Sparky

“I’ll be working on my letter-blog today.” That isn’t news to anyone who gets my morning note of love, but it is what’s on my mind most Saturdays and gives me something to say.

Yesterday, that beautiful niece of mine, Ashley, says, “Can’t wait to see what you write this week.”

I had to smile as I replied, “I can’t either!”

Often times, but not always, I don’t know what I’m going to write about until I start writing.

Two sweet beautiful ladies commented last week.

“Your blogs make me smile, laugh and sometimes cry and that's ok. Thank you for sharing your life and family with us.” — Trish

“A highlight to my week is reading your blog. Thank you for the glimpse into your life.” — Jody

Who doesn’t like to hear accolades like that! But I have to confess. All the praise and glory go to God. He’s the One who’s given me the will and tenacity to do this every week for the past 22 years!

And sometimes it even amazes me.

Ginger’s lump is bigger this week. She’s still eating but I can tell swallowing is more difficult for her. I hand feed her a lot of the time and have to make the pieces smaller and smaller. Even though there’s nothing wrong with her teeth, she, like most dogs, tends to just swallow their food. Sometimes she chokes. She’s still drinking and sleeps most of the time. At the rate it’s going it’ll probably only be a couple of more weeks until she won’t be able to eat at all.

I Googled searched salivary tumor in dogs. It said these tumors are rare in dogs, more common in cats, but when they happen, they’re almost always cancerous.

          The newest member of our tribe arrived a week ago. His name was Gus-gus. “It doesn’t really roll off the tongue,” Mike replied when I asked about keeping the name.

          “How about Sparky?” I suggested. “Our little spark of joy during this sad time.”

          For some reason Sparky is hard for me to remember. Every other name in the book comes up before I get to that one. Spunky, Stumpy, Spooky, Stinker, Starry, Scary, Scratchy… the list goes on and on!

          “Peg! Just pick a name!” my frustrated husband yelled.

          “Okay! How about Rocky?”

          “Where did Rocky come from?” I know you wanna know.

          Sparky is a good little housekeeper. He doesn’t want anything uncovered in the litter box. Nothing! If someone else doesn’t cover it, he will! He goes to town and attacks it with a vengeance! I heard it before I saw it. Look at those rocks go flying! I don’t know how, in my mind, litter became rocks when I thunk the thought, but that’s what happened. Besides, he’s a champ! Just like that other champ Rocky Balboa.

          Speaking of how my mind works…

          Do you remember how I told you that I sometimes switch the first letter of words when I’m talking? This week, while reading the program guide on the TV, I found out you really don’t want to switch the letters in Huck Finn. Or! Or when your husband is waiting to start a movie and you’re out in kitchen and he yells, “What’re you doing!” and you yell back, “I’m making cop porn!”

          Yeah. Not a good time to switch the letters at all!

          But I digress.

When Sparky met Smudge, they kissed noses. It’s a cat thing. They’re not really kissing, they’re smelling each other. If they were dogs, sniffing butts would accomplish the same purpose.

          Sparky seemed to like Smudge, purred and rubbed all over him.

          He met Itsy next and his hackles rose, tail puffed out, he hissed, spit, and swatted. He was so upset I quickly put him back near Smudge thinking that would comfort him. What a mistake! He transferred his fear and anger to Smudge, hissing, spitting, and swatting him. Now Smudge won’t have anything to do with the baby.

          Sparky has taken to following Mike all over the house.

“Your little shadow is right behind you. Hey! We could call him Shadow!”

Mike scowled.

Sparky even sleeps beside him. If Mike moves over, Sparky moves over so he’s touching him. But Sparky’s been up at two and three o’clock in the morning, swatting and scratching at Mike’s feet and legs.

          “He just wants to play!” I defend. Nonetheless, Mike doesn’t appreciate that. I tried to console him with, “He won’t be a baby for long.”

          Mike likes it best when Sparky sleeps with him.

          Sparky’s about ten weeks old now. But just like any baby he cries when he can’t be with mom and dad. We were on the patio, visiting with the Kipps and Sparky thought he should be allowed to come out too.

          But speaking of the Kipps!

          Miss Rosie has that special touch. Sparky was content to let her love on him as he closed his eyes and relaxed so much, he went sound asleep!

          He doesn’t think much of Tux though. Tux was trying to be neighborly and say hello to Sparky while Miss Rosie was holding him. Sparky’s tail fluffed out, he hissed and spit and headed for the top of Miss Rosie’s head.

          “Get him!” Miss Rosie tells Lamar at the same time he’s reaching for Tux’s leash. Tux corralled and at a safe distance, Miss Rosie peels Sparky off her shoulder, wincing in pain.

          Now we make sure Lamar has a good hold on Tux before we let Sparky come out.

          Once Sparky’s been loved on enough and he’s wandering around on the patio, I’m all for letting the two of them duke it out but Lamar’s not having any of that.

          “It’s not my cat. I don’t want him to get hurt,” he says.

          “Sparky get hurt? No way! He’d tear Tux up!” There’s nothing quite so sharp as kitten claws nor anything more sensitive than a dogs’ nose! But I guess it’s more prudent to keep them apart for now.

          Oh! I got the cutest shot of Tux this week. We were on the Kipps’ front porch and I was sitting on the step as we visited. Maybe ‘cute’ isn’t the right word but it’s certainly a perspective I don’t see very often.

          We put a new security camera up this week. We attached the camera wires to a cable so we could string it high and tight between the house and the barn. Mike really, really hates heights so you know this was something he really wanted to do.

          “We’re putting a camera up so we can see your house,” he joked with the Kipps when they came walking up the driveway a few minutes later.

          Lamar laughed. “Good!”

          But it only shows the end of our driveway.

          The last thing we wanted was to do the job twice — even if our nickname is the Do-It-Again Lubys! We checked the camera and it worked just fine. Our video cables are only sixty feet long and we ended up using four of them. Mike stapled all the wires as he ran it along the inside of the barn and on the other end, he stapled it up under the awning and drilled a hole through the wall to the garage, then into the house with the other camera cables. The finale was to plug it in and turn it on. Imagine our disappointment when it didn’t work.

          “We know the camera works because we checked it. It has to be one of the cables,” I guessed. Two of the cables were new, two were used.

          “Or it came unplugged,” he suggested.

          Mike was pretty careful about that, even taping the connection in the middle of high wire to ensure that it didn’t come unplugged!

          Checking the cables was a great big pain in the caboose! We had to drag around a 19-inch TV and extension cord to check each cable. Of course, we checked the easy ones first; the ones we could reach from a ladder. It wasn’t any of them. We had to drop the cable — another pain in the patootie! Someone had put it up there to stay! Mike dropped the line and I unwound the tape. Guess what? It had come unplugged! We put it back together and checked the monitor in the house before we put the cable back up. All was good. It worked.

Mike climbed the ladder to put the cable back up and is sixteen feet off the ground when he realizes the cable had twisted back on itself taking the video cable with it and he had a mess to untangle!

There wasn’t much for me to do at this point so I sat down on the edge of the concrete and watched (and took pictures). Our baby was outside with us and he was brave enough to wander into the yard. He was so cute as he investigated a Dandelion.

“Peg, can you come up the ladder behind me and hold the cable?” Mike asked. “So it doesn’t coil back up?”

Frankly, I was quite surprised he hadn’t asked me to climb up and untangle the mess for him. So, I did as he asked. I climbed the ladder behind him and held onto the cable and he got it done.

          It’s nice to know that we’re still king of the Do-It-Again Lubys!

          Going in and out of the barn gave me a chance to watch the Barn Swallows.

          “Can you see the babies?” I asked Mike.

          He stopped what he was doing long enough to look. “Yep. There’s three little heads looking down at us.”

          With my Cadillac eyes I could barely make out three little beaks hanging over the edge and then only because their beaks contrasted with the darkness. “That would be a cute picture,” I said. “I’m running for my camera.”

          Hard to believe I didn’t have it with me, isn’t it?

          By the time I got back the shot I wanted was gone. Mike propped the ladder so I could climb and get a better angle for picture making. Here one of the youngins is begging for whatever mama brought back.

          Gaining the ground again, I said, “Mike it’s really hot up there! Why doesn’t she have her babies outside where there’s a nice breeze?”

          “I don’t know but I’ll leave the (overhead) door open for them.”

          Tell me that man doesn’t have a kind heart!

          I asked Lamar Kipp the same question. You know what he said? He said,

“Because then they’d be Tree Swallows and not Barn Swallows.”

          Too funny.

          This one, taken the next day, shows the babies looking almost full grown. They’ll be fledging soon. And that’s a good thing. We’ve ordered the other overhead door and I was worried the workers would bother the nest while they’re installing it. The door will roll up right under them.

          Our morning conversations on the patio with the Kipps can cover a myriad of topics. One of those topics happened to be laundry.

          “Do you hang each thing by itself or string them all together?” Lamar asked.

          “It depends on how heavy it is and how much laundry I have.” For lighter things like shirts, I find the extra layer of cloth helps to keep my clothespins in place. For towels and blue jeans, I tend to hang them by themselves. But if there’s a lot of laundry you have to string them all together so you don’t run out of clothespins.

          “Do you hang pants by the waist or the legs?” he wanted to know.

          “Oh, by the legs. It’s the way my mother did it.”

          “Rosie likes ‘em hung the other way.”

          Rosie and Mike were deep in conversation while Lamar and I were having this laundry conversation but I wanted to set her straight. “Rose!” I interrupted.

          The tone of my voice got her attention and the confusion as to why she was in trouble was evident on her face. “What?”

          “You hang clothes all wrong!”

          It’s a good thing my friends know and love me. She laughed. “Well, I just figure it’s better to have the heavy end at the top rather than have all the water drain down and keep it wet,” she justified.

          “I always thought it was better to have the heavy end at the bottom where it could get more movement,” was what I thought the reasoning was.

          Just for shits and grins, I did a test. I hung the same size and brand of jeans, one right side up, one upside down, and you know what?

          “Miss Rosie was right?” you guess.

          Nope.

          “You were right!”

          Nope again. It didn’t seem to make any difference. They were both dry when I checked on them.

          Let’s have a break from all this jibber-jabber with some flower pics. This is Wild Basil. It gets two heads on the same stalk. Now this one that I happened to pick to show you, has an extra long space between the two heads. It’s not normally that long. 

          You can do all of the same things with Wild Basil that you can do with the cultivated stuff.

St. John’s Wort is blooming. This powerful herb has a long history as folk medicine. It aids in the treatment of depression, being known as the “natural Prozac”. Its most widespread use in herbal medicine is in healing wounds. It can be used as an expectorant and to help with bladder issues but should never be used by pregnant women.

          A bee on Milkweed.

         And Heal-all is blooming.

          My yard is full of them! If you find them in a place that’s not mowed all the time the heads can get quite long. In the yard they gotta hurry up and bloom.

This one also has a long history of use and a long list of other names. Self-heal, All-heal, Heart of the Earth, Prunella, Woundwort, Wound Root, Slough Heal, Blue Curls, Dragonhead, Hercules' Woundwort, Hook-heal, and Carpenter's Herb to name a few.

          Heal-all has been used to treat a large variety of conditions including sores, ulcers, headaches, high blood pressure, dizziness, mumps, sore throats, and bug bites. It’s a cure-all herb that can be used for almost any purpose you can imagine. It has antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, astringent, and antioxidant properties.  That means it can help with a lot of problems in the body.

          But never, ever …

          Wait. Let me rephrase that.

          NEVER EVER go by anything I write! If you intend to eat or use anything wild, you’d best investigate it for yourself or ask your doctor. I write for your information and amusement only!

          I saw this little fly and thought it might be fun to identify him. Now that I see him on the computer, I don’t think he’s a fly at all. I think he’s an ant.

Ants with wings are called alates. Some members of almost all ant species can develop wings and fly. This is because winged ants are swarming ants seeking to breed and reproduce.

This guy is called a Cabbage White. Other names are Small White and just plain Cabbage Butterfly.

          Sometimes, that little piece of fuzz floating on a breeze isn’t a piece of fuzz at all. Sometimes they’re one of these little guys, the Woolly Aphid also called Flying Mice, Angel Flies, Fluff Bugs, Fairy Flies, Snow Bugs, Poodle Flies, Fluffer Fairies, and Fluffy Gnats.

They’re covered with wax filaments that make them look fluffy and cottony, as if they are covered with wool. The wax keeps predators away and helps them move easily around plant hairs.

I think all aphids reproduce parthenogenetically, popping out live young clones of themselves without benefit of male companionship.

          The toy I showed you a long time ago, sitting all by himself in a field just off the road; it’s still there.

          Not a fabulous shot but just something different.

          So you can tell by my pictures that we went places this week.

They put a picnic table on the pile of dirt,” Mike said as we went past.

 And just in case you can’t see it, I made it bigger for you.

           I haven’t shown you much train graffiti lately though I do still take pictures of it. But check this one out! Pretty fancy-schmancy!

          And a pink one! Different and it really stood out.

          Check this out. My strip lighting in the kitchen. Mike says to me, “Peg, we should see about getting some replacement lights for those in case one burns out.” Two days later one burns out! I think it’s all Mike’s fault. I think he jinxed it.

          We bought the lights three years ago and they have a five-year warranty on them. I pulled out the shoe box of receipts from 2017 and dug through them. We didn’t throw anything away! But do you think I could find the receipt? No! I don’t know what we’re going to do now.

          I don’t know if I mentioned it or not (and I’m not going back to check) but I’ve been having trouble with my new Epson Ecotank printer. We bought it last November and it has a one-year warranty. There aren’t any cartridges to replace, you just fill the tanks — and they hold a lot of ink! It all started with double-sided print jobs. It would feed back in crooked and that messes up the print heads. I’d have to do a cleaning and that uses a lot of ink. Then it would sometimes catch on the edge of the paper and fold it over messing up the print heads again and dropping ink all over the place. I’d clean it again. Finally, I resorted to doing a double-sided print job with a manual reload. Inconvenient, and I shouldn’t have to do it, but I would. It was only a temporary fix. It kept up its old tricks and got progressively worse. Sometimes I could only print three pages before it messed up again. And even if it didn’t crinkle the page it would drop ink on the page or I’d get ink smears on the edges.

          I’ve been in contact with Epson for several months. Numerous emails and several phone calls. It’s always the same thing. What kind of paper are you using? What program are you printing with? Are you using genuine Epson inks?

          I answer all of their questions, do the head cleaning they want me to do, and of course it prints fine again. For a while.

          This last time I was on the phone with them, after going through all the B.S. for the umpteenth time, John thought I needed to have the printer replaced and he would transfer me.

          The call was dropped.

          I called back and got a gal. After explaining my call was dropped, she wanted me to go through the issue yet AGAIN! I did. We did the head cleaning. The nozzle check printed fine.

          “Thank you for choosing Epson. Have I answered all your issues?’
          “NO!” I was afraid she was going to hang up on me and I was so frustrated and tired my eyes welled up. “Stay on the line and let me print a few pages.”

          She said she would and the third page messed up. Now she agrees I need a new printer and she transfers me. After waiting for four or five minutes I get a guy from the warranty department and he goes through the list of questions again!

          But we got the job done and two days later I’ve got a new printer. The old one gets put back in the same box, they paid shipping, and I have seven days to return it or they’d charge me for the new printer.

          Mike helped me unpack the new printer and repack the old one. I got online and tried to schedule a Fed-Ex pickup but you have to have an account. I didn’t want to set up an account. Finding a place to drop it off was a challenge but we found a place over in Wysox that takes them.

          “It opens at nine,” I told Mike. “We could go over early and get a Sausage Egg McMuffin,” I tempted. So that’s what we did. We got up our normal early hour of 5:30 and shortly after 8:00 we left the house.

          These days the sand and water trucks are running our roads hot and heavy. Any time we leave we always pass a ton of trucks. One day we counted ten water trucks passing us just on the short stretch of road down into town. Four miles maybe. This day we followed six water trucks.

          “They’re drilling a well someplace,” Mike said.

          We get over to Wysox and enjoy our sandwiches as we sat in the Jeep in the parking lot. With ten minutes to spare we decided to go sit in front of the business and wait. Nine o’clock and no one’s showing up to work. It was then that we notice the hours posted on the door. Ten. It’s been changed to ten.

          I pulled out my phone and I was Googling for other locations when someone else came in and parked beside us. She got her package and got out.

          Mike decided to save her a trip to the door. “They don’t open till ten.”

          “Oh,” she said. “The guy down at the post office sent me up here. I guess I’ll come back later.”

          My phone showed another location a mile and a half away. I called the number and it went directly to corporate. Not what I wanted. But while talking to him he gave us the option to schedule a pickup. We went through the process and get to the end and he says he can get it picked up in the morning. Not what Mike wanted. He’s worried about not getting it back to Epson in time and being charged.

          “Can you tell me if there’s another drop off location nearby?” I asked.

          He did the same thing I did. He checked the Fed-Ex website. “There’s a Dollar General at…” and he gave the address. I thanked him and hung up.

          Mike started the Jeep, put it in gear, and crept forward. “The website said Dollar General doesn’t take Fed-Ex anymore,” I told him. I don’t know why the rep didn’t have that information. “But lets go back to that yard sale. That’ll kill some time.”

          The sale was in front of a truck company and had boxes of screw, nails, cleaners, new empty bottles, rain suits, stuff I didn’t know what it was, and only a dollar a box. But I found my treasure! Seven hubcaps! Best dollar I ever spent.

          “Peg! What’re ya gonna do with those?” you ask.

          I’m gonna make flowers to hang on some of our fences.

          I’ve seen this done at Ambrosius Salvage Yard and thought it was cute. I never had any idea I wanted to make some of my own until I found this box of hubcaps. It’ll give me a cheap and easy way to vent some of my creativity. Plus, with seven hubcaps, I can share with my Miss Rosie — if she’d like to make one for herself.  

          After my buy of the day we head back to wait for the Fed-Ex pickup point to open.

          Another guy in a truck pulled in beside us. He got out and opened the tailgate.

          “They’re not open till ten,” Mike told him.

          He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes. “I guess I’ll go walk around Tractor Supply for a while.”

          “I guess I’m not the only one who thought they opened at nine,” I told Mike.

          Nine-thirty, a car pulls in, parks, shuts off, and the gal gets on her phone, obviously waiting. A few minutes later another car pulls in and they both get out, purses on shoulders and lunches in hand.

          “Excuse me!” I call from my open window. “Do I have to wait till ten?”

          The one girl gave a goofy laugh, bobbed her head, and said, “Yeah.”

          “That sucks,” I told Mike after they’d gone in. “I was hoping she’d say, ‘No, come on in.’”

          Five minutes pass and the older gal comes out to dump the garbage. “Ma’am?” I called. She stopped and looked up at me. “Is there some other location where I can drop this off?”

          She took a few steps toward the Jeep. “I don’t think so. Not around here anyway.”

          “I just have a box to drop off.”

          “It already has a label on it?” she asked.

          “Yeah.”

          “I can take it for you then.”

          I was extremely grateful that we didn’t have to wait twenty more minutes and gushed my thanks.

          On the way home we followed Halliburton sand trucks up the hill. “Let’s follow them and see where they’re going?” Mike suggested. He had an idea of where they might be going and it wasn’t far.

          At the new bridge construction site, we were stopped before the go-around to let an oversized load come through.

          But they didn’t turn where Mike expected them to. A few more miles down the road they arrived at their destination.

          By midweek Sparky and Macchiato were sharing a dish of Kitten Chow. He’s still swatting at the puppies but I suspect it’s more to get them to play with him than meanness or fear.

          “Look here you!” I admonished. “Dogs and cats don’t play the same way.” He doesn’t seem to understand.

          Itsy isn’t afraid of him. She just gets aggravated and snarls and nips at him. I think he likes that.

          Ginger, on the other hand, is fearful of him. Before entering a room she always looks to see where he is.

          This beautiful lady came over to help me finish a job we started last year. Painting the window shades for the church. Jody was on vacation which allowed us to work for a couple of hours in the afternoon. 

          When we finished, we toured the ranch, checking out the flowers she’d given me. The Spiderwort is doing good.

          The Chinese Lanterns are doing good too. I’ve got lanterns. And when I showed them to Jody I found out that I also have Woolly Aphids. I guess I know where the one I caught came from!

          On the back patio I showed her my newest endeavor; something I’d been wanting to try for a few years. Mosaics. They complement stained glass well because it gives you a use for scrap glass. I’ve got a big box and several small boxes of stained-glass pieces I’ve been saving for mosaics.  

          Now, don’t laugh at me. I didn’t use any stained glass. Nope. Not one single piece. What did I do instead? I broke a plate. I got a box with low sides and my nippers and it was actually enjoyable to break the plate apart. I used hot glue to stick the pieces on and right away I found out one thing I’d done wrong. I left my pieces too big. That was okay. More practice chopping them up. I’m not done. I’m going to fill the rest of the spaces with white.

          The next morning I go out on the patio and there’s Mr. Mister lounging in my box with all the plate shards. “You think you’re so cute!” I told him.

          He purred, gave me a low throaty mew, rolled over, stretched out, and peeked up at me from the corner where his head ended up. I decided I should push my pot back away from the edge before he knocked it off the table.

Later in the day Spitfire was in the box. Cats and boxes. Boxes and cats. They just go together.

          Before Jody left, we made plans for her to come back for more painting the next day and we’d have lunch. I was in charge of dessert. After contemplating several options, I went with strawberry Jell-O and homemade whipped cream. That gave me a chance to use my fancy-schmancy dessert dishes that I never get to use. And it gave me a chance to remember Momma. Sometimes she’d make us homemade whipped cream using evaporated milk. So that’s what I did. Besides, if I was going to make it any other way I’d have to go to the store and I didn’t want to do that.

          Homemade whipped cream using evaporated milk doesn’t hold up long but’s yummy! I put the leftovers in the fridge and the next day just whipped it back up again. It went to waist but not waste.

          Today (Sunday) I’m working hard, pounding the keys, when I hear a faint meow and a scratching at my desk. Little Sparking… err… Sparky had been playing under my desk. My keyboard would start moving right out from underneath my fingers as he pulled at the cable. The faint meow and scratching sent my heart plummeting to the depths of my stomach. My desk is made for a computer and has a round hole in the back for the cables to pass through. Did he climb through? Is he stuck between the desk and the wall? I worried. And a flash of the nightmare it would be to get him out passed through my mind’s eye.

          I pushed my chair back and got down on hands and knees. “Sparky,” I called. “Where are ya buddy?” I heard an answering meow coming from my right as I was peering at the hole in the back of the desk. I turned my head and there’s another hole. This one was to allow the cables to go into the cabinet where your tower would’ve been in the old days. I grabbed a piece of cat blanket and stuffed up the hole in the back before he does actually try to go through there. Then I opened the cabinet door and found these little eyes peeking out at me. The space he’s in is less than three inches high. I measured it for you. If you want to be precise about it, it’s two and a half inches plus six little lines.

          I left the door open and after a while he came out.

          I shut the door.

          Sparky went back around and climbed back in the cabinet. This time I let him be. There isn’t anything in there that he can hurt or would hurt him but I did catch him creeping back out.

         

          Alvin is still with us. I’m not leaving seeds or nuts on the rock for him anymore. The birds found them. Now I wait until I see he’s out there then I go and give him a few nuts. He’s learned that this big human gives him good things to eat and he’ll let me get within a few feet of him. I toss a nut and he just looks at me. I toss a second one and wait. He’ll go and get the nut, put it in the pouch in his cheek and then zeros in on the other nut. He saw where it went and he remembers.

          I haven’t seen Alvin yet today. While waiting for the microwave to heat water for coffee, I stand at the door and look for him. I felt tiny little feet on the top of my foot and look down. Two pretty little eyes look up at me as Sparkles… err… Sparky gets up to the window. He watches the birds at the feeder for a few minutes and I thought he might stay there when I walked away, but he didn’t.

If you like my jibber-jabber and you like my pictures, I want you to give your thanks and praises to God, where it belongs — but you can CC me!

And with that, let’s call this one done.