I really thought we had things worked out to where we wouldn’t have any more squabbles between the girls.
Wrong!
Before now, squabbles were the result of treats. Raini always gets the chew stick after Bondi’s eaten all the good stuff off it. They’re triple-flavor kabobs. Bondi decided, one day a while ago, that she still wanted it and Raini had to show her she could take it if she wanted it. That was the last squabble we had.
That stinkin’ Bondi. She plays a game where she won’t eat her treats until after Raini has eaten hers. Then she growls if Raini gets anywhere close to her.
Now we watch them carefully when treats are involved.
A couple of days ago we had a squabble. Bondi always expects a new toy when we get home from shopping. She’ll dig in the shopping bags piled on the floor until she finds it.
Bondi was playing with her new squeaky toy when Raini got too close. Bondi challenged; Raini reigned.
I alpha rolled her, yelling in her face that she was a bad dog, and then I muzzled her. She was contrite. Head hung low, she slinked— slunk off to her kennel. I did not lock her in.
When I first checked Bondi for wounds, I found a red spot on her chest, but it wasn’t bleeding. Sometime later, it did bleed. Even later in the evening, I found another spot behind her ear where Raini bit her, but I don’t think it bled.
With the muzzle on, I don’t worry about Raini biting Bondi, even if they should happen to get into a squabble.
I was surprised when I looked out and saw the girls lying together in the sunshine.
Every night, before we go to bed, I sit on the edge of the bed and toss Raini’s ball for Raini, and Bondi’s little squeaky toy for Bondi. When I’ve had enough, we climb into bed. Raini always takes the squeaky away from Bondi and Bondi always lets her have it without so much as a peep. But this night, the same night as the squabble, Bondi’s squeaky ended up on the edge of the bed. She knew it was there. She also knew that Raini wasn’t playing with it. Bondi crept up and Raini nailed her. I don’t know if she touched Raini or if Raini knew she was going for the squeaky or — I just don’t know what happened!
Mike pulled Raini from Bondi and Raini spent the night in the kennel.
“One of them has to go!” Mike was so upset — as was I. These fights sound heart-poundingly vicious!
In the past, after these fights occurred, Mike always said, “One has to go!” I’ve always defended Raini. Nine times out of ten, Bondi is at fault. She knows the rules.
“What are the rules?” you wanna know.
Simple. Raini is bigger and stronger and can have anything Bondi has that she wants. Unfortunately, Bondi is part Chihuahua. That means she thinks she’s bigger than she is and it also means she wants to be the boss. So Bondi doesn’t give up and keeps challenging Raini.
“You’re never going to win,” I tell her soothingly after a squabble.
I feel like our pets are our responsibility and I don’t feel like it’s right to get rid of them. Pet ownership is a lifelong commitment for me. But after two fights in the same day, I’ve had enough. It’s possible that Raini could kill Bondi and I don’t want that. I laid in bed that night worrying over it for hours as sleep eluded me. Maybe it is time to find Raini a new home. I’m sure there’s another capable, responsible person out there who would love to have a fabulous Blue Heeler. Raini is housebroken, spayed, up to date on all her shots, isn’t destructive, loyal, and one smart dog.
The next morning in my love note to my peeps, I said we were going to rehome her or take her to the humane shelter. Now, before you get your panties in a bunch, we have a no-kill shelter here. We’ve adopted from there and so have the Kipps, so I know they’ll find her a good home. It seemed to me it would be in Raini’s best interest to live in a house with no other dogs and maybe not cats either. I’ve found tufts of fur from our kitties and know it’s likely that Raini’s responsible.
The light of day, time passing, emotions cooled, brought a different attitude. Not from me. I’d already made up my mind, but from Mike. “I feel like Raini is so strongly bonded to you that she would protect you when I’m gone,” he said. “And I really don’t want to get rid of either one.” Mike isn’t planning on going anywhere, however, he does think about taking care of me after he is gone.
I had to reboot. Change my thinking. “We’ll have to take away the things that cause fights or micromanage them,” I say. We already do that with treats, so doing it with Bondi’s squeaky toy won’t be hard. “Before we go to bed, I’ll take the toys and put them on the dresser,” I say. “That should take care of that.”
“Maybe as they get older, they’ll stop,” Mike said.
“I’m hoping for that, too.”
As long as we’re talking about the dogs, Mike’s been worrying about something else. He doesn’t like to kennel them for five, six hours or longer when we go shopping. Yes, here in our neck of the woods, that’s how long it takes. There are no Walmart’s, no Lowe’s, no Sam’s Club, no Aldi stores five minutes down the road. Everything is so far away.
“We could put a gate up in the yard where it narrows down,” Mike said. “And a gate between the bedroom and the living room. Raini can have the side with the big pet door, and Bondi can have the side with the cat door.”
We did that this week. We put a gate up where the dog run narrows.
In the house, we put up a fence. Mike attached clips to the wall so all we have to do is slide the fence down on top of them. Even if Raini jumps against the fence, she won’t be able to knock it down.
Now the girls each have access to the outside while at the same time keeping Bondi safe. We haven’t had a chance to use this yet but I’m excited to give it a try.
Raini goes with me when I burn the papers and dump the scraps. One of the things she always does is check the whistle pig hole. There must’ve been fresh scent or maybe he was there and she could smell him, but she went crazy, barking inside and outside the hole. She even did a little digging. I did the chores and went on back to the house. Raini didn’t want to give it up and even the promise of playing ball wasn’t tempting enough to get her to come home. I stood at the gate and called three or four times before she obeyed.
We lost one of our trees.
It was one that I think a quill pig had a gnaw at.
“Maybe it was a beaver,” Mike said.
I’d heard that once a beaver started cutting down a tree, he would finish cutting it down. I don’t think we have a beaver living at or near our pond. Porcupines, on the other hand, chew to keep their teeth trimmed and are quite destructive. Just ask the guys at the hunting cabins. The porcupines chew on their deer stands, and we do have porcupines around here.
So the half-chewed tree came down in the strong winds and landed on our little bridge, breaking a couple of boards and knocking it off its base.
Raini and I helped Mike get it cut up and away from the water. From there he was able to cart it off to the burn pile on his own.
Raini never went far but I did have to watch her around the equipment. She wanted to sniff the end of the chainsaw while Mike was running it, and she would run around the tractor when it was in motion.
“Come here!” I’d call and only have to call once. She’d come.
Then she seemed to know to stay with me when Mike was on the tractor. As I moved around the job site, I’d look for her, couldn’t see her anywhere, turn around and there she’d be, right behind me. She really is a good dog.
Raini and I had a little time to kill as we waited for Mike to come back. I grabbed a stick, showed it to Raini, tried to get her excited about it, and tossed it.
“Go get it!” I coaxed.
She just looked at me.
After about the third time, she caught on and we played fetch while we waited.
The tree had huge pussywillow buds on it. I collected a few.
>>>*<<<
I think my baby Zebra Finches are eating on their own and boy! does that make me happy! They squawk so loud when they want fed! I was thinking that I’d need to move them before they got their grownup colors or I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the parents. I’ve been watching for the beak color to change when I saw Meepette chasing the babies. I took that as a sign that she was done taking care of them.
“I’m going to move them,” I told Mike.
“Are you going to take the cage in the bathroom in case one gets out?” he asked
I know that would’ve been the smart thing to do, and I really was going to do that, but I wanted to take a stab at catching one without the hassle of moving the cage.
“If he gets out, the cats will get him,” Mike warned.
“I’m aware of that and I’ll take my chances.”
There I stood, on the ladder, one arm in one of the small gates, and the other in the lower small gate, and I chased the white finch from the top to the bottom and back again. I almost had him worn out when I’d inadvertently opened the door and — out he went!
He flew to the window over the door. I scared him from there and he flew into the dining room. Trying to land on a moving ceiling fan didn’t go well and he fell to the floor. There weren’t any cats in the house, there wasn’t even a Blue Heeler in the house at the time, there was however, one very fast, mighty-mouse-hunting, Bondi dog. She ran up to the baby and the baby took off. This time he landed in Bondi’s kennel with Bondi hot on his heels.
“No Bondi!” I yelled and surprisingly, she backed off.
I tried to catch him twice before he took off and flew into the utility closet. He landed on the floor in a narrow space between the wall and the sweeper and I was able to get him.
Whew!
After that, Mike took the cage down and I took it into the bathroom and shut the door. I managed to get the other two without them, or their parents, absconding. Now the babies are in a cage by themselves where Meepette can’t chase them around.
I didn’t have a house for my baby cage and I couldn’t make myself spend eleven dollars for one at Walmart. Not when I had a whole bag of wicker bells I’d picked up at a yard sale last summer. I had thought I’d string them together and hang them but they’re sitting in the same chair they’ve been in since I brought them home and plopped ‘em down.
I got one of the largest bells out, cut a piece of cardboard for the open end, glued it in place, cut a hole, and voila! Birdhouse.
Meep and Meepette have already started another clutch. For now, I’m going to let it go. I don’t know if the babies are all girls or all boys or a mixture of the two, but it’s not good to have just one bird in a cage. Once I know I have enough of each, I can toss the eggs and separate the sexes, putting a kibosh on any more egg laying.
>>>*<<<
Coming back from a shopping trip we made a detour through the little town of Laceyville. Getting pictures for you wasn’t our only reason for the side trip.
This church, a church we’ve gone to a couple of times, is building a new church on a new site and the old church, infected with mold, will be torn down.
We crossed the Susquehanna.
I spotted an eagle’s nest on an island in the middle of the river.
We saw they’d broken ground for the new church on the other side of the river. Sorry. No pictures of that, but it wasn’t all that exciting anyway. I did take more pictures on the way home.
A crane in the distance denotes the presence of a gas well.
>>>*<<<
There’s a whole 'nother side of me that most of you don’t know anything about. I live a double life. Okay! Okay! That’s not true. I only live one life. It’s just that my morning love notes will often contain short stories and messages that never make it into my weekly blog. That’s not by design, it’s just that most of the stuff I talk about is mundane, not all that interesting, or wouldn’t make much of a story and gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile.
Take, for instance, this one I wrote Thursday morning.
“Good morning! Good morning!” I sing out good morning twice like that most mornings. I’m happy and filled with excited anticipation of the love notes that will come back to me. I don’t hear from everyone every day but I hear from about half of them regularly. “I scared myself last night,” I told them. “I was having pressure and pain in the middle of my chest.”
Earlier in the day we heard about a 64-year-old woman dying. “She was my age,” I told Mike. I guess that’s why my thoughts went where they went.
“I knew that heart attack symptoms are different in women,” I told my peeps. “I lay there and suffered while I made my peace, then I rolled onto my side and burped! LOL! If last night was my last night on this earth, all y'all know that I loved you!”
Since it ended well, it made my morning loves laugh and I hope it makes you laugh, too.
Sometimes I give my morning peeps an abbreviated version of a story I intend to tell in my weekly letter blog. But this morning’s love note, although I didn’t intend to bring it over here, took a twist, and I have to tell you about it.
It went like this.
“Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Last night was awful! The dogs would randomly bark and launch themselves from the bed, run out to the kitchen or even go the whole way outside, only to come back a few minutes later. This scenario repeated itself 3 times before I turned off the light, at least 5 more times during the night, and twice more since we've been out of bed. You can guess that when your sleep keeps getting interrupted, you don't rest well. The only thing I heard was the wind. Other than that, nothing. Today is just normal Sunday stuff for me. I love you tons and tons!”
Something I didn’t tell them, but I’ll tell you, is that at one point Bondi stood at the end of the bed, her tail at full attention, and barked toward the living room.
“Peg!” Mike yelled into the bathroom where I was brushing my teeth. “I think there’s something in here.”
I grabbed a net, one we bought to catch birds and bats with that make their way into the house, and thinking that Little Possum Butt was back, went to look. I turned on the light in the dining room and watched Raini. If there was something in the house, she would let me know where it was. Raini ran out into the kitchen and hit the pet door at a hundred miles an hour. I turned on the patio light and looked out, but I didn’t see anything.
This morning, at church, I told the neighbor lady about the dogs being restless.
“Could’ve been a bear,” she said. “I see one of my bird feeders is knocked down.”
Then the Kipps came in. The two Kipp girls are up for the weekend. When Lamar came back from walking Tux Saturday morning, he saw Jenn’s car door was open. He investigated and guessed it was a bear — maybe there was evidence, I don’t know. Jenn locked the car that night. Sunday morning, this St. Patrick’s Day Sunday morning, the morning after Raini and Bondi carried on so bad, Jenn said a bear tore up her car.
Both side mirrors are torn off, the rear door handles on both sides are destroyed, and he pulled out the tops of both front doors.
“In all fairness,” Jenn confesses, “I had cheese balls in the car.”
Bears have an acute sense of smell and having just come out of hibernation, they’re really hungry.
The bear must’ve gone right past our place and the dogs knew it.
“A bear could get over our fence or knock it down,” Mike worried.
I do have bird feeders out, but they’re inside the fence.
“Why would he bother when he can go across the road and get it with less work?” I said, but honestly, it was probably the dogs barking that kept him from challenging the fences. Bears don’t like dogs. Not even little ones. A friend of mine was out walking her puppy when she happened on a bear. The puppy barked and the bear ran away. She laughed, “Even though that little puppy couldn’t’ve hurt him.”
>>>*<<<
My driver’s license came, as did my new birth certificate. We made the trip to Waverly to finish the application for my passport card. I took pictures.
I got a good shot of the eagle’s nest as we sped past at 55 mph. No eagle is sitting on eggs. Either it’s not time here in our part of the country, or they’ve decided to have their family in another nest this year. A pair of eagles will generally return to the same nest year after year, but sometimes eagles will have more than one nest within their breeding territory. Or maybe something happened to our eagles.
>>>*<<<
I didn’t get much done in the line of crafts this week. I think I spent one day making cards for my girls. I spent another watching a two-hour watercolor class. Even if I don’t want to paint like the teacher, I learn little things, little techniques to make my work better, or in the very least, easier. I spent another day working on a commission for a frameable greeting card. Correction, I spent two days making, then re-making a commissioned frameable greeting card. It’s an opera mask with a keyboard hat and sheet music.
This is the first one and I got an unexpected bloom. That’s where one color bleeds into another color. I circled it for you.
I didn’t want the blue of the background to bloom into the sheet music. I fixed it by removing the blue and letting my paper dry. When I tried it a second time, it bloomed again. Okay. I thought it was me. I thought maybe, just maybe, my paper wasn’t dry. I tried a third time. I’m absotively, absolutely positively certain my paper was dry and it still bloomed! “Maybe once a bloom, always a bloom,” I told my peeps. The remake looks like this sans bloom, so I won’t take the space to show it to you.
I’ve started my next commission, a dog portrait. With every piece I make, I evolve. I’ve accentuated the colors I see, the hints of blues and purples and reds. It might not be what my client is looking for and I may not even share it with her. At this point, I’m thinking I’m going to have to remake it and tone down my artistic eye, but you never know. I may love it when it’s done and decide to run it past my client.
“Show me!” you say.
“Not yet,” I say.
>>>*<<<
And with that, let’s call this one done!
Done!
