Rough Couple of Weeks....

We've had a rough couple of weeks. It started with several days of the dog flu. Then Scooter had a hard time recovering. We really weren't sure he was going to make it, but he's much better now. And now I have an abscessed tooth...yay! I haven't had any sleep in 2 nights. I am so hungry but it hurts to eat. I've called in sick 3 times in 2 weeks and will probably face a reprimanding when I go back to work next week. Its all so totally awesome.

But on the upside, its bound to get better. Right? Feel free to insert words of encouragement here:


LOL. Seriously though, its been rough but I am still hanging in there.

A million errands, and some happy thoughts....

I had a million errands to run this morning. I had meds to pick up at the vet, needed stuff from Target, needed stuff from Petsmart, had stuff to drop off at Goodwill, groceries to buy...etc. It was so hot that I wanted to die everytime I got out of my car, or walked out of a store. Geez, is this ever going to break? Actually, its cooling off as I write this because we have a huge line of thunderstorms bearing down on us right now. Its growing darker by the minute, and the wind is picking up. If it makes it cooler, than bring it on. We have nowhere else that we have to go this afternoon/evening, so we can just hang out and enjoy the rain.

So, I am really happy for Erica. She has decided to volunteer at the SPCA (humane society) up there in her town. She attended a training session this morning, and is now an official dog walker. Yay! She sounded like she really enjoyed it, and this makes her mother especially happy. The humane society is my charity of choice, so yeah. I am proud of her. She goes in 2 hours a week to walk dogs who need some attention. She also has the option to be a cat socializer, and spend some quality time playing with the cats, but she loves dogs more. Don't tell that to Vixen and Omen. Shep already knows that little secret though. Erica has wanted a dog since she moved away from home. The problem is that she stays so busy, and has very little time at home. So...maybe this will solve her dog-yearning for now. On the other hand, she is at risk of falling in love and adopting, too....LOL. I will let you know if I suddenly have a furry "grandchild" anytime soon.

Finally clean

So, I took the day off to try and get the house in order after our week of dog flu hell. I have cleaned, scrubbed, disinfected and sanitized every inch of everything that the dogs have access to. I finally feel like I can walk across my floors again without being grossed out with memories of what I just cleaned up from them. It feels good. It smells good. I am exhausted, the carpet steam cleaner is begging for mercy, but it was worth it.

Sometimes I envy all the non-pet people. People who can wear clothes without having to choose things less prone to showing pet hair (black is almost impossible for us to wear here no matter how much cleaning goes on). People who have never awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a dog retching (and then that inevitable splatter ...shudder!). People who don't know what its like to step in a puddle of cold urine in their bare feet (or worse, socks. I don't know why socks make it worse, but they do). But then, I look down at the big dog (with the worst case of bedhead on the planet) lying here at my feet. And I feel the soft, warm body of this furry little kitty snuggled here by my side, and I know beyond any doubt that its all worth it. This is where my heart is, and if I have to deal with a little inconvenience occasionally, so be it. Pets rule!

Shep, our bedhead dog:

The Nightmare that has been my week....

I have been to hell and back this week. All of our dogs have had some really ugly stomach virus. Bruce and I have cleaned up more poop and puke than I can even begin to describe. Trust me, you wouldn't want to know the gory details. First it was Scooter. He got sick on Monday. Tuesday we left him locked in the kitchen while we were at work only because it has linoleum floors. Better than cleaning up the carpet. Lucky for me, Bruce got home first that day. Apparently, he cleaned, mopped and disinfected every inch of the kitchen because Scooter managed to "decorate" the whole entire floor. How wonderful.

Today...? Just a couple of minutes before I left for work this morning, Scarlet managed to puke up her entire breakfast all over the study. I was late for work because of all the mess I had to clean up. So, I locked BOTH of those dogs in the kitchen, just to be safe, because I didn't trust them to roam the house with all of the festivities going on. So...I was the winner of the lottery this afternoon. I got home first. The unmistakable odor assaulted me as soon as I opened our door. I immediately went to the kitchen to see what horror awaited me. But both of those dogs were sitting peacefully (and clean) there on the floor. Which left only 1 other culprit. Shep! Our HUGE dog! He hadn't shown any signs of the virus, so I left him out of the kitchen lock up. Half the time he stays outside when we are at work. Sometimes he wants to stay in. Today was an "in" day. And he NEVER has accidents in the house. Seriously, like never. But he made up for it today. I cleaned up the most horrific mess all over the floor of Stephen's room. Its been one trauma after another all week long. Tomorrow, the steam cleaner is coming out and all the carpet in the den, study and now Stephen's room will get a really deep cleaning. I mean, we cleaned up the mess, but I can't be happy until its clean enough to obliterate these events from my memory.

On the up side, the dogs seem to be recovering. Scooter still doesn't have any appetite, but he seemed to have it the worst. He is drinking plenty, and I have gotten some pedialyte, and chicken broth in him, which is finally staying down. Maybe he will get his appetite back tomorrow. We think...and we may be wrong...but we think they must have caught something when the vet came for a house call on Friday. Our vet makes house calls, and we scheduled one for all the routine shots and check ups. She brought one of her assistants, and got everything taken care of here at the house. A few days later everybody starts getting sick....? I don't know if somehow some germs got transferred, or what. But I do know that its been just awful. Hopefully the dogs will get well enough that the weekend won't involve so much poop and puke......Or....I may end up running away from home.

Moderation

I am getting really bad at blogging lately. There is no particular reason, I just haven't had anything to say. Everything is fine around here. Good even, better than just fine. I have no idea why I keep procrastinating about sitting down here and writing a blog....

One thing I did want to say is...how confusing is it to try to have a healthy diet? We tried going vegetarian for about 2 years, thinking that would help keep us healthy (Bruce has genetically high cholesterol). We ended up cutting so much fat from our diet that we both got dry skin, dry hair, and achy joints. Apparently, the body needs fat. Also, our addiction to soy most likely caused my thyroid to give up the ghost and stop working. Oh joy. Rhymes with soy. And the crappy part of that (besides the plethora of problems I have had with thyroid disease) is that I actually like soy. I love soy milk, and veggie burgers. I was happy eating soy, but not anymore. It not only suppresses thyroid function, it also blocks thyroid meds from doing their thing. I have to be really careful because soy is added to almost everything that is "low-fat". Just check out the ingredients listed on a whole string of things like bread, low-fat mayo. Soy is listed on so many products, its really hard to avoid.

After the vegetarian diet wreaked havoc with our health, we gave up and started following what our doctor recommends "everything in moderation". Well, ok, we don't follow it precisely. There are lot of things that I don't eat in moderation (like chocolate). But we still try to avoid eating high fat, high cholesterol foods. Like red meat. And eggs. Which is another one of those completely confusing diet dilemmas. We have avoided real eggs for years, using those egg beater egg white substitutes. Well, its real eggs, just without the yolks. I have never developed a taste for them, although some people claim not to be able to taste a difference. I don't mind them in baking, but scrambled? I will just eat something else, thank you.

And now....there was just an article in the new issue of Reader's Digest claiming that eggs are healthy. That eggs can raise your HDL's (the good cholesterol) more than almost any other food. That an egg a day is good for you....What the hell? Soy is good but it almost killed me. Eggs are bad, but now they are good....???????
How the heck can you know what to do with all of the conflicting information out there? I am about to throw in the towel and just assume that we are all going to die of something anyway, so I am going to eat what I like. In fact, it was late and I was tired when dinnertime came around, so I celebrated the article we had just read and made a quick, easy (and pretty yummy) dinner of scrambled eggs and toast.
With REAL eggs. And it was delicious, too. We both enjoyed it.

Its so hot here that I swear the soles of shoes would melt on the asphalt. I hate it, but you probably already know that. Will summer ever end??? Seriously, will it?

So, a couple of weeks ago we got new credit cards and a letter from our bank saying that our account had been compromised and we had to change account numbers. Well, not our account specifically, but some place that we had shopped at. We've had it happen before, so it wasn't all that big of a deal to us. But I had to go to our gym to have our billing information changed because they only bill to cards. No checks, paper bills...that kind of thing. Well, turns out that they have been charging us for only one membership for an entire year. And they only discovered it because of the credit card incident. We have had 2 memberships for the price of 1 for a whole year. It makes us feel not quite as guilty about these past few months when we haven't been to the gym as much as we should have. Ha ha. We have gotten that all straightened out, though, so maybe we ought to get over this heat-induced laziness and get back in action.

I wish I had something more exciting to talk about, but right now its just not happening......

Phobia

A friend asked if I had any idea how I came to have such a snake phobia. The actual word is "Ophidiophobia" or a fear of all kinds of snakes. Besides the fact that the fear of snakes is fairly common, probably due to the fact that some snakes are highly venomous, I think I do know why I am scared to death of these scaly, slithering critters.

When I was about 4 years old (I know that only because we moved from that house when I was 4 and 1/2, so that has to be fairly accurate) I walked up on a huge black snake lying in the grass in our backyard. I reached down to pick it up out of curiosity (I guess it was my first encounter...?) and it moved. I thought it was a piece of wire or something NOT alive, so when it moved it scared the crap out of me, and I ran up our back steps screaming at the top of my lungs. Scary enough, but what happened next was probably what set the fear in my brain for all eternity.

My Mom looked out to see why I was so upset, and she? She flipped out. Like totally, completely lost her mind. She grabbed me up and pressed me into her chest. She was screaming for my Dad, and sobbing hysterically as if the absolute worst thing in the world had befallen me.

My father went out and apparently killed it. And there was a lot of commotion as neighbors from all over our street came to check out this thing. They told me (years later) that it was HUGE. But as big as it was, it was still a harmless black snake. I remember being smothered in my Mom's arms as she rocked me in a rocking chair. She was still sobbing and checking me out to make sure I hadn't been bitten.
I wanted to go look out the window and see what everybody was doing out there. We could hear them....lots of people hanging around for the excitement. But I was held captive as my mother had an all-out conniption. She wouldn't let me look at the awful thing going on out in the yard. And I ...I could only assume that it must be something monsterous. Something so heinous and frightening and vile that I had come close to dying by even being near it. And the fear has stuck to me like glue.

I am not just afraid of snakes. I have this reaction that is completely out of my control. I lose my ability to think straight. Its more like a "react first, think about it later" kind of thing. Would I have jumped off of that steep slope if I had happened on a rattlesnake on Sunday? I hate to say it because it sounds so stupid, but honestly? I may have with no thought other than to get away from the thing. Get away first, worry about falling off a mountain second. Its completely illogical seeing as how someone would most likely survive a snakebite more than a tumble off of a cliff, but...? My brain doesn't work right when I see a snake. Oh well, it didn't happen, thankfully...mercifully. I still have a creepy crawly kind of feeling just knowing that snakes hang out there where I was climbing around. I have actually considered going through some therapy to try to get rid of the phobia. But for the most part, it doesn't affect my life all that much. I avoid snake places, and that generally works....