Bloodthirsty cocker finds new taste sensation

Posted by kara on March 10th, 2010 filed in Animalistic
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So the darling Baby Lady Grrl, Gigi, killed a rabbit early Sunday morning and ate a good part of it before party-pooper Momma came outside and took it away. Ick.

Hard to believe, too, if you’ve ever met my darling Gee.  But then again she does have a healthy appetite and is always on the lookout for food, or for things which can substitute for food, like the cardboard box the frozen garlic bread came in. She filched that from the paper recycling bag and ate a sizeable square. It looked like guinea pigs had ate at it, but Gigi doesn’t digest cardboard as well as guinea pigs.  We had several episodes of chucking up the undigestable remnants, identifiable because they were the same colour as the garlic bread package remnants.  Anyway, here she is, Lady Godiva in all her skinny-legged glory:

Tonight I was getting a few olives for a snack, green ones stuffed with pimiento, and I dropped one. Gee the Carnivorous was on it in a flash. She wasn’t certain she wanted it, though. She took it away and rolled it around in her mouth, setting it down on the carpet several times (of course).

She finally finished it and must have decided it was good, because a few minutes later she showed up, sniffing around the end table on which I had my dish of olives and glass of Kool Aid (yes, I have the sophisticated palate of a 12-year-old) and it was necessary to remind her that her food dishes are NEVER served to her on the end tables in the livingroom.

Now I’m wondering if she’s getting enough food. What dog would be nutso enough to eat an olive, for Pete’s sake? It’s not even a black olive, or a Kalamata. This was one of those hard-core little green olives, wasn’t even stuffed with blue cheese or anything lovely like that! So she’s gotta be seriously hungry.

She and her brother, Skipper, get 1/3 of a cup of California Natural Lamb & Rice kibble twice a day, with 1/2 cup of applesauce and a fish oil capsule. They and their other brother and sister share apples and bananas and carrots with me during the day, as well as enjoying an occasional Wellness bar as a treat. None of the dogs are malnourished–in fact, they’re all pretty much at the perfect weight, so I hate to mess around with the amount of kibble they’re getting.  Gee has approached porkdom in the past, and I don’t want her weight to seesaw up and down like her momma’s does.

I’ll have to start supplementing their kibble, applesauce, and fish oil caplets with something more substantial, like green beans and steamed carrots again, to give them a little more of a full-tummy feeling.

Animals are animals, not people

Posted by kara on March 9th, 2010 filed in Animalistic
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Recently the tragic death of SeaWorld’s killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau flooded the news outlets. Many people commented that Tilikum, the whale, should be euthanised.

It’s very sad that Brancheau died while working with Tilikum, but what we all need to keep in mind is that no matter how well-trained he is, Tilikum is still a wild creature. He is a KILLER WHALE, and that’s what he does–or that’s what he would do, if he weren’t artificially confined in a space less than 1/25th the size of comfortable stomping grounds in the ocean.

I think Brancheau knew this, and accepted those risks as part of her career as a trainer.
From comments in the media about her dedication to her job, it seemed she loved working with the orcas to show spectators the majesty and capability of these creatures.

But no matter how many tricks Tilikum knows, no matter how much affection he seems to display to his human keepers, he remains a predatory creature with different motivations, language and desires from humans. Even though the trainers know this, and work together very closely to avoid mishaps, the potential still exists for tragic accidents.

This doesn’t apply just to killer whales or lions or elephants.  We need to be mindful that our own domesticated animals are still animals, too. They’re not little furry people running around on four legs with poor language skills–they’re ANIMALS, no matter how radically humans have changed their behavior from their cousins still living in the wild.

I got a vivid reminder of that this weekend.

Early Sunday morning, right around 4 a.m., I was getting ready to join the Wonderful Pumpkin in our cozy bed, so I let Gigi and Riley out to potty one last time.  Skipper was NOT going outside because it was a bit chilly, and Belle had been sleeping for hours and hours and wouldn’t wake up to go out for quite a while.

Riley went down and pottied, and came back up promptly.  I let him in and gave Gee a couple more minutes, but when she didn’t come in a short while later, I tried calling her.

You must understand that our children are essentially four sporting dogs.  Belle is a Labrador mix, Riley is an English springer spaniel fieldy, and Skipper and Gigi are American cocker spaniels. Even though they’re supposed to have specialities specific to their breeds, they don’t all exhibit the same zest for the hunt, and neither Rick nor I mind that.  We’re not hunters and we don’t expect our dogs to ‘earn their keep’ with a specific skill.

Belle likes to chase birds and rabbits, and she and her long-departed cocker sister Kacey Marie managed to bring down a baby possum in the backyard of our Highland Township home in Michigan. She’s quick, and true to the nature of most dogs, anything ‘moving’ in her yard offends her, and she will give fervent chase, but I don’t think she’s as dedicated to it as some dogs would be.

Riley is our handsome, darling boy, but for all his beauty he’s a little brainless when it comes to prey and how to deal with it. This is probably the reason he was deserted by a fishing hole up near Lawrenceburg, KY–handsome dog with promising bone structure and beautiful markings has no natural instinct regarding birds, i.e. “dog won’t hunt” and so “dog is history.”

Skipper-Dee-Doo-Dah (or “Poos” for short) is so completely a momma’s boy that he can’t stand to be outside for the time it would take to hunt something down and kill it and eat it. Now if Momma came out to help, that might be a different story.

And then there’s Lady Godiva, aka Gigi, aka ‘The Baby Lady.” Gigi, a chocolate cocker, is my darling. She’s my unabashed favorite grrl, endearing herself to me with her extreme shyness and timidity when she first came to us as a heartworm-positive foster back in September of 2008. (There–I SAID it. I have a ‘favorite’ dog. I feel like a parent confessing to favoring one child over the rest.) As she got to know and trust us more at home, she’s grown to become a funny, happy grrl who’s earned the nickname “Waterbug” because when she’s really excited she’ll jump around in full 360’s.

Gigi went from being so shy that she would just freeze when you reached down to pet her, to wrestling with Riley and jumping up to stand on your chest and smile down at you while you’re sitting on the sofa. And even though she’s no longer terrified and helpless around us, I still feel particularly protective and affectionate toward her.

And ironically, even though we see Gigi as our darling cuddly baby grrl who’s cuter than any danged button in the world, she’s our sportswoman.  She is fast and smart, an unapologetic hunter who doesn’t mind rain and cold and sparks the rest of the dogs into giving chase and really acting like dogs.

It’s awesome to watch them all charge out into the yard late at night (or early in the morning) with Gigi leading the vocally-silent assault on the unfortunate critter who happens into our yard. A rabbit chase is punctuated by the sounds of the dogs’ feet first thundering down the steps to the deck, and then back and forth in the yard below.  Most of the time, the chase ends with the rattle of the chain link fence signaling the just-in-time departure of the critter.

Occasionally it doesn’t end so well for the critter.  I can tell you that rabbits scream when they’re captured, a heartrending exclamation of horror that seizes my heart. Most often, it’s Gigi who’s quick and dexterous enough to have caught the prey, but I didn’t think she knew what to do with it.  Rick says he’s seen her staring at a bunny she’s pinned to the ground with her front paws, as if she’s amazed she caught it, while the other dogs milled around behind her.

Apparently she finally figured out what to do with the bunny once she caught it.

After Rye came in I gave Gigi a few more minutes, and then I went out on the deck and called her to come in.  She ignored me, which means she was hunting something.  I got the flashlight and tried to find her in the yard. Usually she circles the small utility shed toward the back of the yard, under which many small critters have tried to make their homes. No circles, and I couldn’t see her at all, but I did hear an odd ripping sound and suspected that she was tearing at the plywood that Rick used to barricade the underside of the shed.

If Geej is after something under the shed, she will NOT come in on her own–If I don’t want to wait for an hour or so, I’ll have to go out there and get her. Slipped on my shoes and grabbed the flashlight, and when I was down in the yard on my way out to the shed, I finally saw her–by the fence.  She was concentrating on something at her feet, and as I got closer, the flashlight illuminated the body of a young rabbit, which Gee had caught and partially eaten.

Aw, jeez.

It could have been lots worse–last summer, we were babysitting Karen’s five kids, and her golden retriever, Gretta, actually caught a baby rabbit in the backyard.  I was at work, so Rick had to deal with a mangled baby bunny who was tragically still alive.  He was on his way to the University of Tennessee with the baby when it died in the truck with him.  Heartbreaking.

Bear in mind that Rick and I are not only dog lovers. We love all animals, including rabbits and other wild and domesticated fuzzies, so it’s heartbreaking for us to see an animal become prey.

Most of the time, our kids enjoy the thrill of the hunt without ever ‘finishing’ it. But we have to remember that they are animals, and even though we feed them nutritionally-balanced meals on a regular basis, that there’s still a gene-level memory in them of when they had to feed themselves.

I couldn’t be angry with Gigi.  She’s doing what she was genetically programmed to do, which is to hunt and feed herself. I felt so sad for the rabbit, but I think it died quickly. Well, I hope that’s what happened, anyway. I picked Gigi up to carry her inside, because she really wasn’t ready to leave her prize yet.

Came back out and picked up the dead bunny with a couple of plastic grocery bags and put it in the trash can out front. Its eyes were just beginning to cloud over, but its body was still very warm. Went back inside and checked my darling little grrl for wounds and blood, and discovered that her ears and paws were very bloody and took her into the bathroom for a quick front-end bath. Mud and blood ran down the tub’s drain, and I kept up a very calm and loving patter while I soaped Geej’s ears and front paws and muzzle.  Ew, but this is what happens when a dog (even a darling, fuzzy dog!) kills another animal and commences to eat it.

Kept an eye on her on Sunday to make sure she didn’t suffer any ill effects from her hunt, but frankly I think the rabbit and I got the worst end of that deal. Obviously the rabbit is the overall loser in this story, but again, I can’t blame Gigi or scold her for this.

We need to remember this about all our companion animals, too, not just dogs. Many people who have sporting dogs like beagles and bird dogs have discovered that the prey instinct is very strong in their beloved pets, so strong that it’s not safe for the household to have a bird or rodent as another pet.

And as much as we love our companion animals and train them to live under our roofs with us, they’re still animals and are capable of acting out against us and expressing their fear, frustration or anger in animalistic ways. Your Mr. Poofy Pants Kitty might be pretty tolerant, but he’s still got sharp teeth and may hiss, growl, or even try to bite you if you’re doing something he doesn’t like. My Baby Lady might be adorably fuzzy and shy and funny, but she’s still capable of killing a small animal to feed. Let’s just keep that in mind.

Change ain’t always good

Posted by kara on March 2nd, 2010 filed in Generic Stupidity
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Arrgh. Red alert. My favorite radio station here in Knoxville is changing its format, and I don’t know how they could improve it.

I’m worried.

One of the things I like about 105.3 WFIV is that they play a little bit of lots of stuff. In one day, in one place, you can hear Colbie Caillat, Foo Fighters, Tom Petty, Lucinda Williams, John Mayer, Toad the Wet Sprocket, U2, Fiona Apple, CCR, Talking Heads, Dave Matthews, and Jamie Cullum. Jamie Cullum! I don’t want to lose that music roster!

Stay tuned. I may be having a crisis. I’ll let you know when I’m certain.

Paying attention to pens

Posted by kara on February 24th, 2010 filed in Generic Stupidity
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I have an attachment to fountain pens. I love the smoothness of the ink and the responsiveness of the nibs. My writing isn’t particularly pretty, but it just feels better when I use a fountain pen. Even cooler is that when you use one particular fountain pen for a while, the nib ‘learns’ your writing style and it’s almost as if it’s tailor-made for your hand. *sigh*

My mother, Norma, never understood this. She was fond of telling me that in her time, they were excited and pleased to be able to use a ballpoint pen and throw out their old fountain pens. “They were so messy and you never knew when they’d decide to leak in your pocket or all over your books. I can’t believe that you don’t get tired of having ink all over your fingers,” she’d grouse, shaking her head in perplexity. “We sure did.”

I’m a weirdo.  I admit that. I’ve used many different types of fountain pens, but my favorite is my Waterman, which I’ve had since about 1997. At that time I thought I wanted a Mountblanc Meisterstück, and worked toward accumulating usage points on my cell phone in order to ‘earn’ one (yes, that was so long ago that my cell phone carrier had to encourage its customers to use their cell phones by offering points). Oh joy, oh wonderful day that my cell phone statement finally reflected 20,000 points! I could finally send in for my certificate entitling me to a “free” Mountblanc Meisterstück!

Let’s don’t talk about how I probably paid five times more in cell phone bills than if I’d just gone out and BOUGHT a Meisterstück. I know it was foolish, but at the time it seemed like a good deal.

I still remember standing at the display counter in the store, fogging up the glass in front of the Montblanc pens. (I don’t recall which store it was, but it might have been a Service Merchandise. C’mon, that was quite a while ago!) I got the attention of the salesdude, who opened the display case and produced first a little padded (purple velvet) palette like one you’d use for examining a piece of jewelry, and on that he placed the beautiful black resin and gold pen of my dreams.

I just looked at it for a few seconds, admiring the plain, clean lines of the pen, and the 18-karat nib inlaid with rhodium, and the friendly, rounded little starburst at the top of the cap representing the snow-capped peak of Mont Blanc.  Then I wiped my sweaty paws on my jeans, picked it up, and…

…it was disappointingly light in my hand. It felt insubstantial, inconsequential, somehow. I told the salesdude and he agreed that it felt very light. He pulled a Waterman fountain pen from the case, and handed it to me, saying that if I liked something heavier that this might suit me better.  I was in love. Substantial and elegant and perfectly balanced, and the nib was so smooth it almost felt like writing with a sable paint brush loaded with oil paint–except much more accurate.

Kept that pen with me for a few years, until I lost it somewhere in 2001.  I thought it might have fallen out of my purse, or maybe I had left it somewhere. I was petrified that it had dropped between the seat and the console of one of the cars we had long-since traded in. I tore all the cars apart, dumped all my purses out, and repeatedly searched the same places it might have been. Finally, after making several big messes and finding nothing, I gave up. I was very sad, but hoped someone who appreciated the Waterman was using it and enjoying its feel.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2006. Rick was living in an apartment in Oak Ridge, TN near his new job, and I was trying to sell our house in Saline, MI. He had come home for the weekend, and we were packing up the truck with lots of housekeeping stuff:  Tables and lamps, laundry hampers and baskets, lots of things that took up a lot of room. I had moved the electric passenger-side seat all the way forward to jam something else into the back seat of the truck (which is probably the first time that seat had ever been that far forward in the entire time we’d owned that truck), and just happened to spy black and gold and “Waterman” in the seat rail on the floor.

I was overwhelmed with joy. Rick thought I’d struck gold, and was disappointed when he saw it was just a pen. I took it in the house and dismantled it, discarded the long-dried cartridge and soaked the nib in warm water and dish soap. Being a packrat, I still had the cartridges and inductor from the pen, even though I’d thought the damned thing was lost long ago. Dried everything off and carefully reassembled it, and experienced utter writing bliss. Almost better than a lottery ticket. I’ve been using it ever since.

Just recently I’ve been going through boxes of ’stuff’ that I’ve kept.  Some of the ’stuff’ is from as far back as high school. I found three more fountain pens, two Scheaffer and one Parker, none very expensive, but all loaded with sentimentality. I also found their cartridges, so I carried them all upstairs, consolidated my cartridge supply of all three types of fountain pens into one box in my desk, and set them all up. Now I had broad-nib Shaffers with which to write in peacock blue and lavender and grey inks, my sleek (plastic) Parker with which to write in black, and my lovely Waterman for blue-black ink. :::grinning::: I have the most elegant grocery lists in town!

The Waterman is my most-frequently-used pen, and just this morning it wasn’t working well with the inductor, which was filled incidentally with blue-black Montblanc ink. I wondered yet again whether the brand of ink not matching the brand of pen had anything to do with the pen’s poor performance.  I removed the inductor, emptied and rinsed it and decided to use a pre-loaded, disposable Waterman cartridge instead.

I grabbed one from the communal box in my desk drawer, noting that there were three others like it, and tried to install it. Hmph. Not fitting. What’s going on? Seems like it’s too tight to go all the way into the nib…tried dropping the cartridge into the barrel of the pen and screwing the nib in on top of it. After a little bit of effort, it finally clicked into place, but it still felt tight and wrong.

Began writing and was disappointed to see the ink looked washed out and…wrong.  More grey than blue-black. Finally opened the pen and actually LOOKED at the cartridge I’d installed–which was a black Parker fountain pen cartridge. They’re very similar in size and shape to the Waterman cartridges, just a little longer and a little more tapered from front to back. No wonder it didn’t fit into the Waterman well. Went back to the communal cartridge box and found one more Waterman cartridge. I’ll need to buy more.

I’m a moron. Luckily I didn’t break anything by forcing the Parker cartridge into the Waterman pen, which would have been bitterly disappointing. If I’d just been paying attention, it would never have happened. Must be more careful…

Frugal, if not environmentally-friendly, solution!

Posted by kara on February 22nd, 2010 filed in Ecological, Frugality
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I obsess about pet peeves that could be called achingly trivial. Then I obsess about finding a solution to those peeves. And I have  lot of peeves. All that energy wasted on stupid stuff that doesn’t really matter…oi vey.

But it finally worked!  I came up with a solution to something that’s bothered me for such a long time, and it’s a good solution!

In a bottle of lotion (or shampoo, or shower gel, or what-have-you) that comes equipped with a pump, there’s a lot of product left at the bottom when the pump begins to fail. Because the bottle has a PUMP it’s almost impossible to set the bottle upside down to let gravity help. And then you have to unscrew the pump to get at whatever’s left over, and you end up dumping the rest all over your hand and wasting it anyway.

My temporary solution was to vow to buy only flip-top snappy-type containers, which could be inverted and used efficiently without wrestling with a stupid pump. Hooray! Problem solved!

But when you’re standing in front of the lotions with a calculator in your hand, and you realize that the larger pump bottle is less-expensive per ounce, it’s difficult to stick to that vow.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Kara!” you’re thinking to yourself right now. “Just throw the whole mess away and get yourself another bottle of store brand lotion and MOVE ON. It’s only an ounce or so!”

Ah, Gentle Reader, there’s the rub (pun definitely intended). If I waste an ounce of lotion, that nullifies the savings I earned when buying the larger bottle, which cost less per ounce. And at that point, this whole soul-rending struggle becomes “a matter of principle.”

I’ve tried propping one bottle upside-down over the mouth of another bottle, and that inevitably ends in heartache with lotion spattered all over the mirror and faucet when the top bottle falls. Because it will fall–it always does. Stupid bottle.

Yes, I have seen those little plastic doohickeys that allow you to connect two bottles of different sizes mouth-to-mouth, so that you can allow gravity to transfer the remainder of one bottle into another. I just don’t want to pay someone $10 for their idea. (Yes, I’m petty and jealous that I did not think of it, patent the idea, get a prototype and market such a useful little plastic thingy for myself.) Plus, those little thingamajigs don’t fit every bottle well–I have an image of a couple of unsuccessfully-coupled fallen ketchup bottles, and a kitchen splattered with ketchup.

Anyway. I’ve been noodling on this particular peeve for many moons, and finally came up with a workable and elegant solution. Remove the pump top from the bottle, and place a plastic bag over the mouth of the bottle. Upend this, propping it in the corner of your vanity or wherever it will not be knocked over, and when gravity has done its job, squeeze the rest of the product into the bag.

Squeeze the air out of the bag, and fasten the top closed. Get your receiving bottle ready, and snip a small hole in the bottom corner of the bag. Aim, then squeeze, and you should be able to strip all the leftover product neatly into the new bottle. Et voila!

Think “piping frosting,” except you’re not piping something edible and it’ll be much easier because you’re just trying to squeeze the contents neatly into a bottle, not spell out “Happy Birthday, Pumpkin” in legible icing script on top of a too-hot cake before all the party attendees arrive in four minutes.

Greener members of the audience may say “But Kara, that wastes a plastic bag! You’re using all the product, but you’re needlessly using a piece of plastic–it becomes a wash!” Save it, brothers and sisters. If this matters to you, you can rinse the plastic bag and use it again for a similar operation–just don’t empty the next bottle into the snipped corner of the bag. Also, bonus points if you’re using an already-repurposed plastic bag, because then you can throw it away and not feel bad!

I should patent and trademark this blog entry, shouldn’t I?

Can a blog be a diary or journal? Or is it different?

Posted by kara on February 20th, 2010 filed in Generic Stupidity
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All through my life, writing has come naturally to me and it was assumed that I would earn a living as a writer. Mrs. Gregg, my kindergarten teacher, told my mother this, so it must be so.  Although I haven’t taken much formal instruction in writing, the professional advice I’ve been given usually includes keeping a journal.

Never wanted to keep a journal or write in a diary for fear that someone would find it and laugh at all my twisted thoughts and trepidations. Guess you could call it a phobia, it’s that big a fear for me. Doesn’t even matter if the person reading is a complete stranger, or if my journal was discovered years and years after my death. Not even the idea of being long gone by the time strangers read my journal lessens my dread.

The fear isn’t as bad now as when I was a child and teenager.  I’m much more self-assured and recognize that my feelings are valid, and that I don’t need to get validation from other peoples’ approval. So I should be able to relax about baring my soul to a journal, especially now that I’m an adult and don’t have to worry about older siblings questing for it and ruining my life by making its contents public and then tormenting me with it for the rest of my natural life.

So why can’t I commit to keeping a journal? It would only be a help to me. Many writers say their journals are an invaluable tool for their work. They experiment in their journals and refine their writing style, and use journal writing as a warm-up before settling down to work.

And I could use a little help with my writing. It’s been my lifelong goal to earn a living through storytelling, but I have not been successful to this point, very likely because I haven’t established the habit of writing on a regular basis. I THINK about writing on a regular basis. I PLAN to write (or maybe I plan to plan to write, and that might fall into a ‘double-negative’ situation) on a regular basis, I just never actually get to the writing part.

My friend Karen and I have been talking about this lately. We agree that my God-given talent appears to be writing, and combined with my extreme lack of tolerance for members of the general public, it would be imminently suitable for me to work by myself, writing, in the comfort of my own home.

So I’m starting with the most obvious step, that of writing ‘something’ every day. I take this opportunity to air out my mind, to chew over recent events and to refine my thoughts. Lots of my blog entries come about from this process of writing ‘something’. Does a blog count as a journal entry? Or is it really the same thing?

Obviously a published blog isn’t going to be private. Readers do stumble upon it and read, or so my webmistress Jessica tells me. I do understand and consciously accept that people are reading my rants; I use my blog to spread information that I feel would be beneficial to others, like animal rescue, frugality, food and housekeeping.  And I wouldn’t bother with the blog if I didn’t feel it was being read by SOMEONE. But sometimes those blog entries remind me a little bit of a journal or diary, which usually is kept private.

I had a bad experience recently with a former co-worker with whom I thought I was on good terms. Apparently she didn’t like me as much as I liked her, because I found out that all the while she and I were visiting and bonding while working together, she was lying about me to my managers. I felt foolish and gullible and very betrayed, and I wrote about it in minute, gory detail for my blog. But after I read back through the entry, it seemed too raw, too personal for publishing.

I needed to write about that experience in order to resolve my feelings, so I did. It felt good to dump all the anger and hurt into the ‘sausage factory’ of my keyboard and see the ‘sausages’ appear on the screen. But did I need to publish that blog entry in order to finish the job? I guess not. It felt too private to share, or maybe I’m still too hurt to put it out there and risk more wounding by critics who feel I’m overly sensitive.

So…that kinda sounds like a diary entry, doesn’t it?  Writing about an experience to understand it more fully and to cope with it, but then not sharing it with anyone.

And isn’t it funny (both ‘funny-ha-ha’ AND ‘funny-strange’) that I resisted keeping a journal for almost 35 years because I didn’t want to share my private thoughts with anyone inadvertently, but here I am publishing a blog chock FULL of private thoughts on Teh Interwebz in front of potentially millions of readers?

Heh! Millions of readers–who am I kidding? This blog is probably more private and secure than my best childhood hiding spot, which was inside an old game box at the very bottom of my toy box. This was all tucked underneath a precarious pile of junk including the Battleship game boards and stuffed animals, guaranteed to make a huge racket if someone knocked it down while snooping.

Sheridan Belle and the Abscessed Tooth

Posted by kara on February 16th, 2010 filed in Animalistic
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So our grrl, Belle, is getting up there in years.  She’s 13 years old, which is amazing to me because most of the time she doesn’t act like a senior citizen.  She’s had a few medical problems along the way but for the most part she’s a healthy, hearty grrl.

She had a cracked molar surgically removed about a year ago, and I had made her some chicken & rice soup to ease her recovery while she healed.  It’s a very simple soup, nothing more than chicken thighs simmered with celery, carrot and rosemary, and then some white rice.  NO salt, pepper, onion, garlic, hot sauce, or any of those other things that make food worth eating for humans!

Turned out she didn’t really NEED the soup, she just chewed on the opposite side of her mouth.  When she actually did chew her kibble–most of the time she just swallowed it whole. Little weasel.  I think her tooth extraction was harder for ME than it was for her.

Last week, she got quite sick with dental problems again.  Our friend and her vet, Dr. Kara, came to see her and said that Belle had an abscess somewhere in her mouth, most likely a tooth, but she couldn’t tell for certain without x-rays.  Belle started taking an antibiotic and painkillers and we made arrangements for her to come to the vet’s office this morning for x-rays, a tooth cleaning and potential extraction, all under general anesthesia. 

Bonus!  February is Pet Dental Health Month, so Belle got a $50 discount on the procedure!  Wooo!

I was concerned, though.  She’s getting up there in years, and general anesthesia is hard for anybody, much less a senior citizen. No other options, though–she is NOT going to sit quietly while Dr. Kara scrapes, cuts, pulls abscessed teeth and then stitches her back up. And we can’t let her suffer with a rotten tooth periodically abscessing again and again. I think watching her (or any of our furkids) suffer is the worst part: She’s miserable and there’s nothing I can do for her except give her the pain pills and try to fix her food so she can eat it.

No worries, though–she’s out of the operating room already and has awakened from the anesthesia.  The extractions went well, and she’ll have to be eating soft food for a few days to protect her stitches.  I’ll go pick her up at 4 p.m., and I’ve got chicken breasts thawing to be chopped and boiled for her dinner.  She’ll like THAT.

It’s important to know, however, that many canine dental problems, especially those like Belle’s, can be avoided. Use caution in giving your dog chew toys–make sure that whatever they’re chewing on isn’t so hard that they’ll crack their teeth on it.  Yes, this can really happen, especially if your dog is an aggressive chewer!

Also, get your dog used to having you handle his or her mouth and brush their teeth.  This can prevent plaque buildup which can cause a bacterial infection of the heart, along with rotting their teeth. Take care of your dog’s teeth and ensure their overall well-being!

Cheesed off

Posted by kara on February 9th, 2010 filed in Foodlike Things, Frugality
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I’m becoming quite a fan of measuring by weight rather than by volume.  It seems so much more accurate to say “8 ounces of shortening” as opposed to cramming an amount of shortening that you HOPE is sufficient and lacking any sizable air bubbles into a one-cup measuring cup.

And now that I’m buying butter in one-pound bricks from Sam’s Club instead of quartered, paper-wrapped pounds from the grocery store, I’ve had to get good at doing the math in my head to convert volume measurements to weight.  Instead of just slicing off “one tablespoon” from the quarter-pound stick, it’s necessary to run through all the math and weight equivalents in order to calculate that one tablespoon of butter weighs a half-ounce.  And one half-ounce of butter will always be exactly that, doesn’t matter what form it’s in, a half-ounce of butter will always weigh a half ounce. But if I’m slicing a tablespoon off the stick, and the quarter-pound stick wasn’t wrapped absolutely straight at the factory, I may end up with more or less butter by depending on those little lines printed on the paper.

But oi vey, the MATH.  It hurts me sometimes.

As a result I’ve gotten pretty good at guesstimating the volume of food to equal the desired weight.  Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a solid like butter or shortening, or a grainy powder like sugar or flour, I can get pretty close just by eyeing it up! Cool, no? Or does this count as a “stupid human trick”?

In my younger days I worked as prep cook under an amazing Hungarian woman who could pour an absolutely correct amount of seasoning into her palm straight from the package.  Need a teaspoon of salt? Here it is. A half-teaspoon of cinnamon? There ya go. She might not always wear her teeth to work, but the day she showed me how she could use her palm to measure out tablespoon after accurate tablespoon of parsley, I was her biggest fan. For a long time I worked on being able to do the same, and now after 22 years I might be getting close.

Anyway, I ran to Food City a few days ago to get some beans and cheese for a batch of chili.  Only bought a half-pound of cheese because the price wasn’t that great and I only needed a little bit to grate over the chili.  So I’m studying the cheese, which is labled as an 8-ounce brick.  I’m looking at it, and thinking that it doesn’t look quite like a half-pound of cheese, so I get out my trusty digital scale:

Hmph.  I KNEW it didn’t look like a full half-pound of cheese. Whatever that may look like.

So, what does it matter, you ask?  So I didn’t get a full eight ounces of cheese, even though I paid for it–so WHAT? The problem lies in the fact that if every package of cheese is 1/5 of an ounce short, then the cheese distributor is selling that 1/5 of an ounce twice. We’re being charged for it, but we’re not getting it. The cheese people are shorting the individual consumer so they can make a little more money.

It’s a small bitch, but it’s my bitch, nonetheless. And if everything is inaccurately packed like this cheese, think how much each of us consumers are being cheated.

It’s one thing to watch the size of a candy bar shrink from 3 ounces, to 2.75 ounces, to 2.15 ounces, and remain the same price. It’s a given that food will get more expensive, and either prices must go up or we must get less food for the same price–check out the big tubs of yogurt the next time you’re at the grocery store.  They used to contain 32 ounces of yogurt and now the same-sized tub only holds 24 ounces.  There’s a 3/4 inch gap between the yogurt level and the top of the tub. Mmmm…vanilla yogurt with wheat germ…had to get a bowl as part of my ‘research.’  But I digress.

I didn’t take my digital scale to the grocery store to measure each of the packages of cheese there.  It’s possible that each package of cheese differs slightly, either above or below the listed weight.  Sure, some customers may actually receive 8 1/5 ounces of cheese.  Maybe it was just my day to be on the short end of the stick. But that isn’t ideal, either.  You should get exactly what you pay for, whether it’s eight ounces of cheese or eight ounces of blasting powder, and that package stated that it contained eight ounces of cheese.

Wanna know what 2/10 of an ounce of cheese looks like?  Here ’tis:

Frank McCourt, yer a grand writer, and sure

Posted by kara on January 23rd, 2010 filed in Generic Stupidity, Reading and Other Entertainment Obsessions
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I’m an unapologetic hedonist. I LOOOVE fast food and being lazy and trashy novels and comedic, childish movies that have no redeeming social value. I tend to avoid anything of substance, whether it’s books or movies or healthy food.

There. I said it.

But every now and then I get all perversely noble and feel like I should increase the fiber in my diet and try to be a better person. A deeper person, psychologically speaking. Part of that aberrance is a desire to read “the classics”–or at least, to read some of the writers that other people rave about.

So recently I went to the local lending library and borrowed “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt’s memoir of growing up in Limerick in grinding poverty, and “‘Tis,” his story of immigrating back to his birth city, New York, and his struggle to become a teacher there and find his place in his world. Many reviewers praise McCourt’s storytelling, saying that he managed to show the difficulties of living through unimaginable indigence while spicing stories of his childhood with humor and caring.

I’m not disputing that McCourt is a wonderful storyteller. His writing is riveting.  I just didn’t see the humor that so many others note offsets the troughs of despair. I tried hard to find it, honest–and failed. Is there something wrong with me?

Maybe I failed to see the sunbeams in “Angela’s Ashes” and “‘Tis” because I’m essentially a melancholy person. I’ve tried for most of my life to emphasize the positive, the happy, the funny elements in my everyday life. A friend commented once that I was the most positive person she knew, and that I could find the silver lining in the foulest garbage bag. What she doesn’t know is that this is a constant struggle for me, that it’s a perversion of my “I’m only happy when it rains” mindset. Inside my head, the sky is always cloudy–it’s either just stopped metaphorically raining or is about to start another downpour. ‘Better keep the windows shut and get the dogs back inside,’ is my grim everyday mindset, which I try to keep to myself.

So maybe I identified with the non-stop strife of McCourt’s childhood. I just couldn’t stop reading these books until the last page had been turned. I read compulsively until I couldn’t focus on the print anymore, which is what happens while I’m reading Diana Gabaldon.  Unlike Diana Gabaldon’s work, I wasn’t enjoying it.  While I was plowing my way through McCourt’s two books, I couldn’t muster up the strength to do anything else, I was that morose.

No, I don’t live in a wood-stove-heated hovel in Ireland, begging clothes and bedding from the Salvation Army.  I’ve never batttled communicable illness borne by the rainy season flooding our kitchen and an outdoor toilet shared by the entire neighborhood, and I’ve never had to worry about what we’d eat for breakfast, dinner or snacks. I’m sitting in a warm, dry, cozy home in Knoxville heated with a gas furnace and supplied with running water and not just one, but THREE toilets to call our very own.

I have felt that ominous shadow of “Oh, Jaysus, what in the name of the Blessed Virgin could possibly happen to us next? Will we ever have a moment of peace to call our own, for the comfort that’s in it, at all, at all?” But it’s been nothing like what McCourt and his family and others like them endured during his childhood years.

So what the hell IS my problem? Dunno. Guess my empathetic funk was a tribute to McCourt’s power as a storyteller. He compels his reader to stay with him, even as we tear up watching his mother suffer from emphysema and contemplate the maddening discomfort of sharing a flea-infested bed with three siblings.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to mesmerize readers with my storytelling. But for my own psychological well-being I should probably avoid writing about real life and stick to happy tales of lottery winnings and reunited best friends and lollipops and rainbows.

Animal rescuers (and foster homes, and money) needed

Posted by kara on January 23rd, 2010 filed in Generic Stupidity
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This recession has taken its toll on so many of us. We’re worn out with worrying about making ends meet with no income or half an income or with trying to find work where there’s none available.

Unfortunate casualties in these trying times include domestic animals, our companion pets. Many people who’ve lost their jobs have also lost their homes, and they’ve lost their ability to keep and care for their pets.

In the mad crush and confusion of foreclosure, many families find themselves unable to take their pets with them, and rehome them via Craig’s List and rescues. Or they drop them off at their local animal shelter. Or they just toss them out of the car and quickly drive far away. Or leave them locked in an empty house to (hopefully) be discovered by a caring human.

At the same time rescuers also find themselves stretched to the breaking point. Between the increased influx of animals needing rescue to decreased contributions and the inability of dollar bills to stretch in order to cover greater costs, everybody is worn thin, emotionally and financially.

Rescue at any point is hard, never-ending work that requires relentless optimism. It seems that no matter how many animals you manage to help, there are dozens, hundreds, THOUSANDS more who need help desperately. That thought alone is enough to drive me to tears.

That’s especially true now, when we’re overwhelmed by the number of animals needing a new port in the storm–and we’re fighting our own financial battles.

I am unimaginably thankful for the positive, optimistic and inhumanely STRONG people who surround me in rescue. I don’t know how I’d keep going without their broad shoulders to lean against.

If you don’t work in rescue but you’d like to help, dive in! Do a Google search for a rescue specializing in animals of which you’re particularly fond. Rescue groups always need fresh, optimistic faces. Or donate a few dollars or some old blankets or toys or that just-opened-but-totally-disdained bag of kibble your finicky cat won’t touch.

If nothing else, tell someone who does work in rescue ‘thanks for your efforts.’ Sometimes it’s enough to know that others understand and appreciate all the hard work and heartbreak. We gotta get our warm fuzzies from somewhere in order to keep going.