Monday, February 25, 2013

And then I watched the grass grow.

It has rained and rained and rained.  In fact, so much so that I actually used the word "deluge" several times this weekend. 

On the way home from picking up Daughter from school I said,"I am starting to feel like I live in Seattle without the good coffee." 

Really, it is that bad. 

We have puddles that have their own puddles in our yard. And not the kind you want to run and play in.  Not that I really do that anymore.  It would look a bit odd for a forty-two year old woman to be playing in puddles in her yard.  I'm sure the neighbors would start to wonder. (They probably already do.)

But I will tell you that rain is perfect for taking naps and catching up on old episodes of Murder She Wrote.  You'd think since I was stuck inside that I would be motivated to clean the house or do laundry, but that would be wrong.  I did manage to clean a bathroom and wash a few loads of clothes. 

Although, one of those loads was folded and never put away. 

Because when J.B. Fletcher is on a case laundry can wait.

The most exciting part of my day was seeing a pelican in the yard.  Yes, a pelican.  Our yard backs up to a small pond and we are very close to the Gulf of Mexico, so we often see great blue herons, cranes, and other water birds in the pond.  We rarely see pelicans, though.  So you can imagine my surprise when I looked out the window and saw one swooping over our yard. 

Jessie The Dog kept looking outside and at first I thought she was just being odd (which is normal for her.)  Once I saw the pelican I realized what she had been staring at all along.  I'm not sure why he landed in our yard unless maybe he was diving for large fish in the puddles.

For whatever reason the pelican landed, The Great Pelican Sighting of 2013 was what I decided to blog about today.

You are welcome.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

If You Give A Dog A Latte'

They say that dogs have owners and cats have staff. 

Those people don't have my dog.

Jessie was a rescue dog we got while we lived in Smalltown, New Mexico.  Daughter named her Jessie after the cowgirl on Toy Story.  She is part poodle, part terrier which really means full mutt.  I tell everyone who has never seen her that she looks a lot like Benji.  Only Benji solved crime.

This dog doesn't solve crime.

The vet classifies Jessie as "tri-color" = brown, black, and white.  Mostly brown.  Sometimes there is more brown or black depending on how much mud she has on her. 

The poodle part of her has curly hair that GROWS LIKE A WEED and the terrier part of her makes the growing hair wiry.  Not long after we got her Hubs even noticed that Jessie actually has two types of coat. One coat in the front and one in the back.  (I'm not even kidding.)  We also noticed that her head never grew at the same rate as her body.  (Also not kidding.)

Jessie is "one of those dogs."  Sweet as can be and eager to please, but Lord help her.  If something weird is going to happen, it is to her.

In her nearly three years of life on this planet, Jessie has managed to live a lifetime of experiences.

1. Right after we got Jessie, she had a strange high fever which was misdiagnosed as distemper.  We had just lost another rescue dog to distemper and were devastated. Thankfully, she was okay.

2. While still a puppy, she slowly chewed away parts of the sofa.

3.  She almost swallowed a people pill.  I didn't know the "almost" part and called the vet on a Sunday morning to learn that I needed to induce vomiting on a dog.  I hope to never have to do that again. Not fun for me or the dog.  We later found out that she had spit out the people pill.

4.  Following an induction of vomiting, Jessie revealed the parts of the sofa she had chewed.

5.  One time what I thought was the evidence of worms was in fact the beans from a Beanie Baby.  I didn't learn this until after I made a trip to the vet for a deworming medication.

6.  Are you noticing a pattern here? 

Last weekend Hubs scattered some coffee grounds in his garden. He is getting his garden ready to plant in the Spring.  The next morning I let Jessie out to do her business. When I opened the door, she didn't immediately come running back. She usually does.

I called and called. Then called some more.  That's when I saw her small head and disproportionate body sniffing around the garden.

"Jessie, COME HERE!" I called again.

She ran to the door with a big terrier grin on her face and I sniffed her breath.

Coffee breath.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the coffee was a huge, used bag of grounds from Starbucks. 

Sigh.

Jessie was happy as a dog in a garden bed of coffee grounds and didn't appear ill. But I remembered the time our old dog drank an entire cup of coffee and how much time I spent cleaning the carpet.  So I asked our vet about Jessie's morning coffee. 

The vet said she would "have to eat a whole gob of dirt" to get sick.

Lucky for me, Jessie doesn't love dirt nearly as much as the sofa.