Gimpy: as good a man as he ever was

Gimpy was scheduled for neutering Wednesday morning. He climbed into the car at home without hesitation and climbed back out of it with the same sense of adventure in the parking lot of the animal hospital. He remained unruffled as we walked through the front door, then sat at my feet like a little gentleman while I filled out the consent form for anesthesia.

Everything went smoothly until a vet tech approached to change out his collar and leash for one of theirs, which sent him skittering to hide behind me. He and I turned around in circles several times as he attempted to keep my body between himself and the tech, so the tech suggested that he might be more cooperative if I would go ahead and leave. I walked out the door, closed it behind me, and glanced through the window over my shoulder. The tech was standing right where I'd left her, holding her end of the leash while Gimpy was leaping and bounding on his end. Heh. He's no pushover.

That all happened about seven-thirty in the morning. Shortly after eleven, the vet called to say the procedure was complete and Gimpy was awake and doing fine, although he was still "a little tipsy." (She also shared that his mood had improved dramatically prior to surgery when a female mixed-breed named Honey, occupying the next cage, was apparently struck by his awesomeness and boldly let him know it. That romance was nipped in the bud--literally--when it was time for the surgical procedure.) Knowing that Levi would be all over Gimpy when I brought him home, we decided to let Gimpy nap at the animal hospital until mid-afternoon.

Levi definitely noticed Gimpy's absence. He looked for him all over the house, then searched the backyard, finally stopping to wait at the gate and watch the driveway for any sign of him. He was better after Kim brought Lucy and Winston over, and all three of them were excited when I brought Gimpy home. They sniffed and inspected every inch of him.

The aftercare instructions from the vet said that for the next seven days I shouldn't let Gimpy run, jump, climb, get wet, or lick his incision. Leash walking would be okay. After reading that, it dawned on me that I was destined to become a canine activities  director for the next week.

I moved Gimpy's crate into the living room, where he could be with the family and I could keep an eye on him, and he slept for most of the afternoon. Once he was good and awake, though, he wanted out of there. He seemed to be geared up for his usual nightly romp with Levi, and Levi clearly had similar ideas, but that rough play was out of the question. I put a ball in the crate with Gimpy and gave another one to Levi. Immediately, they each wanted the ball that the other one had.

Shortly before bedtime, I put Levi behind the indoor gate and let Gimpy out of the crate so I could give him some hands-on attention and affection, and that was when I got my first good look at his incision. At first I thought all the dark-red blood I was seeing was seeping out of his wound, but I quickly realized it was all under the skin. His now-empty scrotal sac, also blood-red, was swollen to about the size of a lemon. I'd been so careful to keep him quiet and lick-free that I almost panicked. Fortunately, I had checked with Dr. Google the night before to find out what to expect after the neutering procedure, and Gimpy's condition was one of the possibilities I'd read about. He didn't seem to be in any pain whatsoever, so I decided he didn't need to go to the emergency vet yet, and I switched my attention to making certain he didn't make the problem any worse.

I got out one of Butch's old E-collars, put it over Gimpy's head, and fastened it as tightly as I could. He bucked around the living room like a wild bronco ("No jumping, no jumping!!!") and scraped it off against the coffee table. I did it again and so did he. I went back to the cabinet and pulled out another, smaller E-collar. That one was tighter, and he wasn't able to get it off, though God knows he tried. It was also shorter, so I wasn't sure it would be effective, and Gimpy was miserable while it was on him. He wouldn't even eat his favorite liver treat.

After about twenty minutes, I gave up. I took the collar off of Gimpy and made him a bed in my room, the first time he'd been allowed to spend the night outside his crate since he's lived with us. And then I went to sleep--and woke up every ten minutes, all night long, to check on him.

The next morning, bright and early, we went back to the animal hospital, where the vet told me he that he has a hematoma ("a localized swelling that is filled with blood caused by a break in the wall of a blood vessel") and that she had turned around during surgery on another animal and caught Gimpy "going after it" hard enough to break blood vessels, so all my precautions were a little too late. She told me what to expect and gave me her cell phone number in case it got worse, and I felt considerably less anxious as I brought Gimpy home again.

Since then, everything seems to have been going well. The hematoma is gradually clearing up (blood is being absorbed by the surrounding tissues), and Gimpy hasn't appeared to have been in any pain at all. I've been putting him in the crate only to settle him down when he's gotten too rowdy and, yes, at bedtime, too. He hasn't been licking the incision during the daytime, so I've felt reasonably certain he wouldn't do it at night, either, and we've all been sleeping better.

I've had to break up Gimpy and Levi's wrestling matches a dozen times a day, jumping in as soon as one makes the first move on the other. When that happens, they both give me hurt, confused looks, as if they think I'm punishing them and don't understand why. We played ball for the first time today, limiting it to slow rolls across the patio, which bored them both after about a minute. Afterwards, Levi ran in the yard by himself while I kept Gimpy beside me on a leash.

If there are no more glitches in the healing process, we'll be back to normal activities in three more days. In the meantime, I sure wish Gimpy and Levi had opposable thumbs and a PlayStation or a Wii.

What I've Been Reading

Genealogy research has continued to keep me buried up to my eyeballs this week, and I've enjoyed it immensely. But at every mealtime and every bedtime, those same eyeballs have been glued to a book. These were all pretty good, especially The Memory Collector, which I haven't yet finished. Lots of action and suspense in that one.


Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain

Faithful Place by Tana French

The Girl on Legare Street by Karen White

The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner

For a description and reviews of any of these books,

click on its image above.

Sepia Saturday: The Importance of Seeing Ernest

The subject of this week's Sepia Saturday photo prompt is a well-dressed lady who smiles as she sits beside a small, cloth-covered table while a uniformed maid pours her a cup of tea. That photo sent me scurrying through my own files in search of the photo below. The two nicely dressed ladies in the foreground of this shot are my great-aunt, Cleda, and my grandmother, Lola. They, too, sit at a cloth-covered table, though I'm sure their  cups had been filled with coffee.

(L-R) Cleda, Lewis, Vicki, Kathy, Lee, Ernest, Lola--late 1950s

I have nothing else to say about that photo except that it's the perfect time to drag it out, because I've been wanting to tell you about Uncle Ernest. He was Aunt Cleda's husband.  I probably met the man only half a dozen times in my life and, frankly, I haven't thought of him all that often through the years. Until recently, that is. Lately he's been popping  into my head on an almost daily basis.

I know very little about Uncle Ernest. I know he was a successful businessman in Kansas City. I remember that he always dressed impeccably, and he was charming enough that I enjoyed being around him in spite of his ever-present cigars. He was also the first completely bald man I ever knew--for a long time the only one--and I had to be careful not to let anyone catch me staring in fascination at his sleek, shiny, sun-tanned head.

The photo below shows Uncle Ernest (at right) when he had hair. Even at that time, though, when he would have been no older than 25, his hairline had begun to recede. One might say he already had a "head start" on baldness.

Uncle Ernest (far right)--abt 1920

It seems odd to me that memories of someone long gone, someone I never knew all that well, keep popping up so frequently. It always happens when I'm totally relaxed, when I'm sitting out on the patio with a book in my lap, a cold soft drink on the table next to me, and my feet propped up in a chair. Uncle Ernest will be the farthest person from my mind, and then--poof!--there he is again. Do you think he's trying to tell me something?

Good ol' Uncle Ernest. I wish I'd known him better. If I had, maybe I'd understand why I keep thinking about him now.

UPDATED TO ADD:  Could it be that my "sleek, shiny, sun-tanned" knees remind me of  him?

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The Saturday Song Selection this week is an old favorite. You might not immediately grasp its obscure connection to the Sepia Saturday post above, so I'll spell it out for you:
a) The song is performed by The Eagles. Eagles (the feathered ones) are bald.
b) A line from the lyrics:  "It seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table..."
Get it now?

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The song is "Desperado" by the Eagles.

Thanks to TheEaglesHD for posting this song and its lyrics on YouTube.

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To see what other Sepia Saturday participants

have "laid upon the table," click on the image below:

Odds and Ends and Pretty Flowers

One of the hardest things about being retired is keeping up with what day of the week it is. When I wrote Tuesday's post, I thought it was Wednesday. (Gimpy's appointment to be neutered is next Wednesday, not Tuesday.) I almost missed "So You Think You Can Dance" Wednesday night, because Wednesday seemed like Thursday. And today feels so much like a Saturday that I've found myself twice thinking about calling people I thought should be home on a Saturday morning. Maybe it's because my days aren't all that different from one another lately, and maybe it's because, even in their sameness, they've been filled with things I enjoy.

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I've had three separate genealogy projects going on this past month, and there aren't many things that hold my attention more than family history research. It's more fun than ever now that so many people are posting family photos and stories on the Internet to go along with the trail of "begats." What isn't fun is spending hours posting names, dates, and places in a genealogy database and then discovering that much of that family tree is someone's best guess. Wouldn't you suspect an error if a wife lived a century before her husband or died before her eleven children were born? Needless to say, there are some kinks to work out of my latest research.

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When my children were small, I made many of their clothes--and a lot of my own, too. Nowadays I use my sewing machine mostly for alterations, and that happens so seldom that  I always have to pull out the manual to see which way the spool of thread goes on the spindle. I could thread my old machine by muscle memory, but this machine is new enough--and used infrequently enough--that I haven't yet developed that ability. This week I was shortening sundresses for my daughter, and that little bit of sewing was enough to make me long for a bigger project. I'll leave the machine set up for a few days and see if anything comes to mind.

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One of the best things about being retired is not having to stick to a schedule, though I now find myself with a regular deadline I hadn't anticipated: the due date for library books. When I was working and could afford it, I bought books. Then, I could read at a leisurely pace. Now, a stack of books from the library excites me as much as a box from Amazon.com ever did, but it also puts pressure on me. The first thing I do is divide the two-week lending period by the number of books I've borrowed to determine how much time I'll have to spend with each one. Isn't that silly? I know I can renew them online, but I don't want to do it. For some stupid reason, it feels important to me to finish them on time. I think it must be some kind of weird, left-over-from-work mindset.

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The granddogs, Lucy and Oliver, are spending the weekend with us. It's fun to have actual lapdogs for a few days. They don't play with Levi and Gimpy, but they all get along, and the big boys are not quite as rambunctious when the little ones are here. It's a nice change of pace.

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All the flower photos in this post were taken on my recent visit to Houmas House. Can you see why I love to go there?

No More Dark Shadows

The title above refers to neither the old TV show nor the new Johnny Depp movie, though some (particularly male readers) might find the subject of this post equally ghoulish. You see that dark shadow between Gimpy's hind legs in the photo below? This time next week that'll be gone.

Gimpy

Yup, I've made the appointment. The deed will be done a week from today, which happens to be the two-month anniversary of his joining our family. I knew when Gimpy  arrived that neutering lay in his future, but I wanted him to get to know us and love us first, so he wouldn't associate missing body parts with Levi and me.

So far Gimpy has shown none of the bad behaviors I've learned to expect of fully intact male dogs, but I want to stop those urges before they begin. The one that worries me most is the sudden eagerness to take whatever drastic measures are necessary to escape when any female dog in the neighborhood is sending "ready" signals. 

Our '80s dog, Radar, broke out several times and ran away in search of romance. When we got better at preventing his dashes out the door, he would sit for hours at the window, looking out, crying, his chin quivering in misery.

Nope, that's not the life I want for Gimpy, and I can't depend on the high fence around our yard to keep him home and safe under such powerfully tempting circumstances. That fence didn't stop Kadi's tenacious suitor.

Kadi

Kadi's veterinarian had told us to wait until the first time she was "in season," then have her spayed right after that. But Kadi was a good-lookin' little girl, and I saw the big Blue Heeler that had begun to hang around, crouching low on the other side of the fence, an intense, determined expression on his face. I wasn't worried, though, because I thought Kadi was safe inside that fence.

And then, early one morning, I got a phone call from my next-door neighbor:

Neighbor:  Are you aware that there's a big, strange dog in your backyard with Kadi?

Me:  Ohhhhh, nooooo!

Neighbor:  They're not doing anything, just lying side by side in the grass.

Me:  Ohhhh, lord, please tell me they're not smoking cigarettes.


No sir. Gimpy will not be climbing that fence if I can help it.

What I'm Reading

I enjoyed both of these books, especially True Colors. Give 'em a try if you have the time and the inclination.

True Colors by Kristin Hannah

The Lost Hours by Karen White

For a description and reviews of either of these books,

click on its image above.

Sepia Saturday: Just for the Record...

When my stepfather passed away, I asked Mother for one thing of his to remember him by, one special item I associated more closely with him than any other thing he owned. She gave it to me without question or hesitation. It was this vinyl album, recorded in 1955:

I was nearly 15 in 1957, when he married my mother and moved her, my sister, and me  from Missouri to Texas. Before then, I'd never knowingly listened to classical music, although I would later recognize certain classical tunes as theme songs from some of my favorite '50s TV shows. Those were the days when I wanted to listen to Elvis 24/7. (As a matter of fact, those were the days when no one ever even used the phrase, "24/7.")

Instead of Elvis, we got Tchaikovsky. We got him early in the morning, and we got him loud. A special feature of this particular album was actual cannon fire. Do you remember how much you liked to sleep when you were a teenager? Can you imagine lying in bed, trying to hang on to the last vestiges of sleep, then becoming just conscious enough to hear a particular passage of music and know that if you didn't get out of bed immediately, you'd be blasted out by the sound of cannons in a matter of seconds?

I never did learn to like this piece of music, though I grew to love the man who did. He passed away sixteen years ago. I haven't played this album since, but it means a lot to me. His hands pulled the vinyl record from its jacket on so many long-ago mornings, placed it carefully on the hi-fi, and cranked up the volume. When I hold the album in my hands now, I feel close to him. Now, from a distance of more than fifty years, I can smile when I remember the devilish grin on his face as he watched three schoolgirls stumble through their bedroom doors each morning with sleep in their eyes and hands over their ears.

This photo from 1957 offers an example of that "devilish grin" I mentioned.

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Just for the record, there's plenty of classical music that I enjoy these days. This piece doesn't fall into that category, but, hey, I'll make it my Saturday Song Selection anyway. I think Daddy, wherever he is, would get a kick out of it. Now, if you loooooooove the kind of classical music that would be an appropriate soundtrack for a raging battle--or if you simply have masochistic tendencies--go ahead and listen to the whole thing. Otherwise, just turn up the volume, slide the little round time-marker-thingy to about the 4:15 mark, and check out the cannons. (I've discovered it's actually kind of fun to hear them when you're wide awake and expecting them.)

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Thanks to zmov1 for posting this music video on YouTube. 

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What are other bloggers doing this week for Sepia Saturday?

Click on the image below and follow the links to find out.

What I'm Reading

Sullivan's Island by Dorothea Benton Frank

One of Dorothea Benton Frank's books was on my list on a recent library trip, but I couldn't find it on the shelves. Since then, coincidentally, my stepsister mentioned how much she enjoyed the works of this author, so I made a point to look for her again. I found this one, and it turned out to be a good read:

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

As for author Kristin Hannah, I intend to read every book of hers I can get my hands on. Just finished Winter Garden last night, and it was a wonderful story--and a terrible one at the same time. I didn't want it to end.

For a description and reviews of either of these books,

click on its image above.

Memorial Day: Remembering Those Who Served

Lush Louisiana

In this part of the Deep South, one doesn't dare stand still outdoors for too long. To do so is to risk being entangled in the tendrils of rapidly growing green things. I'm kidding, of course, but the idea isn't too big a stretch of the imagination.

Here's a photo I took at the Cajun Village in Sorrento, Louisiana, on January 26th of this year:

          
Now look at this one, taken May 16th, of the same structure:

What a difference in less than four months!

Sepia Saturday: Taking the Bull by the Horns

As much as I love old photographs, participating in the Sepia Saturday challenge is forcing me to acknowledge that my own collection of old photos is somewhat limited in scope. I could have searched through them until the cows came home and still wouldn't have found a sepia image that fit this week's photo prompt.

Well, never mind. I've missed the last two weeks because I didn't have suitable photos to post, but it happens that I do have some newer ones that fit this week's theme perfectly. So, by golly, I'm gonna post my modern-day cow pictures and hope nobody has a beef with that.

Below is a horizontal strip of cows I photographed from my car:

I had to crop all their hooves away to get rid of
a big blur of barbed wire that was in front of them.

On another day, again in my car, I spotted the next two cows lolling in a field near an unsightly interstate highway overpass. Because a blogger never knows when she'll need a cow photo, I snapped their picture.

Hmm. Missing hooves again. These girls were either lying on

 them or were standing in very tall grass.

Here comes my pièce de resistance, a drooling bull:

This guy lives at a local rural life center. Isn't he handsome?

Now, do you want to know why it was so important to me to do a Sepia Saturday post this week in spite of the fact that I didn't have any appropriate old photos? It's because I found the absolutely perfect Saturday Song Selection to go along with the theme and was determined to share it with you:

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The song is "Cows with Guns" by Dana Lyons.

Thanks to camedser for posting this video on YouTube.

Click here to read the lyrics.

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To see what others have posted in response

to this week's photo prompt, click on the image

below and follow the links. Some of their

 old photos might just moooooove you.

Of Fantasy and Reverie and Mother Nature's Kiss

The special thing about Houmas House isn't the antebellum mansion. Oh, it's beautiful, all right, and full of wonderful antique furnishings, and it has an amazing old spiral staircase that's held together by wooden pegs. It's definitely worth a visit just to see the house.

But the real thing about Houmas House--the magic of it--is in the gardens. The gardens weave an almost mystical spell, one that draws me into the midst of the vivid flowers and the gauzy veils of Spanish moss and makes me wish I had the time and the money to go there every single day. To stroll through those gardens is to be kissed on the forehead by Mother Nature and rocked gently in her arms. They are that soothing. If there are not fairies living there, then it must be true that fairies don't exist, because when I walk those paths, I can believe they do.

I'll give Mother Nature and God Himself plenty of credit for the awe-inspiring beauty of those gardens, but they didn't do it all by themselves. The head gardener, who has been at Houmas House for many, many years, is a wonderful artist who expresses his ideas through multiple painting techniques, various forms of sculpture, and, yes, plants and seeds and fertile soil. The 38 acres of the plantation grounds are his canvas.

My stepsister and I spoke with him on our recent visit. He let us wander through his studio to see the wide range of his inanimate creations (non-garden-variety art in more ways than one). Afterwards, when we asked him about his designs for the gardens, he said he approaches them the same way he does his other art forms: "I wake up every morning and ask myself what I feel like doing."

Take a little walk with me now, and I'll show you a few of the things he has felt like doing:

(I've kept these images small in hopes that they'll load faster for you, but please be sure to click on them and view the larger versions. I think you'll be glad you did.)

PS:  A portrait of Houmas House's head gardener is the featured image on my photo blog today. Click here to check it out.

Racing through the Month of May

I've been crazy-busy over the past ten or twelve days, but I think I've enjoyed every single minute of it. It's great to be able to say that, right?

In the interest of getting caught up, I'll post a brief recap today, then flesh out any blog-worthy topics over the next few days. Here goes:

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming:
I've missed two Sepia Saturday posts in a row. I would have managed to squeeze out the time to write those posts if I'd had any old photos that might conceivably have fit the prompts, but I came up empty.

While I was looking for suitable photos, though, I did manage to "sepia-ize" and otherwise doctor up a picture of my brother-in-law, who had a birthday earlier this month.

A belated Happy Birthday, David!  

Mother's Day

On the 13th we enjoyed our traditional Mother's Day crawfish boil at my daughter Kelli's home. This year the younger generation of males in the family took over the cooking under the watchful tutelage of my son-in-law, Troy. Mmm-mmm, good!

A Special Visitor
My stepsister, Donna, arrived for a couple of days that we crammed full of good stories, hearty laughter, good food, and tourist attractions. More than anything, I wanted her to experience the magic of Houmas House Plantation and Gardens, and we did that for the better part of a day:

We also visited the Cajun Village, not once, but three times in short spurts:

Genealogy Research (Bordering on Obsession)
A friend asked for my help in tracing relatives of a woman born in Poland in 1885 whose passport he recently found. He thinks they might like to have it. Turns out she came to this country as a schoolteacher, mostly in private girls' schools. I've learned quite a bit about her, including the fact that she apparently died without ever having married or given birth to children. I'm still looking for brothers or sisters who might have given her nieces or nephews, but I'm afraid the trail has grown cold.

I also did a little research on my stepsister's family on her mother's side. (My mother married Donna's father, so we already knew about his side of her family). Genealogy research is always fun for me, and I continued exploring Donna's family history after she left to go back home. Let me tell you that, after discovering that one of her multiple-times-great-grandfathers and his brother had both been killed by Indians--in separate incidents in different years--I was hooked. For most of this last week I've been glued to this computer from morning to night, digging up the stories of that family. What a fun journey it's been!

Here's a picture of one of Donna's great-great-grandfathers (not one of the scalped ones). She hasn't seen this yet, but it's included in the package I mailed to her today:

Clinton H. Ferguson

The Return of an Old Friend

A wonderful friend with whom I'd lost touch for nearly 15 years contacted me this week. What a pleasure it was to hear from him! He's had some hard times since we last talked, but he's in a really good place now. I hope to see him soon, and I'd love to meet the amazing lady who is his new bride.

The Double-Dogs Dare Me

Gimpy has been with us for nearly six weeks now, and things are going great! I look forward to writing an update about the special relationship he enjoys with his brother, Levi. To borrow an often disparaged phrase from Debbie Boone, they really do "light up my life." 

Levi (left) and Gimpy

Thanks!

If you're reading this, thanks for sticking around in spite of my infrequent posting. I'll try to make it up to you.

What I'm Reading: The Siege by Stephen White

I've enjoyed a number of Stephen White's books over the years, and this one was another terrific read. Kudos to the author for coming up with a believable plot that was different from anything else I've ever read.

For a description and reviews of this book,

click on the image above.

Purging Paperwork

I am a saver of documents. Maybe it's because of the former legal secretary in me who rears her head every time I hold a piece of paper in my hand and whispers, "Don't throw that out. You might need it some day."

I save cards and letters because rereading them always makes me smile. I save old envelopes and scraps of paper on which I've written someone's address or phone number or  noted a few words of the lyrics to a song I liked and want to hear again. I know it isn't necessary to save a utility receipt once the new bill, showing a payment, has arrived via mail or email, yet I still had some receipts from as far back as 2009.

There are important documents in my files, of course, ones that need to be kept. In fact, I was looking for one of those over the weekend and became annoyed with myself because I couldn't find it where I knew it should be. That one misplaced document (I did find it later) started a purge-and-shred project that has consumed several hours each day this week.

The reason this job is taking so long is that I'm consolidating all those scraps of information into computerized lists before shredding or filing them, and sometimes that  leads me down rabbit trails. I still haven't finished, but my mountain of paperwork is now a stashable molehill, and I've reached a good, temporary stopping point.

Now I need to put up my hands and step away from the shredder for a few days. I'm having company next week, and there are other chores to be tackled around here, areas to be cleaned that are more visible than the inside of my file drawers. I will get back to this project, though, and finish it.

In the meantime, what are some of your best tips for taming the paperwork monster?