Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

We took down our few holiday decorations today (actually just a few holly branches, a string of purple lights, and our cards) and I was struck again how quickly this entire year has just flown by. Each one seems to go faster than the last. We’ve had a lot of changes this year and lost a member of our critter family when we put Wednesday down. Chances are that we will probably lose Cricket some time soon (honestly we expected her not to last until the end of the year but she’s hanging in there) and we are also looking for a better home for Maggie. It’s not fair to her to live such a constrained life because she came into a house already full of broken pets, and we just can’t afford to keep going further and further into debt to take care of everyone.

Not having a fenced yard with a dog who likes to run like a gazelle is nerve-wracking but there’s no way we can justify spending money to fence yet another place that isn’t ours. The fact that some of the neighbors don’t take the care that we do in keeping their animals in their own yards causes us a great deal of stress. We don’t necessarily think that Maggie would start a fight, but she would certainly be able to finish one and would get the blame for it regardless. Especially at this time of year, when we get up in darkness and come home to darkness, it’s scary letting the dogs out the door when we can’t see what is out there. We just have to hope that there isn’t a cat, or a 100 lb German Shepherd standing outside the house somewhere.

So 2008 is rushing towards us and we have this feeling that this is going to be another year of changes for us. Partly because of the animal stuff mentioned above, but maybe more than that as well. We’ve cut down so much on the clutter around here and are still working to clear out even more. There’s no reason to lug around all this junk that we have no attachment to. This year we made even more of a point of recycling everything we can and we now take our own bags into the grocery store, and are buying much less processed food. We’re trying very hard not to buy cheap “made in China” products but quickly discovered that this is harder than it seems. The important thing is that we are trying, and over time it gets easier.

We aren’t sure what the future will bring with our jobs; the small-town computer shop where we work has had to contend with a brand-new Staples store opening in town, with a super Wal-Mart and a Best-Buy soon to come… at the very least, the shop will have to change the way things are done to stay afloat. I’ve had this growing feeling that I am perhaps not quite on the path that I am supposed to be on, that there are talents of mine that are going to waste spending all day running here and there and fixing computer catastrophes, and being in a perpetual state of having to be reactive without ever having the time to think proactively and put my creativity to use is just wearing me down. By the end of the day we are so beat we just come home, feed ourselves and the critters, and go to bed. There doesn’t seem to be any time for ourselves, let alone for writing, working on the website or all the other little projects I used to do. I guess we’ll see what the new year brings.

We’ve settled in comfortably into the house… we’ve made it a very homey, cozy place and really enjoy having the big living room with those patio doors overlooking the mountains. The landlord had a screen door put on the patio and we put up a crystal that makes rainbows dance all over the room when the sun hits it. We have a huge assortment of wildlife that comes to visit every day, titmice and chickadees and cardinals, several squirrels that give the cats a fit by coming up on the deck, and our resident pair of wrens that like too hop around on the deck and peer in the windows. There’s also blue jays, crows, doves, and tons of assorted finches and sparrows. Nadine the chipmunk has been absent for a few weeks, we assume she is hibernating.

We hope that this new year brings good things for everyone and some needed positive changes in the world.

I have been working on getting the Critters section of the web site back up and functional over the past week or so. The ‘Contact’ link at the top of the weblog has been replaced with a ‘Critters‘ link and that link goes to a page that in turn links (or will, eventually) to pages for all of the current and past critters.

Most of the pages only go to photo gallery links so far but I finished the story about Wednesday I had started shortly before her death, and have posted it on her page.

There have been no further blow fly plagues or other weird incidents at the house, and we re-cleansed it properly the weekend after we posted about that stuff. The cold weather got rid of the ants and I plan on caulking around all the little nooks and crannies they were getting in through, before spring comes. I am not going to temp fate by making any statements about things improving, but they’ve at least calmed down a wee bit.

I meant to post earlier and let everyone know we survived the move, but on top of everything else going on we were both hit with some sort of nasty cold last week and in my case it decided my lungs were a nice place to settle in for the long haul. I finally had to take a day off work yesterday and just stay in bed to try and fight it off. Still coughing a lot, but much better today.

So we are moved in and slowly getting settled. The weekend we moved we couldn’t use the tub until Monday but the rest of the plumbing was operational and we have a brand new tub. The plumbing is now connected for the washer, but the hot water doesn’t work so we’re using the laundromat for some stuff while we wait for that to be fixed. The old tub and all the other crap torn out of the bathroom is still on our front porch, but we’re trying to be patient about that.

Joy’s recently repaired Jeep seems to have the ‘hiccups’ when accelerating and we still haven’t had a chance to get the Ouchlander looked at. We’ve made at least a dozen trips to Lowes and Home Depot, mostly to buy and return the same couple of items over and over that we just couldn’t find in the right size (stove burner insert pans for the old house and new) and the new house came with both fleas and ants. Hopefully things will settle down soon.

It’s been a huge relief to get away from London Road, which has a speed limit of 30 MPH but has a constant flow of delivery trucks, cars with loud bass, motorcycles, and 18-wheelers, all going between twenty and fifty miles over the posted speed limit. We’ve got one neighbor at the new place who has kids that zoom up the road with an ATV and a dirt bike, which is annoying, but it’s not the constant barrage of noise and exhaust smell we lived with before. We wake up to the sound of roosters crowing instead of sirens screaming now. Running out of milk or realizing we’re missing a recipe ingredient is a bit of a pain; no more quick trip to the grocery store as the nearest one is five miles away — but I suppose it does cut down a bit on ‘impulse munching’ as well. We’ve got a resident chipmunk that lives in a rockpile on the property, and lots of cardinals, blue jays, and other birds. It’s neat to sit on your back deck and hear cows and geese (or ducks? we aren’t sure) off in the distance.

On a sad note, we had put Wednesday to sleep last week. She was in an increasing amount of discomfort from both the rapidly growing tumor on her back, and the bladder stones that could not be treated, and we felt her quality of life had deteriorated to the point where it wasn’t fair to ask her to endure any more. Her passing was as peaceful as we and the vet could make it, and at least her pain is over. Coming in the middle of so much other chaos, I think we’re partly still numb over it, and I half expect to see her come walking into the living room every morning.

We’ve taken a couple of pictures and started a small gallery of the new house. The animals all seem very happy there and are enjoying being able to see out all the windows and bask in sunbeams (we loved the last house, but except for one room, it didn’t get much sun) and we’re slowly putting things in order… We did end up renting an “emergency storage locker” at the last minute on moving day, when it became apparent that all our crap was not going to fit unless we planned to live with boxes stacked to the ceilings. How the heck did we accumulate this much stuff? We’re making a serious stand on clutter and have made several trips to Goodwill with boxes. The idea is that we’ll bring the boxes out of storage a few at a time and anything we don’t need/use/wear on a regular basis just needs to go. It’s ridiculous for two people to haul around this many material ‘things’ - especially as often as we seem to wind up moving.

We managed to capture all of the animals in just two photos, without having to ‘Photoshop’ anyone in after the fact.

Considering that the cats normally tend to avoid being within ten feet of each other, Maggie can’t sit still, and Cricket is about as hard to photograph as a hummingbird, that’s actually quite an accomplishment.

All four cats, clockwise from bottom left: Winter, Olive, Wednesday and Simon.

All three dogs, left to right: Maggie, Cricket, and Lindsy. Yes, there was food bribery involved.

We thought we’d start off our first post to the new blog by wishing Simon and Wednesday “Happy Birthday.” Wednesday was born July 3, 1998 and abandoned with her littermates on the doorstep of the clinic Joy and I were working at shortly afterwards, so she’s been with us virtually her entire eight years of life. Simon was adopted from a rescue group in Tucson, AZ and we don’t know his exact birthdate for sure; since we know it was in early July we decided to make it July 4th since he came into our lives with such a ‘bang’. Simon is five today.

Shortly after we moved, Joy noticed a small hard lump on Wednesday’s back. She wouldn’t let us examine it closely, and since Simon has a nasty habit of ambushing the other cats and jumping on their backs we thought maybe it was a healing bite. When a week later it had not gotten any better — was in fact larger — we started to get worried. Adding to our suspicion was the fact that we could now feel a second smaller lump beside the first.

We had the gnarly little grisly lumps removed and sent off for biopsy, and the results confirmed our fears: fibrosarcoma. The pathologist felt it was an vaccine associated sarcoma. Wednesday has not received a vaccination in that area since 1999 that we know of, however there was an incident in 2003 where we were very suspicious that a veterinarian that we had left her hospitalized with for a day mistakenly vaccinated her while she was there. She has a previous history of vaccine reactions where she vomits violently and repeatedly for hours afterwards (which is why she’s only gotten rabies vaccines, which are given in the right leg, since ‘99) and this happened after that visit. The clinic said they did not vaccinate her, but we still suspected there had been a mixup and she’d gotten a shot. If a vaccine she wasn’t even supposed to get to begin with set this thing off, that would be a sad irony.

This cancer has a 60-80% recurrence rate and the lumps have already returned. The incision site took over a month to heal — We won’t put her through that again so our best hope is that the cancer will grow slowly enough that it won’t impact her quality of life for as long as possible.