Anyway, here are a few highlights and the full album can be found in the gallery. There’s even a few rare pics of the critterweb humans.

Simon appreciating the chilly day from the comfort of a lap.

The mini roses all survived the winter and are getting leaves already.

Cricket also subscribes to the ’sunbathing is better on a lap’ ideal.

Last year’s parsley, still going strong.

Unbeknown to her, the huntress (Winter is on far right of pic) is also the hunted.

A photo op goes awry.

Lindsy, Chris, Simon, and Paddy

When I was taking this, I wondered if Joy was having a creepy sensation of being spied on?

Calvin had a great time outside.

There are  21 more pictures in the full album.

As I mentioned in the first post, we were a little hesitant to be optimistic about a new addition to the family, with as bad as things went with Arthur… and adding a cat was particularly dicey, given the aggression issues we’ve had with Olive, and between Olive and Winter. We’d hoped the right one would kind of balance things out, but it could just as easily have been a total disaster.

I’m happy to say that things have gone better than we could ever have hoped. By the end of the first week, we had him intermingled with the rest of the gang. The only problem we did have was him giving his upper respiratory infection to Winter, but that may have helped the transition in a way, funny as that sounds; she was feeling too bad those first few days to worry about being hostile to the ‘intruder’ in the house.

Now, over a month later, Winter treats him like a little brother – sometimes she finds him amusing and she actually plays with him, other times he’s too much for her and she gets angry. He does pay attention when she gets mad and backs off. Simon also gets along well with him — we were worried he was being too rough with Simon but Simon seems to initiate the wresting at least as often as Dandelyon does. They sleep together and Simon even grooms him sometimes.  Olive… well, Olive is Olive. She is OK most of the time but we have had some issues with her jumping on him when she’s having one of her off days. Still, overall things have gone well.

Cricket was initially kind of snarky with him (in her defense, he does treat her as a chew toy) but she’s gotten over that and he’s showing a bit more restraint with the flying tackles. Lindsy snapped at him a few times, but she hates all of the cats and we didn’t really expect she’d be any different with a new one.The unfortunate thing is we now have two cats that love dogs, and no dog that likes cats, but we’re still hoping to find the right dog to add to the family some day — though ideally not until after Lindsy’s passed on.

One thing I do need to explain is that Dandelyon is now his middle name, and we’ve been calling him “Calvin.” It just suits him more, most of the time. His full name is “Calvin Dandelyon Weasley.” Yes, not only have we confused things by spelling one name weird, but now we’ve given him a name from “Calvin and Hobbes” but not named him after the cat in the cartoon. At least the Weasley part is pretty straightforward, if you’re familiar with the Harry Potter books. His personality is very Calvinish, he’s funny, inventive, mischievous, and cheerful, but can put on a good pout when he gets tired. And he has yellow hair that sticks up all over the place.

He has been so much fun to have around, he really is like a little ray of sunshine. We really love him. He makes us laugh constantly with his antics, and he’s blossoming into a beautiful cat. The five AM wake up in the form of a five pound kitten suddenly pouncing on your face we could maybe do without, but I’m sure he’ll outgrow that.

How could anyone resist a face like this?

Never mind that it is barely above freezing out there, Olive is determined to sit outside and pretend that she’s not freezing her ass off.

The animals almost nixed the whole plan with that entire weekend we spent at the vet’s, consuming about twice what we’d intended to pay for the camera in one sweep. What we ended up doing instead is selling some gold jewelery we’d been intending to sell at some point anyway, and put the money towards the camera. I’d had this stuff, which was near-24 carat gold and came from Thailand,  for a long time but had no attachment to it, neither of us wear gold, and it wasn’t valuable enough to hang onto as an investment or anything. It was enough to mostly pay for the camera, though. Ironically the camera also apparently came from Thailand, according to the sticker on the bottom.

We poured over the review sites one last time, being really hesitant to mail order a camera since the one we’d been looking at isn’t available locally. Somewhere in the course of this, Joy wound up clicking on sample pics for digital SLRs and we realized how much sharper and more accurate they were. She’s actually the one who looked up and suggested the Nikon D3000 that we ended up getting, which we were able to buy locally. I think she’s been working at that computer shop too long and the ‘geek’ has rubbed off on her. We paid more than we were going to for the other camera, and I didn’t get my ginormous zooming capability (for now) but it’s a far superior camera that will be able to do anything we want it to and more. A zoom lens will have to wait a while, but since it’s a DSLR it will support all sorts of different lenses… maybe even a macro lens to really get up close and personal with my spider friends?

It’s taken a bit of getting used to to once again look through the eyepiece and not have the live view on the LCD (this model doesn’t have that, nor does it shoot video but we never used that feature anyway) but it’s a lot like my old Nikon N4004 in most aspects and very intuitive to use. I am including a few photos below that we’ve taken so far, and the Halloween pics were done with the new camera. No more washed out indoor pics of Olive with her eyes blinded shut.

If I have any criticism at all, it’s the noseprints that you can’t help but leave on the LCD when taking pics, and that seems to be pretty universal for digital cameras. I also find the pictures a bit oversaturated, but Joy thinks they look good so that might be just a personal preference issue.

Fall in Marion, NC. The burning bush hedge in this picture really was that brilliantly red but the grass seems a wee bit bright to me. I brought the camera along for the day when I went to Newland for a service call but unfortunately it was really dark and overcast all day.

Mini rose close-up (all three roses are still blooming their hearts out, don’t they know summer is over?)

‘Wildcat’ in the bushes.

Olive on mole patrol.

Cricket on the couch. The house was pretty dark, this was taken in the evening with low light and flash. It did really good with her eyes.

The color really came out  really pretty here. Her eyes are closed from the sunlight, not the camera.

Note: the weird line on the right side of the portrait oriented images is something our upload program is doing to them, nothing with the camera. Its been going on a while and I keep meaning to research that and fix it but never get around to it.

Anyway, those disclaimers aside, I now present the holiday costume pet torture 2009 edition:

Meet Count Catula – we made Simon’s costume ourselves this year, Joy did all of the actual sewing by hand since I quicky discovered that flannel is not sewing machine friendly.

Simon loves dressing up, and particularly seems to like capes. If you click on either of his pics, there are a couple more in the gallery we uploaded. He paraded all over the house. Taking pictures at night of a black cat in a black cape was a bit of a challenge though.

Initially, Winter’s flapper costume produced spontaneous paralysis and caused her to fall over dead…

She did, however, eventually recover the use of her limbs long enough to pose for us.

Olive has a bad leg so we let her off easy and she got to wear Cricket’s costume briefly. She was most unimpressed.

Lindsy, also being old and creaky nowadays, wore a Halloween party collar in lieu of an actual costume.

Cricket wore her costume to the vet’s for her recheck and X-rays, which we thought was pretty funny. She had a blast showing off.

Well, that’s it for another year… hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween!

A few weeks ago, Cricket did something or another that made me laugh, and I thought about how she really is fun to have around and how lucky we’ve been that she recovered from that bad spell a year and a half ago. She’d been so ill that we actually had made an appointment to have her put down, because she hadn’t eaten in days and it seemed she was just fading away and suffering. At the time, many tears were shed and we finally braced ourselves and made peace with what about to happen as best we could… and then she recovered. As I was reminiscing about this, I thought “dammit Cricket, we prepared ourselves back then for losing you, and mourned you, and then you didn’t die and now someday we’re going to go through it all over again and you will break my heart.”

But sitting there thinking that, it was some distant future event I was thinking about, because after she came back from that bad spell I had sort of decided somewhere in my mind that she’d somehow gotten better and was going to be around for years and years. At her last vet visit about a year ago, I am sure the vet even said that her murmur was a bit better, so I constructed some version of reality where the heart issues were just temporary problems caused by her heartworm treatment. So, while we were concerned about the trouble she’s been having, I mostly just thought the vet was going to explain that it was due to collapsing trachea or some other ’small breed dog issue’ and nothing to worry about.

That’s not what happened… in spite of how active and spunky she is, Cricket is still a very sick little dog. Her heart murmur is worse – a five out of six now, and there’s a strange area on her lungs (which look pretty crappy overall) that could be pneumonia, the start of pulmonary edema from the heart issues, or cancer. She’s on a course of antibiotics, some cough pills (same medication as the sticky pink goo but a much easier way to get it into her) and then in two weeks she goes back for another series of X-rays. If that funny area is not changed for the better, well, it’s not a good thing. The X-rays also showed some pretty significant spondylosis in the vertebrae in her chest area.

Olive’s on Antibiotics for another week and her foot issue may be some sort of foreign body working it’s way out. The plan is to let it go and see if it can do it without surgery. Oh, and when we came home, Simon sneezed blood all over his food bowl. We’ve changed cat litter and are giving it a few days to see if that is what is causing his problem, and if not we’re not sure what the next step is for him. Scoping his sinuses? Did I mention Winter had some sort of incident in the yard yesterday and acted like she’d hit her head? She’s better today but she gave us a scare.

The Cricket thing has really bummed me out. It’s my own fault for deluding myself but I really didn’t expect bad news today.

Having some down time I guess at least gives me some time to catch up a bit here, since its been a long time since I’ve posted, and as usual that means a lot has been going on. I actually had started a draft a week or so ago with an update on how things went with the whole foster dog thing, and I’ll post that separately, but as for the rest here’s the ketchup…

My broken nose: mostly healed, black eyes gone, small scar and there’s a bit of a bump there that might be permanent. The bruising was still pretty noticeable when I had to go to Atlanta for a business meeting at the beginning of the month, so I am sure everyone now remembers me as the woman with the two black eyes.

We have been at the vet just about every day lately — OK, maybe I am exaggerating a bit but it feels like we have. Simon’s had a herpes flareup that we just can’t get settled back down, and is  walking around with his left eye running constantly blowing snot bubbles out that nostril. Because it’s viral, antibiotics can only do so much. Poor guy. And then last weekend, Olive walked into the room and Joy said, “uh, does her right back foot look funny?” It sure did — swollen to about twice it’s normal size or more all the way up to the hock, yet she wasn’t even limping. Joy had just trimmed everyone’s nails a few days earlier, so we knew it was something that had come up suddenly. We checked her over and couldn’t find any wounds or punctures but the foot was oozy green between the toes, so off to the vet we went.

It’s a good thing that our vet is also the local emergency clinic, and that we don’t pay emergency fees because we’re a regular client. They were slammed, so we were there most of the afternoon – and that’s not a complaint, most of the cases that came in were a lot more urgent than Olive’s foot. The vet couldn’t really find a cause either, and cleaned up her foot then sent her home with antibiotics. One interesting thing: Olive is the only one of our animals that we never had microchipped (we always figured we’d do it if she had to be put under for something) but Joy has always been convinced she felt a chip under the skin. Since she was there, we had them run the scanner over her and she was right! I imagine the people that surrendered her to the clinic we worked at when she was attacked by a dog had it done.

Cricket has been having more trouble than usual breathing, and since it sounds really phlegmy and we know from previous trips to the vet that, in spite of her heart issues, she’s not retaining fluid in her chest, I assume it’s more of an asthma type thing from the scarring on her lungs caused by her previous heartworm infection> I got the idea that maybe guaifenesin might help her (that’s the stuff in mucinex, and it helps when my lungs act up) and after I verified that it could be used in dogs and found a dosage, we started her on it and it does seem to be helping. Dosing her, however, is not fun. The first time I caught her off guard and she was, like, ‘ack-what the hell was that all about?!’ but now she’s on to me and it has turned into an epic wrestling match involving a 5 lb dog, a half a teaspoonful of sticky red cherry flavored syrup, and me.

Winter is now the only animal in the house NOT on some sort of medication, and Olive’s antibiotics have given her screaming diarrhea. She has also been back on her clomipramine for a few weeks now, for her ‘anger management’ issues.

Hmmm… lets see, have I missed any other excitement?  Well, there was the Yellowjacket Nest from Hell in our azalea bush – after failing with boiling water, diatomaceous earth, organic wasp spray, and finally two cans of Hot Shot, we called in an exterminator. Even he had to come back twice but they are finally gone. Everyone suggested that we just pour kerosene or gasoline down the hole but that just seemed like a really bad idea since our septic tank is also right under that bush. It was a bit fascinating to watch them from the safety of the office window that overlooks that bush; I had no idea that yellowjackets prune the leaves on bushes to make flight paths to their nest. It’s a relief to have them gone though, that was a really big nest and very close to where we park the cars.

We also had a scare during the flooding that happened in this area – a roof leak in the living room. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we had a roof leak at the last house almost exactly a year before this. Luckily this was just due to some shingles that had come loose. The roof is old and will need to be replaced at some point, but thankfully not immediately.

I think that mostly covers our lives in the past few weeks… I’ve been putting in a lot of road time with work (averaging about 1200 or so miles a week) and Joy’s still making the long commute to Waynesville every day. There might be a change coming soon on the latter front but I don’t want to jinx anything so that’s all I’m going to say for now on that…

One last thing, what the heck happened to summer this year? I think we just went directly from spring to fall.

Someone gave us a zucchini the size of an eggplant (surprisingly it was not overripe, just genuinely huge) and we made Curried Apple and Zucchini soup – YUM! We’ve got basil coming out of our ears, I keep meaning to make a batch of pesto but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Maybe this weekend.

One of the main reasons for the lack of blog activity is that things have not been working out so well with Arthur… in fact we’ve decided to find him a more suitable home. I pretty much have to have eyes in the back of my head because the one thing that we could not cope with — going after the cats — has become a big problem. Not so much with Simon, who does not run and can take care of himself pretty well, but with the girls. Anything we have tried as far as redirection, corrections, etc. has just resulted in Arthur learning to be sneakier about it, so that he now has to be leashed or separated from them by a door every minute he is loose. It’s caused a lot of stress around here and has worn us out, and we have had more than enough of that in the past to go through it again.

It makes me very sad… why can’t we just find a dog that will fit in? Things started off well, and we tried to really think it through and evaluate before we got him, but he just can’t resist the impulse to stalk and chase anything small that moves. In the right household he’d do great,  but we have to think of the safety of the others, who were here first. Winter has had surgery in one knee and the other one has a luxating patella that so far she has not needed to have repaired, but sudden running or jumping could tear it loose. Olive is old and broken and fragile. This is their house, and they deserve to enjoy it safely. And it’s not fair to Arthur, either, for us to try and ‘pound a square peg into a round hole;’ he is who he is. We’ve gotten frazzled and short-tempered after two months of unsuccessfully working at this problem and that isn’t good for anyone involved.

We started with a posting on craigslist and have a few people interested, and one person who felt the need to be sarcastic and judgemental without knowing the details of the situation.

Many, many years ago, my very first dog was a Bull Terrier named Maya. She and I were the ultimate personality clash, and I struggled for over a year with her before deciding to find her a home. I was inexperienced and totally ill-equipped to deal with a dog as stubborn as she was, and she was, well, miserable. When she went to her new home, I was pretty sure I was going to get a call within a week to come get her… but I didn’t. When I did get the call, it was to tell me how much they loved her, how great she was doing, how happy she was. Anyway, what I am trying to say is, sometimes a situation is just unworkable, and besides the safety concern here, I don’t think stubbornly plodding on for the next 12-15 years when Arthur could be happier somewhere else is the right answer.