Howling at ghosts
My girl Christie has been with me 11 months now. I cannot believe how quickly this year has flown by. She wasn’t a super active dog to begin with – her age and her health contributed to a general weariness – but she has, from her first day with me, been my companion and is always near me if not on my feet. Continue reading
Lilith and Christie having some fun
My poor blog has fallen through the cracks in my life and I’m starting to feel guilty about it! It seems the more time I have the less I post – very counter-intuitive. Continue reading
Your cheese or your life.
These twerps can be pretty intimidating when there’s cheese on the line.
On January 8th I adopted an old Catahoula Leopard Dog mix named Christie from the Pima Animal Care Center here in Tucson. After three different visits without connecting to any of the dogs, this visit, Christie pretty much picked me.
It has been so long since I’ve written a post I almost forgot which application I use to do so. Luckily after my Windows 10 upgrade, it looks like Windows Live Writer is still functioning so lets dust off the cobwebs and get to the gratitude.
I love this bird. He has been with me twenty-one years now, and the place I got him from estimated him to be about two years old, so I consider him to be twenty-three. The older he gets the more mellow he is, although he can still really pump up the volume when he wants to.
I can’t image what my life would be without him. Internet resources claim Nanday Conures lifespans range from twenty to thirty years. He has slowed down considerably in activity, but he is just as agile and quick as always as far as I can tell when flying, and he can destroy a chunk of pine as fast as always. I’m hoping I have many more years of his company, because my shoulder without Bandit on it just doesn’t feel right.
I celebrated my fifty-fourth birthday yesterday with a project I’ve been contemplating for awhile. I have been wanting to do some gardening, and my pinterest has been filling up with various do-it-yourself inexpensive gardening ideas. I really liked one I saw using some metal buckets. My idea was to substitute some cheap plastic pails, and I found some that made me giggle at Walmart. (Sigh – yes, I shop at Walmart sometimes). Then I hit the spring sale at Home Depot for flowers. I had already picked up some hooks and mesh and potting soil at Ace (which I like much better for that sort of thing, because the employees at my local Ace are so wonderfully helpful and friendly).
We are trying very hard to feel sympathy for my East Coast friends who are suffering through a horrendous winter. I look at those temperatures and shiver in empathy. I hope I never have to move back east! 
I’ve been watercolor painting again after a whole year’s sabbatical, but SOMEONE thinks my choice of subject matter leaves something to be desired. Why I’ve picked it up again, will be explained further down this post.
We had a very cold week which actually gave us snow on New Years Day. Although when I dared to post a photo on Facebook and called it “Snow”, I was sort of laughed at. Around here, “Expecting a Hard Freeze” is a major news event which precipitates my entire neighborhood to cover cactus, bushes, and baby trees with blankets.
