Martha's Story

 Yesterday I told you how a cat ended up living here. I think he cast a spell on my mom! He was not here for two whole days before Mom was considering names. Not knowing if the kitten was a boy or a girl was a problem.

Everybody was eager to help Mom solve the mystery. All the men in the park came in to check the underside of the kitten. I would have been indignant!! So rude! Anyway, all of the men decided that the kitten was a girl.

Mom has a good friend named Martha. Martha was not in the park that weekend. She had gone to meet her new granddaughter. Oscar said he heard them talking about grandchildren and names. Oscar said he liked to hover near the door when Mom and Martha were chatting over coffee every Saturday and Sunday. This particular time they were talking about the fact that none of their children had named a child after them. Martha's new one was not going to be named after her and Mom says that she would have to wait for a great-grand! Whatever that is!

So, Mom decided to "honor" Martha with a namesake in the form of a cat. Oscar found this to be funny. He said he wondered just who would consider this an honor! Martha is also an animal lover, having dogs of her own.

The tiny kitten grew fast, thanks to Mom's care. One day about two weeks after he came to live here, he bit the nipple off his bottle! Oscar said he heard Mom ask Martha what he was doing and then she was in the kitchen looking for a saucer to pour his formula in. He says she grabbed a Chinese food container, too. She gets these when Dad brings home take-out. She loves these containers and will proclaim their virtues if she can find someone to listen. Seems she like the fact that they are rectangles and just the right size for leftovers and can stack neatly in the fridge, as well as the cupboard and the very best part .... they are free! See what I mean? She calls them Chinese Tupperware. I still have no idea what that is, this Tupperware.

She put cat litter in the container and formula in the saucer and put them both on the floor by the kitten bed that was actually a box with a blanket. He heard her tell the kitten to feed himself and then take care of business in the pan of litter. Then walked outside to garden. We both snickered when we got to "take care of business" part. Why does she say that?

Martha complied with Mom's suggestions and received much praise when Mom came back in. Mom always gets excited when we do what we are told to do. Oscar says this is when Mom started taking Martha outside with her. Martha would follow Mom's every step and would fall asleep in one of her gardens while she worked. Martha never ran into the road. He was, in fact, afraid of the sound of engines. He still is, though he hides it well.

Martha lived in the store. Mom put a kennel in the store and his litter pan and food and water were in the store. He came in the house and played with the dogs, Oscar says he could jump higher than any of them even as a little thing. He would make all of the dog's crazy, then jump up on something higher than they could reach and just stare at them. They hated him for that.

One day Martha was on the couch with Dad and he was tickling Martha when all of a sudden, he called out to Mom. Mom appeared out of nowhere, "what's wrong?" she asked. Dad said "Martha has balls!" Oscar says Mom was unfazed and said, "You are right about that, Tom says she does!" He said, "No, not that Martha, I am talking about the cat!"

So, Martha was a boy! So many thing come to my mind about this. I asked Oscar if Martha got to keep his testicles, cause us dogs didn't. I am still a little miffed that I wasn't even consulted about this. Eddie and Bo still have all the equipment they came with! Mom keeps telling me to be patient, that as soon as Covid is over we will be addressing issues such as that. 

Another thing about this, how dumb are  all those men? Oscar and I shared a good laugh about that. Mom never claimed to know if Martha was a boy or girl. Oscar says that Dad was so worried that Martha was a girl's name and that Mom would have to change it. Mom said "absolutely not, he knows his name and it is Martha!" 

Martha still accompanies Mom to her gardens from time to time. He grew to be quite large and fat. He is bigger than any of us dogs. He sleeps a lot, but he can move quite fast, especially given how fat he is. I have already told you that he will bring us dogs treats from time to time. 

I have a taste for mice and rabbit. He left a rabbit hind quarter for me not long after I swallowed that mouse whole. This time Mom did take it away from me. It was too big to swallow whole and I didn't feel particularly spry that day. I know I could have run, but what was the point? I knew she would catch me eventually, so I just succumbed and let her take it from me. She is relentless!

This is Martha's story. If you might be wondering how he got so fat, it might be all the hunting he does at night. Oh, he still gets his cat kibble, Mom keeps his feeder full. She calls it a self feeder and it holds a lot of kibble. Oscar told me the reason for a self feeder. He says that when Mom and Dad take a trip, they leave Martha here! Mom says us dogs are enough to handle. Fine by me!

Martha lives in the house, he, in fact goes anywhere he wants. He can leap to the top of the fence and go outside our yard! I think he does this to show off. He has done this so many times, the only dog impressed by this is Mr. BoJangles.

Nine Lives

 It has been crazy here with Mom in the kitchen making all manner of delicious treats. Not for us dogs 😞, but for people. Cujo here again. Did you know that chocolate is bad for dogs? Mom said it, so it must be true. Thank goodness for peanut butter! We got lots of licks from peanut butter.

Toni Louise has a favorite treat. When Dad empties a jar of peanut butter he gives her the "empty" container. She will run to her favorite lounging spot and lick to her hearts content. If you should be brave enough to ask for a lick, you should be prepared to run! She does not share her bounty!

Mom emptied some peanut butter jars and when she handed the plastic jar to Toni Louise, Mr. BoJangles snatched it and ran! This was funny because the jar was as big as he is. He could fit his whole head inside. He only did that once, then Toni reclaimed her rightful treat and Mom gave the rest of us a carrot. I like carrots and Mom says they are good for our teeth. I guess she forgot about the teeth they pulled last time I took a nap at the vet's office.

Toni was disappointed with her jar. Dad leaves a lot of peanut butter on the sides of the jar. Mom scrapes it clean with this thing called a spatula. She has suggested many times that Dad make use of this kitchen tool, but he says the knife is already in use when he thinks about it.

Enough about that. I wanted to tell the story of Martha, the boy cat. It was spring time and lots of stuff was going on around here, as Oscar tells me. He said it was the beginning of the first holiday weekend and everything was happening at once. Mom was in the office, all ready to check campers in and Dad was outside with his cronies and the bobcat. Not the animal, although Oscar tells me that a real one was captured here. 

These "cronies" were clearing a site and using the bobcat. They picked the bucket up full of old limbs and dead leaves and such and when the bucket was up in the air something fell out to the ground. There were three men and they rushed over to see a tiny kitten on the ground. He was alive, they could see that, but he was also covered in his own poop! For whatever reason known only to them, they all took their shirts off and wrapped them around the tiny kitten and raced to the office with it. 

"Is it dead?" they asked Mom, who was busy unwrapping the poor little thing. Mom told them they had not managed to smother him and handed the shirts back to them. They seemed to be appalled that Mom was holding the poopy little kitten in her bare hands. She sent them on their way and took the kitten inside and bathed it.

She checked the kitty from head to toe. She said it looked like it's eyes had only been opened a short while, and decided the kitty would need a bottle and some replacement formula. She dispatched Dad to the store and when he returned, she fed the kitten. Before feeding him, she swaddled him, so he wouldn't knead her hand with his tiny claws. By then the park was filling up with campers and children were gathered in the office to see the baby kitten. Rumors fly fast in a campground!

The big question was "Is it a boy or a girl?" Mom said it was too soon to tell. Oscar found this to be strange. Couldn't she just examine the cat's private area? She had no trouble checking him out when she bathed him. He said the word "private" was very misleading!

Not only children, but adults wanted to see the cat missing a couple of his nine lives. NINE lives? A cat has NINE lives! This came as a revelation to Oscar and he demanded to know why an inferior being should have NINE lives, while he had only ONE! He was still upset after Mom explained to him that it was just a figure of speech. Cats seem to get themselves into perilous situations and survive, making people say that cats have nine lives. Oscar said the joke was on them if they believed this.

The bigger question was ... where was this kitten who sucked a bottle every two hours going to live? "Surely not here!" said Oscar to all the other dogs. "We do not need a cat among us dogs!" But, Oscar had a bad feeling that Mom was becoming attached to the tiny scrap of fur.

All day long he sat by the door to the office in order to eavesdrop. Mom was talking to the cat!! It sounded like she was holding it and talking softly to it and he did not like this! He says he even heard her purring to it. He heard the sound of children coming in and out and when it was time to feed the kitten, a whole bunch of little girls would come in the store and watch. One little girl begged for the kitten. He heard Mom tell her that she would have to feed the kitten every two hours, even through the night. The little girl said she would do that. Then Mom showed them all what had to be done to the kitten after it's belly was full. Oscar was wondering about this, himself. He knew that when he was a tiny puppy his dog mom took care of his every need.

Mom had a wash cloth handy for the task and she showed the entire group of girls how to help the kitten pee and poop. Oscar cannot figure why she would do that! Now, the little girl who wanted to take this kitten home no longer wanted to have anything to do with owning a new pet. Oscar said he thought she did it on purpose, because he heard her tell Dad later that once an animal pees and poops in your hand, it owns you.

Check in tomorrow and I will continue with the rest of the story.

It's A Scam!

I may have mentioned a time or two that this place where I live is the dustiest place I can remember. I am constantly dusting and dusting is not a favorite chore.

Have you seen those ads on line about the old woman whose grandchildren refused to visit because her house smelled funny. Her daughter asks her when she last cleaned her house and she says she just had it cleaned by a professional! Daughter runs her finger through the dust on the surface of a table and Grandma is all sad because they won't visit. Then a friend comes along and tells her that the air in her house is so bad that she can't breathe. She leaves and returns that same day with these miracle devices that will purify the air in your house. After a week her house was dust free and her grandchildren even stayed the night. The ad shows what looks to be a device you plug into an outlet.

HeWho loves gadgets decided to order 5. Took forever to ship and they finally arrived. From a company named Clarifion. I had wondered how it would eliminate dust from the air. It looked to be the size of one of those rodent eliminators you plug in and they emit a frequency that only rodents can hear. I have those and they work quite well.

I have no idea what is in the illustration for this product, but what we got was five small bags of activated charcoal. The instructions say to hang them in rooms where odors are a problem and once a month you have to place them in the sunlight for a day to "reactivate". After two years, dispose of them. The suggestion is to dump the contents of the bag in your garden to provide valuable nutrients to the soil.

How did they know I had a garden? How did they know I am a faithful composter? But ... if these "dust eliminators" work as promised, where does all that dust go? These are small and I have a lot of dust. The answer is that I am a sucker!                                                                                                                    

 

46 Years

The new stove is here and the cookie baking must continue ... or does it? The stove is very basic. White with various scratches that I will touch up with appliance paint. The kitchen appears to be much brighter, since the old stove was black.

I had thought I wanted a black stove. I hated the way is showed everything that ever came into contact with it. The window had dust and dog hair trapped between the two layers of glass. How does that even happen? I researched methods of cleaning it. Because it was self cleaning, you couldn't just pull the door off and clean it separately. One tutorial would have had me taking the drawer out and laying down on the floor and scooting my head under the stove and using a long thin item to stick up between the glass. After the part where my head was under the stove, I was pretty much done with that tutorial. Yeah, that didn't happen. 

No worries about that with the "new" stove. No window, not self cleaning. Old style ring elements atop the oven. Doesn't even have a timer. The one time the man listens to me! I got what I asked for.

You know how you become one with your appliances and know all the little quirks? Let me just says that when you have six batches of cookies to make is not a good time to become acquainted with an oven. I over cooked two batches of macaroons before I finally located a thermometer to check to make sure the oven temperature was accurate. This oven is almost 25 degrees off.

I finished the cookie dough that killed the stand mixer and baked those just fine the day the stove came here to stay. As waited for the stove that day, I wondered why HeWho just didn't hunt down a new oven element and replace it. Perhaps he thought I expected him to lay on the floor and shove his head under the old stove to clean the window? I had mentioned it more than once.

Now that the white stove is in place, he is all excited about "fixing" the black stove. Does he think I want two stoves? Who knows. I could cook twice as much.

So, after the initial cookie baking resumed, I was making the dough for thumbprint cookies. In my defense, I am often distracted while working in the kitchen. The phone still rings enough to make me want to open the back door and sling it as far as I can. Add four dogs stalking my every move in the kitchen, hoping I will drop something, as well as a giant cat weaving himself between my legs endlessly. So maybe I forgot I had already added the butter and did it again.

Thank goodness I used parchment paper! Other wise that excess butter would have been in the bottom of the clean oven. As it was the "cookies" were flat gooey things. My mind was calculating all the ingredients and we all know I hate waste. I scooped all the "cookies" into a bowl and today I added a block of softened cream cheese to the bowl of the unfortunate cookie mess. I figured I could roll the results into balls and dip them in white chocolate if nothing else. 

Turned out it made a reasonable dough and I re-baked them. Turned out fine. Now I am exhausted and have to sit for a bit before cleaning the kitchen and moving on to dipping the macaroons in chocolate.

Today is our anniversary. I had to do some math to figure out just how long we have been married. 46 years. Wow, that sounds like a long time. Seems like forever and just yesterday all at the same time. I wouldn't change a thing, because I wouldn't be right here if I did! I wouldn't want to be anywhere else or with anyone else!

All the cookies are done and I baked 8 small cakes today and made a peanut butter pie for my anniversary man. The kitchen has been closed down and HeWho loves me is off to get our take-out.

 

Possum Tales

 It rained yesterday and turned very cold. Everybody was cranky all day. Well, except for Mr. BoJangles. Sometimes his perky attitude gets on my nerves. Today isn't much better, but at least it is not raining. Mom is not feeling well and Eddie got in big trouble with her!

This is Cujo again. Eddie has been itchy for some time now and has to take these long baths. Because of this, Mom has been treating him special. It has become really annoying to the rest of us dogs, with the exception of Bo. Well, today he pushed Mom to her limit. He refused to go out side and peed on the floor. She scolded him and tried to make him go outside. 

He looked at her and just walked away. He asked me what she thought he needed to go out for since he has just peed on the floor. I had to agree with him that it did seem kind of senseless. I didn't tell him that it made me a little happy that he was in trouble. He is hardly ever in trouble and Mom makes a big deal about how good he is. Makes me jealous!

Well, I can tell you why she wanted him to out after he peed on the floor! He pooped on the floor! Dad is the one who cleaned that up and then Dad chased him out the back door. Mom asked Eddie why he would do such a thing and why he couldn't behave like Cujo and Toni Louise. Wow, I feel like I just won an award!

I forgot to mention that we have a cat. He was already here when I came to live here. Oscar told me that there used to be two cats here before I came. One of the cats came from Minnesota with him when they moved here. His name was Gemlin and he was sort of a snob. He thought he was better than the rest of us because he had a pedigree.

Gremlin was a blue Himalayan. Oscar said he was more gray than blue and could argue for hours about his fur color and heritage. He rarely got down on the floor with the dogs. He was too busy looking down his nose at them. He made constant fun of Wall-E because nobody knew what kind of dog he was. Gremlin claims that he had a birth certificate and that he came from champion blood lines. Oscar says that Gremlin was very impressed with himself. Gremlin stayed inside and could often be found lounging on Mom's bed.

Gremlin was old, the same age as Sarge, the Collie. Another cat was living here on the camp ground when they all came to live here.  She was a non-descript gray cat. She lived outside and refused to come inside. She wasn't very friendly at first, but she had never met the likes of my mom. Oscar says it didn't take long for the cat known as Spooky to learn to be held and petted by people.

Spooky and Gremlin did not like each other much. My mom sort of forced them to meet. Spooky was suspicious of this coddled cat that lived indoors and used a litter box. Gremlin started down his nose at her. Well, if a cat with a smashed nose can do that. Makes me wonder if he ever consulted a mirror. Maybe he would not have been such a snob if he had ever seen himself.

My mom was very worried about Spooky the first winter they were here. Spooky would not come inside and Mom was afraid she would freeze to death. She finally took an old covered litter box and lined it with a wool blanket and put it on the front porch with the cat food and water. Spooky took the hint and took up residence in her makeshift home.

But, as it turned out, Spooky wasn't the only one living in the old litter box. One night Mom went out to fill the food dish and add fresh water when the other resident came out to eat. It was a possum! Mom named him Petey. If you are an animal and you decide to live here, you will get a name. 

Petey was not pleased to see Mom and hissed at her. He probably thought he would scare her away. I guess he had never met anyone like my mom before. She hissed back at him and he started to charge at her. She swatted him with her broom. After that he stayed in his new home and would only watch her as he waited for food. Apparently Spooky was sharing her residence with him.

Spooky lived a long life before she went down for a nap one day and never woke up. It was sad, but she was loved and lived a good life. She is buried here on the grounds, along with other pets that have passed here. No one knows what became of Petey, the possum. Later I will share how Martha, the boy cat came to live here.

All I Want For Christmas Is ...

 Cujo is enjoying a day off. Wouldn't want to tax his brain with all his "writing". Nope, today is all about me and my woes.

As Cujo may have mentioned I have been feeling a bit less than. I seem to have no energy. I still get up every day and try to pretend I feel better. I shower and do my hair and make-up. Then I have to rest from all that effort. I do things in fits and spurts, rarely accomplishing much. Feels that way anyway.

So, today I awoke and decided I felt better. Not great, mind you, but better. Last night I mixed up batches of cookie dough that had to chill and I was all set to make cookies today. I cleaned my kitchen and got a load of wash going. I was going to make the peanut butter blossoms first, because that was the biggest batch. I had all my ingredients on hand, thanks to HeWho loves to run errands.

I was mixing the butter and peanut butter when HeWho arrived home after getting the insurance set up on the new RV and paying our property taxes. Since he was unlikely to leave again, I told him he could be in charge of pushing the Hershey kisses into the hot from the oven cookies. He was definitely up for the task, he loves peanut butter and he loves chocolate and I was okay with losing a few cookies along the way.

Leaving the mixer to the creaming of the ingredients I had dumped in, I turned the oven on to preheat and prepared the cookie sheets with parchment paper. I was adding the eggs, one at a time to the mixing bowl when a light flashed behind me! What was that? I looked at the wall switches to see if HeWho had decided I needed more light, then quickly changed his mind. He sometimes does stuff, you know, to keep me on my toes. But He was in his chair, removing the foil from the candies. My back was to the stove and when I turned around, I saw a flame in the oven.

I called out for the candy man and opened the door to see that one of the elements was red hot, while the rest were black. Yes, the oven died. No oven, no cookies. Of course there is an oven in the RV, but my cookies sheets are too big. I wanted to cry.

HeWho went immediately to the phone and began searching for a good buy on an electric stove. Since we don't plan to be here forever, I suggested he go to a scratch and dent place. He asked if I wanted to upgrade to the gas stove I was longing for. No! I don't want to spend money on that! I am cheap, get used to it!

The mixer was still going and the eggs were all incorporated. I added the flour and MY MIXER DIED. Are you kidding me? I said that to my mixer, which, by the way is only two years old. It spoke back with that smell that electric appliances have when they burn up. It may seem like it had been running for a long time, but it wasn't. About half the time it would have been running to make a pound cake. I finished mixing the dough by hand and it sits waiting in the kitchen.

Waiting for what? Waiting for the stove that HeWho has left to obtain. Guess I am getting a stove for Christmas. And a mixer. I have enough time to get a nap while he is gone.

Earning A Name

 It has come to my attention that I haven't told you how Toni Louise came to be a part of our family. This is Cujo, in case you were wondering.

In case you don't know, my mom has to be in the office a lot while the pool is up and running. I think she might get bored and starts to think too much. I have heard Dad say this. Sometimes she will find Dad sitting in his chair and will turn the TV down to tell him she has had an epiphany. He will get a look of pain on his face and us dogs will make ourselves scarce as she explains what ideas she has. I happen to think that all of her ideas are good. She has wonderful thoughts!

She found a website about dogs, dogs in shelters. She saw a dog that happened to be in the shelter in the town where we live. This dog was a young dog, even described as a puppy, the caption proclaimed her to be a Chiweenie. She was black and her face looked sweet. The puppy was in someone's arms, so it was hard to tell much about her. My mom even called about her. The adoption price was minimal, only $35.

She made Dad look at the picture of this dog. "We already have three dogs!" is what Dad said to her. Oscar tells me it was amazing that Mom said "You are right, we don't need another dog. She just looks sweet and we love the Chihuahua part of Wall-E and we love dachshunds and she would be both, but we really do not need another dog." And that was that.

Well, maybe not. Two days later the lady at the shelter called Mom and told her they had taken in quite a few animals over the weekend. She reminded Mom that this shelter was not a no-kill shelter and that the dog that Mom had inquired about had been there the longest. When Dad came inside to get some lunch, she relayed all of this to him. He told her that someone was sure to come along and get that puppy. Mom said he was probably right about that. Then she added that she had read that black dogs were the least adopted dogs. "We have two black dogs!" said Dad. "That is just wrong, I think you made that up." Mom told him she would look it up and show him.

Dad came in later to say he had to go into town to pick up something for the mower or the tractor. Oscar said that as soon as he left, she gathered all three of them and told them they were getting a new sister. Oscar said that Emmy thought this to be a fabulous idea since she was the only girl dog in the pack and that she had been missing Louise. Louise did love Emmy the most. She treated her like she was her puppy and would protect her if she got in trouble. Oscar said he was pretty sure that Mom was right, because she was always right about everything. Wall-E was scared. Wall-E was always timid and did not like changes. He was quite content to be in a pack of three.

When Dad came home, he didn't have any tractor or mower parts. He had this young dog with a smallish head and freaky long legs. Oh, it was the dog that Mom had seen. In the picture she could not see those legs! Mom picked her up and examined her, head to toe. "She has a hernia." she told Dad. "And she has no Chi nor Weenie in her, how did someone come up with that?" 

Oscar said that Mom named her Toni at first. Mom said that Toni had a kind face, like Sarge. Seems that she also had long fur with a skirt similar to that of a Collie. While her heritage remains a mystery, her personality earned her a middle name. Being a very young dog with freaky long legs made her somewhat clumsy and goofy, but it was her sense of adventure that made Mom add "Louise" to her name. In honor of the other escape artist before her. 

Oscar tells me that one time Louise, the St. Bernard, gained her freedom and went wandering around the neighborhood. When she decided to return home she neglected to look both ways when crossing the road and she hit an SUV. Yes, you read that right. The dog ran into the side of the vehicle. Louise was hurt, but she three legged it home and climbed up onto the deck and was nonchalantly laying there, wagging her tail when she was found.

She had to be loaded into the back of the car and taken to the vet. Seems she crushed her elbow and smacked her chest pretty hard, but she never whimpered a bit, denying to everyone that she had disobeyed once again. I suppose she forgot that the deck was outside the fenced in area she was supposed to be in.

Oscar says that when Louise came home again she had a big purple cast on her arm and the biggest cone ever made around her neck. Mom was happy that Louise's repaired arm prevented her from digging in the future. Little did she know how strong that wander lust was, as Louise commissioned Emmy and him to do her dirty work in exchange for taking them along on her adventures.

Toni Louise has that same wander lust and like Louise has ended up at the vet for emergency surgery. Only difference was that the vehicle hit her and tossed her into a ditch dislocating her hip! She earned her name!