Today I’ll continue with the “life happens while you are making plans” theme.
Nancy woke up long enough to take two pills and is now sleeping again. It is cold and windy outside and I need to feed horses and uncover my garden – that is, 4 tomato plants. I’ve about given up growing veggies and things here but figured I could handle 4 plants.
We had below freezing temperatures Friday and Saturday nights. The first week of the month it was so cold that all the main buds died on the walnut trees (both black and Carpathian). The black walnut trees are about 18 years old and the others about 10 years and all were producing. Just this week they were starting to push out new leaves from secondary buds. As neither are native to this area and frosts are common here at 2,200 feet elevation, I have to keep this in perspective. If they do not recover I can try something else or just photograph the naked trees and call it my contribution to folk art.
Nancy’s sore throat and sniffles are fading so won’t threaten the implantation scheduled for June 1st, a week from Tuesday. Meanwhile she has gone through several boxes and sorted out a few keepers but most of the stuff will be recycled or go to the “covered” transfer station – the place we take our garbage. Times change. Years ago the place where one took garbage was called a dump, was outside, and was home to rats and mice. My father (when young) and a friend would each get a nickel and buy a box of 22 ammo for a dime, go to the dump and practice shooting. After tiring of hitting cans and bottles and a few rats they would hold sticks out with their hands or with their teeth and try to hit what the other was holding. About the time I got big enough to try such things they closed the dump and Father and older brothers monitored shooting activities more closely.
Two months ago, when I thought I was monitoring our dogs closely by closing our “in-season” female into a bedroom – I goofed. She was in a different room. When I let the male in from the yard he ran down the hall and found her and we had a mating before I had the sliding-glass door closed. Oops! So as fast as Nancy could clear away a stack of boxes I replaced it with a new set as I made space for whelping quarters for our expectant mother (that would be “b—h” in dog language). Luckily the mother-to-be has gotten too wide to crawl under the bed so I have a chance to get her to accept the whelping pen (this has inside panels so she can’t crush a puppy against the inner wall) as the preferred birthing place. She may attempt to carry them under the bed afterward (when she is thinner) but I’ve seen that trick before and will be firm in refusing her intentions.
There are lots of other things going on this week so we do not need and did not want this puppy-thing. At least the births will happen a week before Nancy’s ICD is implanted. That’s good. I will have to contend with week-old puppies and their new mother while Nancy spends two days in the hospital in Yakima, 50 miles away. I’m having a hard time finding the good in that.* It must be there so I’ll keep searching.
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*To read “The Pony in the Dung Heap” visit the link below and scroll down to the “Michele W—- on December 30, 2009 at 3:48 pm” entry.
http://goodvibeblog.com/2009/12/qa-how-to-deal-with-multiple-difficulties/