The Ants Go Marching One by One

Seriously, have you ever just watched them work?

The world would be different if everyone
had this type of work ethic.

What to do, what to do

Allow me make something clear. We. Do. Not. Take. In. Stray. Animals. The definition of stray is quite clear to me. Stray = doesn’t appear to belong to anyone based on its’ appearance. Lost = appears to be lost and definitely has an owner somewhere.

Enter stage left: “Bubba”

Bubba is a boxer, possibly mixed with a Bulldog or Pit Bull. He’s very sweet and older, probably 8 or 9. He will get in your car if you let him and he is overweight (think table scrap dog), though I’m no vet. He knows how to sit and is not neutered. His nails are short, his coat is in great shape, his ears are natural (uncut) and he has the typical boxer attitude (visualize happy-go-lucky with much twisting of the body to form a C).


He showed up at my office, which is on an extremely busy street at around 5:00 PM on September 24th with… you guessed it, no collar or tags. Everyone at the office noticed all those things I listed above, but one by one, they left the office and “Bubba” did not go with them. Are we seriously the only ones that feel bad for not only the dog, but the person who lost him? This is somebody’s dog! All I could think of was…. If this was K or Jake, I would hope someone would hold on to him/her long enough for me to find him/her.

We put up signs, contacted all the local vets to put him on their lost/found list, contacted the local shelter and humane society, and added him to every lost and found website we could find. We also took him to the local emergency vet to see if he is micro-chipped. No such luck. We’ve received 3 calls, but not a single one panned out.

Now almost two weeks later, “Bubba” is in our kitchen because the temperature outside is dropping rapidly and it is going to rain from now until Saturday. Jake is not social so we have installed a door… to the kitchen. Seriously, the shape this dog is in, it never crossed my mind that his parents might not come looking for him. I don’t have a clue what to do. I’ve called the local boxer rescue and have not heard anything back.

It’s a running joke at work now because I took him home. I know in my heart of hearts that I cannot keep him. This was not in our budget. Not to mention that fact that three people and two dogs are enough for a 2-bedroom, barely over 1,000 square feet house without adding one more.

I could totally stand on a soapbox right now because this situation breaks my heart and happens all too often. I can’t think of a single thing that would let me leave my dogs behind or allow me to believe that everything will be okay because someone will take them in.

I’m not asking for your help, I’m asking for your prayers. That his owner has been unable to look for him (maybe a hospitalization or something) and that soon they will contact me.

Extended Break

It's been a while since I've posted here. I'd like to say I have a valid reason, but I don't. I just haven't had much to say. Even though lots of things have been going on at our house.

We got this wild idea to paint our living room for a quick update that wouldn't be drastically expensive. Seriously, nothing is worse than 68 year old, TEXTURED, plaster walls painted baby blue. They haven't been painted in who knows how long and have a nice coat of cigarette smoke from previous inhabitants. Did I mention that all the trim throughout the house is painted with cream colored oil based paint?

We started with the trim because we knew it would take a while as it need to be sanded. So we sanded. And stripped (the paint, although it certainly would've made things interesting). And sanded. And stripped. All 18,973,392 coats of paint. It. Sucked. No, C didn't do all of it, I just took more breaks than he did.

C repeatedly dropped hints over that weekend that insulation was on sale at Lowe's, blah blah blah. Although I realized he was making a valid point, (our house has no insulation in any of the exterior walls) I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do about it. So I did what any wife with white hair from sanding and an extra day because it was a holiday weekend would do. I took the hammer to the wall and created a hole in the plaster large enough that it couldn't be easily patched.

Soon that became this.

There are a lot of safety issues I should point out here. We should've worried about lead this and asbestos that. We did atleast wear those mask thingys. Bottom line, if you decided to take on a project like this, you may want to have those things professionally checked out first.

See, no insulation. Excuse our temporary window coverings.

Right here, C is installing more receptacles and replacing all the old wiring so later he can tie them into a new breaker box and my worries of dying in a house fire will be severely reduced.

Our dog Jake should've been named Sup, short for Supervisor. He's convinced that no matter what you are doing, he needs to be right there to watch. This includes using the restroom, taking a shower, cooking, anything.

Since C does electrical stuff all day, he convinced me we need to install can lights. Now that we have them, I believe just changing the lights would've made a huge difference but it's too late for that now. See Sup Slacking...

Hopefully this coming weekend C will be done with his first real experience mudding and we'll be able to prime, paint and put all the trim back on. Next on our list... those really outdated windows... okay maybe our son's room. I just can't decide.

A Sad Day at The Zoo

Typically when you turn on the news in this city the breaking news is a shooting in which one or several people died or more political drama as the government here is fairly corrupt. Well on Monday the headline was this: "Baby Elephant Born!" Asali's artificial insemination finally took on the fifth try. She was pregnant for one year, 9 months and 15 days. It was exciting news and of course then everyone plans to make a trip to the zoo soon just to see the baby.

But at 11:10 this morning that happiness was shattered. Apparently the baby stumbled in the enclosure and in an attempt to help it back up the mother accidentally hurt the baby. They tried to save her, but she didn't make it. She didn't even have a name yet.

Plant Update

I'm only slightly obsessed with these flowers. Our sunflowers last year were ruined when my mother in law (who knows a LOT about plants so I'm not sure why she did it) pulled the flower over, almost to the ground to look at a bug that was on the stem. It never stood back up and soon shriveled and died. I took this photo this morning on my way out the door.

Also, we checked on the pumpkins this morning.
The top had a good bit of condensation on it so I figured
we should soon see leaves.

I took the top off just to peek and ...

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

Rewards At Last

I came home to this yesterday!

A critter has taken up residence in another one that's about to pop.

And our balloon flowers that we planted at the end of March
are finally about to actually have flowers on them.

Yes, I am easily amused.

These nuts...

Our company goes to Sam's pretty regularly to pick up sodas for our community fridge at work. Recently they came back with these. Needless to say, the whole office is officially addicted. Typically, chocolate covered almonds are just too sweet for my tastes. And I NEVER eat dark chocolate. But these are just right. I like to alternate between bites of really salty chips and a couple of these almonds because I'm a sugar-salt freak. But they are awesome no matter how you eat them.

Budget Entertainment

C2 can be a real busy body (especially if he hasn’t had a nap). Being on a budget really limits our entertainment options. Thank goodness he’s just as happy window shopping at the Goodwill store as he would be playing in the arcade at our local miniature golf place.

A couple of weeks ago at Home Depot he asked if we could buy this pumpkin plant for $1.00.

A dollar?…totally do-able. Especially if we get pumpkins out of it and don’t have to buy any in October.

It was supposed to come with soil and three seeds but as you can see someone had removed the soil pellet before we bought it and we didn’t realize it.

Not to worry, we have plenty of soil at our house. Planting seeds and watching them grow is soooo cheap and he really enjoys checking on them.

Planting the seeds is probably his favorite part.
(excuse the paint on the porch, it's under construction)

Then you just add a little water (from your new pedestal sink in the bathroom!)

And lastly, put the top on and place it in a window until your seeds sprout.

Hopefully soon, we’ll have sprouts. Until then, I’ll be researching how much sun and space pumpkins need.

Here's some more cheap plants we now have. Dianthus we picked up off the clearance rack half dead already at Lowe's for $1.00. It just needed a bigger pot and some fresh soil.

Sunflowers for $1.00. The smaller plants on the bottom right of this photo are sunflower seeds that we got out of our bag of birdseed just to see what would happen. They are doing great.

(This photo is from a couple of weeks ago.)

Just about to POP! We can't wait. And just maybe we'll get seeds for next year.

Time Flies

This past Thursday was my nephew’s first birthday. Saturday we celebrated with a cook out at my sister’s house. Hard to believe he’s one. No, I did not post the wrong photo, it is the same child.

Nature is Great!

I’ve never seen this process really from beginning to end. To be able to not only see it up close but get photos… Next time the kids find a catepillar, get a jar and enjoy it.

This is one of the caterpillars a co-worker of mine found in our front yard. He actually found 9 of them but some of them didn’t make it.



We searched the internet and found out that one day it would be a monarch. The cycle is only about 21 days.

Here it is after it turned into a chrysalis.


As the 10 days this stage takes goes on the chrysalis turns black. Just before it opens it turns clear and you can see the wings of the butterfly. (That photo is pretty blurry.)


When it’s time for them to come out, the bottom of the chrysalis opens up and they climb out. This process takes less than 10 minutes so if you aren’t there when it starts, you’ll probably miss it.


Their wings are pretty wet when they first come out. There were actually drops of water on the counter below where he was perched.


He stayed in our warehouse for most of the day drying his wings.



At closing time when he was still there, we took him outside and placed him on the bushes.



He stayed right there until I left to go home. As I was locking the door I looked over (quite sure he would not be there in the morning) to see him one last time. He moved his wings a couple of times as if saying goodbye and he took off around the side of our building.

Weekend Work

If you've spent any time here in the past, you know I put a fair amount of photos in my posts. So I'll warn you before you go any further that the photos in this post are absolutely nasty (and embarrassing but whatever).

Apparently the house has had plumbing issues for some time but we were never made aware of them by the previous tenants. Sick and tired of taking a shower while standing in 4 inches of water that had accumulated just since turning the shower on... we decided to do something about it this past weekend.

We debated on whether to get a snake and try to unclog the pipes or just replace the almost 70 year old cast iron pipes with PVC. We chose the latter and off C went into our crawlspace which is actually quite roomy.

This is what he found.

That nastiness is a mixture of hair, rust, gunk and I don't really want to think about what else. The white pipe at the top of that photo would be someone's attempt at updating things. If only they had carried that idea all the way down. It was simply inserted into the larger cast iron pipe below it and not sealed in any sort of way. Therefore once the drain pipe was clogged everything that went in after it was overflowing into the crawlspace (hey, I warned you).

But we got that all fixed up and I got the tub nice and sparkling again (ever tried to clean a tube that doesn't drain?) and it was on to the bathroom sink.

In order to get to the pipe we had to remove some of the tile. Some genius decided to install the tile using liquid nails so we had to shatter them to get them off. A perfect excuse to remove the rest of the tile that goes halfway up the walls, all the way around the bathroom. Added to the project list... check.

We also discovered that at some point, this bathroom was painted pink... I know, almost as bad as the pipes.

What we found in the sink pipe wasn't much better.

(This is after he cut it so about 6 inches below the sink.)

We ended up having to replace that pipe almost all the way to the point where it joins the other drain pipes and goes towards the sewer.

Once we got the sink and cabinet out of there, I couldn't put it back. We had so much room without it. And the storage space isn't an issue because the linen closet is way oversized. We found a suitable pedestal replacement at Lowe's for just $44.

Maybe this weekend we'll get to the kitchen sink... which hopefully is just a broken disposal (but we aren't counting on that).

Changes...

We've made a few changes since we moved to the OLD ADDRESS.

We ripped out the bushes in the front, removed the wheelchair ramp, and pressure washed a few things. We aren't done by any stretch of the imagination but it feels better already. Check out these before and I'll say current photos since we aren't done. Next on the list... probably painting the exterior and re-painting the porches.

Whomever built the ramp didn't leave space between the boards so that what's under it could dry out. We found a puddle of mud and full of all sorts of critters.

Like huge earthworms (too bad we don't fish)...

Slugs...




Spiders and babies...










Don't have a clue what this is. C called it a hammer-head worm...









We aren't sure if we want to keep those azalea bushes on the right.



The back porch used to have a huge (it's still there, just quite a bit smaller) gardenia bush growing beside it. I assume the sap from that is what was all over the back porch. But I kept my shoes on just in case.