Senses on a Suburban Spring Evening

What I see:

1. at least a dozen kinds of trees growing both fresh and new, and strong and tall among the over two dozen trees surrounding us
2. a little dog's forest worth of ferns
3. a few plucky birds out almost past their bedtimes
4. lightning bugs
5. lots of lightning bugs
6. around an acre of freshly shorn, fresh, green grass
7. hot pink roses
8. clematis
9. vines and more vines!!!
10. flowersflowersFLOWERS!!!!
11. plants soon-to-flower and those which will not but are beautiful in their own right because of their million shades of green
12. the swooping bats which I always refer to as "my bats"
13. a freshly filled hot tub
14. a riding mower
15. the tranquility of the cemetery behind my house
16. the neighbor's child's child's play-set
17. ...and a few pink, plastic flamingos

What I smell:
see numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 above
and
a grill in some nearby yard cooling down from the busy day
warm concrete

What I hear:
see numbers 3 and 12 above
and
children playing in a yard (catching lightning bugs?)
a nearby screen door--the old-fashioned kind-- opening and closing regularly with a "whoooosh," then a "smack!"
some creatures scurrying in the brush and plants around the house
very light Sunday night traffic on "my" two busy streets

What I feel:
warm concrete beneath my dirty feet and under my ample ass
a mosquito and some gnats lighting repeatedly on my skin

What I know:
my oldest baby boy graduated from high school today
I have the whole summer ahead of me with my boys, my dogs, my friends, and--for a week--the ocean
my boys are safe and having fun with friends tonight
I'm about to eat a tub of mashed potatoes and gravy and a few biscuits with honey for a late supper

What I taste:
joy

Dumb Dog Ain't so Dumb

We've always been convinced that Zev, the younger of our two dogs, is a bit "special." As in , um, "slow."
Tonight, however he exhibited some high level thinking, not just for himself, but for a not-human-animal.
He rang the bell on the back door and when I went to let him out Hahn got very excited and wanted to go out and Zev went into the other room, so I hooked Hahn outside instead.
When I came back in, I found that Zev had taken Hahn's pig's knuckle and went to his hiding place with it and was chewing happily on both his and Hahn's pigs' knuckles, with absolutely no interest in going outside.
Damn dog grifted the the big guy...

FREE COUCH!! Please spread far & wide in Central PA--Must go SOON!

We bought a new couch to replace our somewhat dilapidated one and would like to offer this old one to friends and their friends before I put it on Freecycle. You must have your own truck and someone to help you load it. We are located in Penbrook (right outside of the City of Harrisburg).

This is, I think, a Broyhill. It was a very well made couch when we got it 12 years ago, but we are hard on furniture since we actually use it and have two sons and many pets. It was custom designed to have the big 4 for me:

1. Removable back cushions.
2. Rectangular--not t-shaped--seat cushions so they can be switched and flipped.
3. Removable cushion covers so they can be removed, washed and line dried.
4. Deep seating.

The current upholstery is the original, which is olive green canvas. Their is no skirt and it has four dark wood bun feet. I might suggest a fifth and sixth be added in the middle of the front and back if your are getting this to fix up. It might keep the frame from twisting again.

And now for the flaws.

1. The top piece of wood across the front has become detached on both ends and twisted so it is now 1" high and 4" deep instead of vice versa.
2. Along the top of this area of the frame--but under the cushion, and only on the one side of the sofa--the upholstery is split open.
3. The upholstery has been split along the seems in two places.
4. One of the seat cushion covers has a large hole on both sides.

With a knowledgeable re-upholsterer who could fix the part of the frame, it could be as good as new. With a slipcover it is perfectly serviceable for a rec room or first apartment. As is, an upscale frat house might enjoy it.

Please pass this along to anyone who might be interested. We will be getting our new sofa this Saturday, the 21st, right before the "Rapture." Whoever wants it will need a truck and a friend to help take it out of the house and load it. Our house is smoke free, but we do have both cats and dogs. Please call 717-314-1217 or email kaylynewcomer@yahoo.com ASAP.

Click the pictures for a larger view, if you see a magnifying glass icon, click again for even larger pictures. The lighter "stripes" on the first picture is the sun coming through the window. The afghan on the back is not included.

Comment Gone Post

I just finished leaving a comment on a post by The Bloggess, and I thought that it actually might make a good post in, and of, itself. So here ya go:
I'm so out about my mental illness, people get sick of hearing about it. I do periodic posts about it, and my last was, as someone else had done, in regard to the shooter in Tuscon.
I've suffered from chronic major depression and chronic anxiety disorder for as long I remember, literally. I didn't get help until after my oldest son was born in 1994. They told me I had PPD. I didn't. I was just scared to keep going the way I had been since I now had a human being depending on me.
My worst episodes of depression have happened since I've had my children. The kind of episodes that are so black and so long that I seriously consider suicide, but I never act on it because I cannot do that to my children and I know how to get help now. Even though it is motherfucking, god-damned hard to get that help sometimes. Lack of insurance or time or fucked up policies when we did have insurance all were obstacles at times.
I've been on various drug regimens for almost 17 years, now. Currently I take an SNRI, an anxiolytic and a mood stabilizer. There is some disagreement between various of my doctors whether I have bipolar II or the chronic major depression *and* chronic anxiety combo platter, but they all agreed that either way, adding a mood stabilizer would help and it has.
And you wanna talk stigma? In February of 2008 and again in February 2010 I had a round of ECT. Five treatments each time. Feel free to check the tag "ECT" on my blog for an explanation of the process and dispelling popular myths about it. [Please read from the oldest post at the bottom to the latest at the top for continuity.] It has been a lifesaver for myself and my family.
I decided to do it after a very long depression did not improve. In fact, it got much worse and cycled up more panic attacks as well. I did a lot of research, chose to do the ECT, did it and was amazed that nobody ever mentioned it to me before. I felt wonderful and everyone kept telling how normal I was, which may have been a retroactive insult; I'm not sure...
The second round came after a steady two month decline back into the hole and I decided not to let it get nearly as bad as it had been the last time. I did it again and was glad, again.
Within weeks of the second round, I started one of the worst years (situationally) of my adult life. An old friend abruptly died; my best friend lost her father to cancer; I lost my grandfather (the man who was my father figure growing up) quite unexpectedly to multiple cancers that apparently had been eating him alive for some time; I put my dog to sleep after raising him from an eight-week-old rescue mutt to a 15-year-old family member alongside my sons while I was a stay-at-home mother; I was laid off from the study for which I had been working; I had flairs galore of my autoimmune illness; I've seen my children through some tough times this year; I had some female plumbing issues which I thought would leave me sterile; and I'm sure I'm missing some other things...
But you know what? I was able to survive it and come out with hope in my eyes because I started out from a point of virtual mental health. So ECT has saved my life twice, now. So I talk about it. A lot. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes, but I think that's okay, because we need to chip away at all of the stigmas of mental illness and it's treatments.
I got this tattoo:to commemorate the ECT the first time. And when people ask me what it means, I tell them--even strangers--all about it.

Cats are fuckin' insane.

I really could just end the post with the title, couldn't I?
I've always loved cats and dogs, but since my first two cats I had who were solely my pets died, I have yet to meet a cat with that special spark with me. I love my cats, but they are both insane. NCL (pronounced nickle) is Evil Insane. Born of incest and the hardscrabble barn cat life, he's just never been "right." Gertie is a lovely cat and happy to be here, but she's as Neurotic As All Hell. If she were a person, I wouldn't even be able to be friends with her, and we all know how mentally healthy I am, right? Somehow, though, the two of them get along. They stage late night pranks trying to get the dogs into trouble by getting the dogs all riled up and then hiding so it seems the dogs are the crazy ones. They picket our bed every morning demanding their fair share of rations as if they haven't eaten in years, chanting little cat versions of militant slogans. If the had thumbs, I'm sure they would have signs, or perhaps even chain themselves to the bedroom door.
Yesterday saw the last of their food, but I didn't know until it was too late to go buy some and it is still too early to go to the store where I buy it, so right now they are rioting upstairs. I'm not kidding. I hear myriad pounding footsteps as if they were an army of toddlers. I hear things falling, sliding, scattering, strange yowling, meowing, shrieking, litter scattering. And yet when I went up I found nothing amiss and both cats sitting at the top of the steps looking at me as if to say, "What? We're just sitting here. Totally not staging a peasant uprising. My what a pretty neck you have..."
Ten o'clock will not come soon enough for any of us.

My favorite part of Blogger is the stats page.

I don't know how long the stats tab has existed on Blogger, but I only came across in the beginning of September when I started trying to be an active blogger again. I learn so much from this tab that I like to check it even on days I haven't actually blogged.

I do use Feedjit on my homepage, but that shows me my own views and I have to click a few times if I want to see where from where people are arriving. The stats page puts that all within on or two clicks and doesn't track my own pageviews.

So my favorite things I have learned over the past month:

1. If my post title sounds confessional or dirty pageviews zooooom!
2. Despite how hipster everyone always seems to want to sound when discussing their computer usage, check out the following: 48% of my audience uses Internet Explorer. The other 52% is split between a dozen other browsers. (Congrats to that one person who is the sole Java web browser member of my audience. Who knew there was a Java web browser? I had to Google it to be sure it was a real thing.)
3. Again, the hipster quotient is blown to bits: 73% of you use Windows operating systems. The rest? Macintosh (12%), iPhone (6%), Other Unix (5%), BlackBerry (1%)
4. Much of my audience arrives here from NetworkedBlogs on Facebook, so I'm glad I installed that. Thanks FB friends for reading.

A few things I learned from Feedjit, but I love so much that I have to share:

1. A lot of my traffic also arrives from Zen Comix whose author has included me on his blogroll, so thanks to him! Check out Dave Dugan's funny and timely political cartoons and political musings.
2. On Google, I am the third listing when you search for "hey hey you get into my car" which is a lyric from a Billy Ocean song from the '80s. To be honest, I don't even remember why I titled this post "Hey! (Hey!) You (You!): Get into my car!" but I did, so there you go.
3. For a very long while, if you Googled "24 hour pH study" on Google images, my HAAAAAWT picture from "Adventures in Tubeland" was the number one image. The Google started their "instant result" bullshit and this picture disappeared entirely from the results. Like, that day. What's up with that, yo? (By the way, even if you Google 24 hour ph study hawt the picture does not exist, but a lot of non-hawt pictures do. Weeeeeiiiirrrrrrd...)

And something I learned a long time ago, but alwaysalways forget until it's too late. (This has nothing to do with Google, Blogger or Feedjit. Or anything else in this post. But it is bothering RIGHT NOW, so I will share it anyway.) When you give you dog's horse hooves to chew on, your house will smell slightly like horse piss and horse manure until they finish them. Apparently that whole sterilizing thing they do to the the hooves can't even remove that stank.

PS Blogger's spellcheck thinks "hawt" is not a word, but "ha wt" is a totally acceptable substitute. Also? Tubeland does not exist, but "Tableland" does. Huh, go figure. I wonder how you get there...

PPS Blogger's spellcheck has also never heard of Facebook, blogroll, or BlackBerry. Get with it, Blogger's spellcheck!!

Giving new meaning to "Bow-chicka-wow-wow"

All of my dogs and cats have been neutered or spayed on the very day they turn five months old because my vet won't do it before five months. (Or when they are older animals: before they enter my house.) Because of this, none of my animals have ever had problems with marking or humping. One of my hounds--a girl named Zelda--occasionally mounted my old yaller dog Zeke, but that was totally a dominance thing; she thought she could steal "alpha dog" from him, alas, to no avail.
Then there was Zev, my "special dog." (See previous post.)
He will, once in a great while, try to hump his older brother, Hahn. I do not think it is a dominance thing. He seems to genuinely enjoy it, but we actively discourage it and it has been quite some time since the last "incident."
Until yesterday.
I took both dogs to be groomed. It was Zev's first grooming. When we came home, until bedtime last night, he repeatedly mounted Hahn every time he thought we weren't paying attention.
Poor Hahn.
I have two working theories:

1. He felt so sexy from having been prettied up that he just had to work it.
2. He thought Hahn looked pretty damn fine after a day at the spa.

Either way, he seems to be "hump-free" today. Thank god.

Dumb as a, well, rock

My youngest dog, Zev, will be a year old in December. So I guess I can pretend he acts the way he does because he's still a puppy. But, honestly, I have a feeling I will have some excuse for him for all of the upcoming phases of life.
I had finally started keeping houseplants alive a few years back, so now there are plants everywhere. They might not "thrive" to the point of lushness, but they are alive and they do grow, so that is a big deal for me. I have put decorative gravel or river stones on top of the soil for all of the plants to keep the cats from digging in the dirt. Now, however, Zev has discovered an enjoyment for the pea gravel in a few of the floor plants. The gravel is round and smooth and the perfect size for his tiny mouth. He will take a stone and carry it around and play with it with his mouth for a while and then get bored. We have found ourselves repeatedly stepping on these stones all over the downstairs now and putting them back in the planter. I have a feeling there is a stash under or behind furniture, but I haven't discovered it yet. But I also have a sick feeling that he occasionally eats or swallows them. I've never seen him do it, but he is not that bright, so I worry about it. He seemed a bit constipated today, so now I am hyper-paranoid that there are rocks in his bowel. We had a hound a while back who had an intestinal blockage and that surgery was hell, both financially and emotionally.
I've been trying to train him to keep away from the planters, but he is a sneaky little bugger and I think he might even enjoy the "hunt" so to speak. Well, at least when I say he's "special" I can truly, truly mean it.