Picture of New Pup

I told y'all the other day about our newest dog. We've named him Kane and this is a picture of him. Getting one wasn't easy. He is never still. (Smile) By the time I would get ready to snap the picture, and actually have him looking my way, or being still, he was off and gone again. My husband finally got him part-way into his lap and I snapped this one quick. I think it was the best of the ones I got.

I'm not sure how old he is, but he's still a puppy and as you can tell by the size of that front paw, he's going to be a BIG dog one day. Right now he jumps on everyone and bites and chews everything, but he is a baby. (Smile)

Waiting and Waiting...

It has been almost eight weeks since I mailed off my completed non-fiction manuscript, along with what I hope was a detailed and well-done proposal. The agent's site says to allow six to eight weeks, along with mailing time, to get a response.

I hope that means I will be hearing something one way or another soon. I've never been really good at waiting. (Smile)

Good news or bad news, I'll be posting the news here the day I get it.

A New Dog

When I lost my dog Red a few months ago, I swore I wasn't going to get another dog. After all, we have seven--SEVEN--so we didn't need eight. I've seen strays, had people try to give me dogs, and even saw one stray that looked like Red that really pulled my heart strings. Through it all, I stood strong. No more dogs!

Until a couple of days ago. (Smile)

My husband and I had gone to Wal-Mart to get some things, including dog chews and dog food. We had two bags of dog food so one was in the buggy and the other was under it. A stray dog, a puppy really, came up to us just outside the store and began to follow us. I fastened my eyes straight ahead and refused to even look at the puppy.

Before we reached the truck he had got ahead of the buggy and was smelling the bag of dog food under it. A few more steps and he was biting at the corner of the bag, trying to tear it open to get at the food. We kept going.

When we reached the truck he stopped too, then went to work whole-heartenedly on the paper bag of kibble. I had those chews in the buggy, so I tore the bag open and tossed the poor pup one. He grabbed it up happily while my husband--who could no doubt see the danger of where this could go--rushed to get our stuff into the truck.

The puppy only gave the chew a few seconds before he decided correctly that it was a hide chew and not real food. With determination he turned his attention back to the bag of dog food under the buggy.

With my heart breaking, I told my husband to open the bad and pour the puppy some food out. Of course then I was afraid someone might hit him with a car if he were standing there in the parking lot eating and maybe not moving because he didn’t want to leave the food, so we decided against pouring out some food for the pup.

My husband tried to put that last bag of food into the truck and the puppy tried to follow it into the truck. I just couldn't stand it.

To make a long story short. We left with our stuff and one puppy in the truck. He's keeping Clover, Red's friend, company in the big back and side yard. He's eating a lot, loves to play, and I think is going to be a huge dog in a very short time. Clover is so happy to have a playmate again, since the other dogs are all inside dogs and he only spends time with them when they go out or I let him in for a little while. The new pup's name is Kane. He looks like he has a number of breeds in him, including maybe some pit bull and boxer. I'm not so happy about having a puppy again. They chew on everything. (Smile) And yet he already feels like part of the family.

The Limbs are Down

I know it looks like a whole tree, but that's the limb that was holding on by a splinter to the big oak you see a glimpse of standing beside it. In this picture the smaller limb is still up. You can see it leaning against the backside of the oak. Hubby decided if we waited for the city to come take care of it, the thing would either end up on one of our pets, one of us, the truck, the house, or something else that wouldn't be good, depending on which way it headed when it came down.

I'll admit I wasn't happy about him trying to get it down. A man he worked with was killed after Katrina, trying to get down a leaning tree. That limb my husband got down this evening was about as big as a tree. I sat inside, my stomach in knots, through the hour or more it took him and our son to get that biggest one on the ground. Even inside the house with the doors shut and the AC on, I heard the thud when it finally gave way and landed in the drive with a crash. The sad thing is, there are other huge badly damaged limbs up in that tree. I know it's only a matter of time before they too snap and come down.

My husband and son are still out there in the dark, as I write this, trying to cut the limbs up and get them out of the way so they can put the fence back up. Both have to leave for work before daylight in the morning.

But what are you going to do with men?

Excuse the Fit, but I'm Throwing One!

This was taken in my back yard. Not in August of 2005 after Katrina, but today, August 6, 2006.

Under that huge broken oak limb that’s hanging by a splitter from the trunk of that even bigger oak tree, is my husband's gas grill, charcoal grill, a patio chair, and a number of my plants and flower pots. The biggest part of the limb is still stuck against the trunk, but when it comes down, and it will, it's crashing through my chain link fence. (It would probably get the truck too, buy my husband parked it across the street and is leaving it there until the limb is gone.)

If I hadn't been so angry, I think I would have just sat right down in the middle of the new mess and cried. I tried to get that tree with its spilt limbs taken down. Or even just the limbs taken out. It’s a big, big oak tree, and I never wanted to see it go, but Katrina just got the best of it. The limbs, like the two that came down today, have spilt-off hunks missing from them.

After I signed papers, FEMA came out and looked, took down two small pieces of limbs, had their tree expert agree the tree needed to come down, and then they refused to do it. Said it was really on city property and a city (Bogalusa, Louisiana) problem. I told the FEMA tree expert that those splintered limbs couldn't hold their weight up there, and they were going to come down on my property no matter who the tree belonged to. He said they would come down, some year. (He said that only weeks ago.) They were supposed to be taking down any trees or limbs that were leaning or a danger to homes.

Well, that the tree is on city property, I know that, and it is all fine and good I guess, but the corner of my house, my truck, my yard, my fence, and other things like my plants, don’t belong to the city of Bogalusa, and those things, my family’s things, are what’s going to get crushed when those big limbs come down. Like today. (It would cost hundreds for me to pay someone to come take it down for me. It's a city tree and they should pay to have it removed if FEMA says it's their problem.)

The city of course isn't going to touch the tree--I'll bet you. The tree on the other side of my driveway is a hollow oak and has a big dead limb that sticks out over the driveway, over my car. (My new car that I had to buy because I couldn’t leave my other car parked in my own driveway because I thought during Katrina that hollow tree would come down on it. I had to move it to protect it. Well, the tree actually stood, but the lower land spot beside my house where I moved the car to, flooded so badly that my car was totaled.)

That tree has been sick and hollow for many years. The city of Bogalusa marked it after I complained, and said they would take it down. That was some where around fifteen years ago. My mother's been gone for eleven, and it was years before she died. They've marked it a couple of other times over the years, after I've fussed again, and all that's happened is the paint mark has worn off with time. That tree and the one that lost the limb today, were both marked to be cut after Katrina. But that didn't happen then either. Seems FEMA was ticked at the city for having to take down trees on city property that the city should have handled, and I guess the city was ticked at FEMA for leaving a lot of those trees for the city to take care of later.

And guess who is paying the price for their battle?

Sorry for the little fit, but sometimes you just gotta scream or you'll just blow up.