HoundBlog

Well, our Thanksgiving weekend had mixed blessings.

Butterfly was Best of Winners on Friday for a 4 point major (the second major of the required 2 to complete her championship) and now only needs 4 singles to finish. Teddy was Best of Winners on both Friday and Sunday (he wasn’t entered on Saturday) for his first two points. Saber who was entered Saturday was Reserve Winners Dog as he skipped around the ring instead of gaiting properly. He made everyone including the judge laugh as he was just too cute for words, but we will have to work on him over the next couple of weeks to get him out of doing skips 🙂

The down side was Lance, my Champion Chinese Crested came up Saturday morning screaming in pain and unable to walk. Took him to the vet’s in Montgomery where they diagnosed a degenerated disc. They gave him a shot of steriod which relieved the pain and inflammation and he was much improved Sunday morning when we went to pick him up. I took him in to our regular vet Monday who disagreed with the diagnosis as his symptoms were one-sided which isn’t usually the case with disc degeneration, but more in line with a brain injury or stroke. He’s still on steriods to keep the inflammation down but will be weaned gradually over the next 10 days. He is almost 100% back to normal as of yesterday afternoon.

I did get a turkey breast, dressing, brussels sprouts, rolls and sweet potatoes cooked for dinner on Saturday, so while we didn’t get turkey on turkey day, we did get some that weekend.

I took a vacation day yesterday to clean house – it was a mess when we returned and smelled awful. My carpet cleaner decided to quit working properly, so it has to go into the repair shop today. Thankfully, I did get one room done before it died, but still need to do the living room.

The two baby cockatiels are almost completely feathered out and look so pretty! I’m going to have to rearrange my birds, though, as 5 is too many for that cage and I will have to move some to another cage and there isn’t enough room in there for another cage. Ken suggested we move them into the dining room but I worry about the dogs aggravating them when we’re not there, so we’ll have to figure out something that will give a buffer zone if we move them out there.

Got a nice post card from Eddie — I also got the gift he sent. It’s a small silk rug or mat that is just gorgeous! Thank you son! It’s in the camper right now as that’s the safest place for it until I can get a hanger for it. I think I’m going to hang it in our bedroom since I really don’t have much of a “theme” in there as far as colors go. It looks pretty good in the camper, though, so it may stay in there. We’ll have to see.

Well, that’s got you all caught up on my life 😛

Love to all,

Margaret

Woo Hoo!! Four day weekend on the horizon!! I know Ken is glad! He does not have to work Saturday (Woo HOO!!!), so we are ready for a long, relaxing weekend.

Guess I will spend a lot of it cooking since he wants turkey with trimmings 🙂 I guess that’s Ok as he’s earned it. I’m going to slip out of work early so I can hit the grocery store before going home to get the stuff for the weekend and also get some straightening done at the house.

Charlotte is picking up the package Eddie sent from Bahrain for me. I’m excited to see what that is…. will post a photo of it.

This will be short as I have to get some work done before I leave.

Love to all,

Margaret

Mom complained last night that I hadn’t answered her question about the dogs and others have said that Colin and I are leaving you hanging since we’ve both not posted for a few days. Sorry everyone!

The show was a lot of fun. Charlotte is always fun to travel with and everything is greeted with humor, so despite not winning much at all, it was a nice weekend.

The hotel I picked out of the premium list to stay in was mid-priced, so I was hoping that it would be clean and comfortable. When we arrived, the inspection certificate stated they had been inspected in March 2006 and had a 97.5% rating.

They must have been warned that the inspector was coming and made an all-out effort to clean, because our room was nowhere near 97.5% clean. The bedspreads were torn and had cigarette burns in them. The room itself had a smell of cigarette smoke so strong as to knock you down when you first opened the door. This was supposed to be a non-smoking room, so I would really have hated to have been in a smoking room! You really wondered about the bathroom although it looked clean enough on the surface. When the dogs started scratching, though, we got concerned. This hotel got a flea bag rating from us. 😯

On the plus side, though, it was directly across the street from a Golden Corral restauraunt. If you’ve never been to a Golden Corral, you are missing a treat. This is a buffet style restauraunt (all you can eat) that has some wonderful food! I found out I’m old enough for the senior discount, so got a $1 off my meal 🙂 They have steaks, chicken fixed about 8 different ways, hamburgers, meatloaf, ham, and I know I’m leaving off a lot here. Vegetables are varied and cooked well. Salad bar has a lot of goodies on it to choose from. Regular salad greens, Ceasar salad fixings, potato salad, pasta salad, 3 bean salad along with a myriad of toppings. Then there is the dessert bar. I always get carrot cake — this is a spice cake with raisins, walnuts and grated carrots mixed in the batter with cream cheese icing that has more nuts on top. It is wonderful! They also have a double chocolate cake, fruit pies (they vary), turnovers, brownies and fudge, ice cream and dozens of toppings for that. All of these are cooked right there and you can watch them make everything.

They also serve breakfast in the morning — just as much stuff to choose from and if you’re not in the mood for breakfast food, there is some “regular” food as well, although not quite as much as in the evening or lunch. Dinner is $10 per person (adults) and breakfast is $8 per person (adults) which I don’t think is too bad. They have good sized rooms that you can book for parties or meetings.

Ok — now I’ve made myself hungry 😛

I did have the pups eyes tested at the health clinic put on by one of the clubs and Charlotte had her pups eyes and hearing tested. Everyone came out with flying colors. I’ll get hearing done this coming weekend in Montgomery as the price was much more reasonable than it was in Monroe.

Need to run.

Love to all,

Margaret

Hello everyone!

Today we have visitors from India.

The company we use to input some of our data entry is here to go over some new processes we want to put in place and to meet some of the new staff that have come on since they were last here. Since Wes is out of town, I’ve been appointed hostess. I’ve just left them with their first group and will have to run back up in about 30 minutes to get them to their next appointment which is lunch with the CEO.

They’re supposed to meet with Carlos and I to go over IT issues, but I really don’t have anything for them (other than the same old stuff of poor spelling and inaccurately typing the text messages).

Yesterday I took home the 5 dogs I was fostering for my friend, Kathy, who had a stroke about a month ago. She looked bad, but not like she had had a stroke, more like she’d been seriously ill (which she had!). The dogs seemed to be happy to be home and I’m happy for them to be out of my house. It was quite a strain on me to take care of 5 extra high-maintenance dogs. It was a strain on my other dogs, too as the house dogs have let me know by breaking their housebreaking. I hope things go back to normal here real soon.

Leaving in the morning for NC and a dog show. I am looking forward to having a couple of days away from the routine. I think it will be fun. Ken’s staying home and Charlotte is going with me. We’re spending the night in a hotel and having dinner with friends. We’re hoping the breeder of the Cresteds we’re showing will come, but I doubt she will. She’s been invited other times and has never shown up.

I will be glad when January rolls around and the White House foreign policy gets a make-over. I am really tired of sword-rattling George W blustering about. Let the Saudis and the Koreans have their nukes. While I don’t hold a lot of hope that rational thought will prevent them from using them on anyone, digging our heels in to prevent them from developing them is just making them more adamant that they will develop them despite the pressure from all and sundry not to. This is setting the stage for more conflicts and war and we can’t afford to be fighting any more wars. We already have too few troops, equipment and supplies to maintain the two wars we’re currently fighting. Let’s work instead on negotiating a peace with these countries that will allow them to decide on their own that they don’t need nukes in order to play with the big kids.

Well, that’s my .02 on the matter and if I put another $2.03 with it, I can buy a gallon of gas 🙂

Got to run…need to gather up my lambs and herd them to their next pasture.

Love to all,

Margaret

Ken fussed at me last night for neglecting my blog. I didn’t even know he read it that often 😛

This month and next month are birthday months for us. November has Mom, Pam and Bebe celebrating (23, 29, 30th respectively) December has Eddie, Frances, my friend Janet and Randy (2, 4, 17, 22nd respectively). I’m probably off on some of those dates by a day or two, so if you know better, don’t hesitate to correct me 🙂 (Thanks Judy!)

News from the Middle East is still depressing. They are still killing each other with seeming abandon. What are they going to do when all the people are dead and they only have leaders to kill? While I’ve thought all along that it was a major mistake for the US to get involved in those squabbles, we messed up and did anyway. Now we have to decide if we throw in the towel and retreat with tails tucked or suck it up and go do the job right. It’s only pride that even has us considering the second option. We are not omnicient when it comes to how the world should be run and I’m a live-and-let-live sort of person. I really don’t want any more blood shed over who is right or wrong in this conflict. It’s gone beyond a possible terrorism threat to the US. Now they’re just terrorizing each other and any foreigner that gets in the way is just a by-product. We really have no choice but to let Iran and Syria straighten out the mess and it’s really in their best interests to do so.

As for Israel and Palestine – well, I used to think Israel held the high ground with respect to trying to live the Golden Rule, but they have lost sight of that and have lowered themselves to the Palestinian level of an eye for an eye. People — is this really solving ANYTHING???? No!! It’s not!! It’s just resulting in MORE PEOPLE DYING — people who are not soldiers, not politicians  — just ordinary people trying to go about their daily lives. STOP IT! STOP BOMBING YOUR NEIGHBORS. 🙁

Well, I feel my blood pressure rising. Need to find another subject to talk about 😛

Ken had a phone call from the Richard Petty Experience last night. They told him he won tickets to his choice of Orlando or Las Vegas to drive a race car on the track. The kicker was, we had to pay $248 for it (still not bad considering the RPE is around $500 per person and this was for two tickets so was a $1000 value for just the drive alone). They wanted a credit card number over the phone right then. Ken said no, he never gives out his cc number over the phone (GOOD FOR YOU!!!). Of course they said too bad and we said too bad.

I bought a new camera the other day. It’s a Kodak Z740 which has 10x optical zoom and 5x digital zoom. My old Kodak only had 3x Optical and 2x digital which didn’t give me much zooming power and I want to get better photos of the birds that come to the feeders, etc. I hope to have before this weekend so I can practice with it before taking it with me to the dog show.

Well, guess I should actually do some work today….

Love to all (but most to my hubby who keeps me on the straight and narrow),

Margaret

Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day when we honor our veterans of previous wars. I understand that the oldest living veteran from WWII is now 110 years old. He was in the ambulance corps. I’ll be flying my Navy flag tomorrow. Thank you — all you veterans and those who supported them at home while they were away fighting for our freedoms.

We have nothing planned for the weekend this weekend. Guess it will be another house-cleaning stay-at-home weekend for me. I still have to plant the chrysanthemums Charlotte gave me 3 weeks ago and she’s asked me to come down to her house and install a new printer she bought the other day. I have dogs to groom. The 5 foster dogs are going home week after next, so I want to send them clean and tidy.

Then we have two weekends in a row of dog shows. Charlotte and I are going to Monroe, NC for a show on the 18th & 19th, then the following weekend is the Thanksgiving Day weekend in Montgomery, AL. Ken will go with me to that and have 4 days off — the first he’s taken in a LONG time! He needs some rest! That will also be our “maiden” trip in the new camper. I think we’re both excited about that.

That’s all for now…

Love to all,

Margaret

Well, elections are over — hope your choices won — mine didn’t.

I hear there is more fighting in Iraq and Gaza — how disgusting! Aren’t there enough troubles in the world without people killing one another? There are plenty of other things to worry about killing us. Disease, natural disasters, global warming, starvation — just to name a few. If they would spend their passions on finding cures for disease, feeding the poor and housing the destitute, they would not have time or money to fight each other.

Guess that’s just my hippie roots coming out 😛

I have the Bride of Frankenstein with me at work today. She’s got to go to the vet to have her drains removed and there isn’t time to go home and get her there before they close for regular hours.

Have you seen one of those old time movies where there is this buzz-pop-flash of light in the dungeon laboratory? I thought Ken was watching one of those on TV last night, but it was my microwave. Things just don’t last like they used to. We’ve only had that microwave for 8 or 9 years.

Got to run….

Love to all,

Margaret

***** UPDATE *****

Eddie sent me some new photos from Bahrain. I’ve uploaded them into his album, so go check them out.

***** Back to regular programming *****

Well, I’m sorry to say, daily notes are actually not-so-daily notes 🙂 It’s been a bit crazy around here the last few days so I hope you’ll forgive me for not posting lately.

Sunday, I had two girls get into a fight. It was a pretty bad one. They were really whaling on each other in the back yard with the other girls circling like Indians around the wagon train and getting nips in on the combatants, then dancing back out of reach. This, of course only served to further enrage the two fighters. I tried the water hose first but all that deterred was the cirlcers and then only as long as it was trained on them.

Nothing to do but wade in with my most vicious “I’m the top b**** around here” voice. Again, that only affected the non-combatants as the other two were too filled with the frenzy of the fight by then. Since I really didn’t want to get bitten myself, I grabbed each by the tail and lifted them off the ground.

Now, I’m no weight lifter and the lightest of these two weighs 37 lbs, so I had nearly 80 lbs of dog hanging in the air by tails! I’m REALLY glad they were not 180lb Mastiffs! I was still having to fend off the Indians, too so picture me standing in the back yard with a dog in each hand by the tail — all 4 feet off the ground, hopping from one foot to the other as I pushed other, excited dogs away, screaming my head off (and I won’t give you any of the things I was screaming as it would get this post marked as “not suitable for young minds”).

I dropped the least wounded of the two and got the second one up on my shoulders, then proceeded up the back deck steps into the house. Let me tell you, those steps never seemed so steep before. There are only 5 of them, but by the 4th, my vision was starting to get hazy around the edges. I made it inside, shoved Delilah in a crate, grabbbed Nell (the other combatant) and shoved her in a crate, then collapsed into a chair. 20 minutes later, after I had caught my breath and quit shaking quite so hard, I dragged Delilah out to assess the damage.

No one was spurting blood, so I cleaned them up, clipped around the wounds, flushed them and packed them with neosporin. I ended up taking Delilah to the emergency vet to have her tended to as she had a really deep gash in her throat and an ugly wound on her head close to her eye. He put in two drains which will come out Thursday and stapled the other wounds.

I did have a laugh though. Once I got the two girls in and crated, I realized that all the dogs invovled were females. When I started looking for the boys, I saw them peeking out from under Ken’s desk to make sure the coast was clear.

My countertop now looks like a pharmacy with all the medication I’m doling out to the dogs, myself and Ken.

Got to run….work calls

Love to all,

Margaret

If you look over on the right, you’ll see where I’m trying to add some content over there, but it’s not working properly, so just ignore it for now. I’ve asked the support people for help, just haven’t heard back yet.

Another beautiful day today! Too bad I’m in here where there are no windows. Went out earlier and it was a bit windy, but otherwise very nice. I’m looking forward to being home tomorrow to enjoy the crisp fall weather.

Have to take Bruno to the vet tomorrow. His itchies have broken out again. I hope the vet can do something as he is so uncomfortable, poor guy.

Birds hatched out a new baby yesterday. We’ll see how this one grows up. She has 5 more eggs that she’s sitting on. The home I had for Junior fell through — anyone want a pretty, sweet little cockatiel? He’s real tame and a baby doll — totally spoiled by me and his daddy (real bird daddy, that is).  I will post his picture tonight.

Got to run — work calls.

Love to all,

Margaret

Did not get to blog yesterday as my office was moved from one room to another and my computer was down. Bummer!

Took forever to affect the move as there were 3 people moving from one spot to the other. Our current comptroller moved into the office that is just off my (now old) one, the new VP of Finance moved into my old office and I moved up to the office that the Comptroller was using.  Carlos asked me for the best way to make everything happen and I told him, but it didn’t go like I had planned it out.  Wayne stuck his nose into it and so I ended up kicking my heels with nothing to do while they put Jean’s desk and stuff together. She was the only one who could stay where she was at until it was all done since she was not moving, but getting new furniture and everything in her new space. Verle was leaving early anyway, so his work was minimally effected.

Then I came in at 6:30 this morning to try to catch up on what I wasn’t able to get done yesterday to find that, while my desk was put together, my computer was still scattered to the 4 winds, so instead of catching up on work, I put my computer together and get it fired up. My UPS has decided it doesn’t like the new place and keeps tripping, so I hope we don’t have a power failure :\ My speakers don’t want to work,either, so it’s pretty quiet in here with no ding-dong to announce the arriving mail or any of the other little sounds the computer makes when I do something it thinks it needs to remark on.

I meant to bring a radio this morning.

There’s also a bunch of junk piled along one wall. While it isn’t in my way, it’s an eyesore and I would like for it to go away. Carlos said it was HR stuff, but it seems to be a mixture of junk from offices people have moved out of and empty boxes. There’s one filing cabinet full of fleet stuff from 1999-2004 which could go upstairs into storage. There are two broken and wobbly stenographer’s chairs that could go in the trash as far as I can see.

My screen is on the right side where I’ve been used to it  being on the left, so I’m having to get used to looking in a different direction. It seems to be making it a little bit awkward to type for some reason I can’t quite grasp. I don’t know why the way your head is turned would make any difference in how you type, but I’m making a bunch of typing errors and that’s not usual for me.

Well, enough griping on my part. Wish I could be home enjoying this beautiful fall weather! I did get out at lunch today some and did NOT want to go back in the building. But I have and now I need to do something productive.

Love to all,

Margaret