Merry Christmas (from July)

This is probably the only GOOD family photo I have because I'm usually taking the pictures. If my kids ever get amnesia, they are going to think I abandoned them; I was never around... it was ALL Daddy. This one my sister, Paris, took in July...hence the tans. Now there will be family photos from Christmas morning, but I'm not about to publish publicly my beautiful 'morning face' and how happy I look before my first cup of coffee. Especially Christmas, because I will be up late on the Eve helping the kids get to sleep (benadryl), wrapping presents (horribly), putting together those God-awful Hot Wheels' toys(cussing), prepping for the next day's feast(more than a greenbean casserole) and double checking MY list (wine, sleep, sparkly things).Happy Holidays to all we know and love!!!

Photos

Do you love eachother?

Canon says, "I love my sister"

Skye says, "Hmmm, let me think..."

I wish it was just a photo of the Kids and Santa, but Skye wasn't liking the dude in the Red Suit.

For the 10th time, "Get down Skye!!"

Wow, I realized more than a month has gone by and I hadn't updated the blog. We all get caught up in a time-warp sometimes and then when you are faced with the unbelievable fact (is that an oxymoron?) of looking at a time-stamp and seeing how many hours, days and it's now a month that has gone by and you didn't feel the time slipping by?

So since my last post: I've had a 357 Magnum gun stolen from our store to do God only knows, but let's hope in the the river now; the cats have been switched from canned catfood to home-made catfood because Katina was slowly starving herself to death and I'm not going back to dry; we've spent a week/Thanksgiving in Texas, and the leaves have fallen off most of the trees while we were gone.

The Gun: we had really nice renovations at the store with completely new carpet, tile and paint. A Before and After fit for HGTV. We had Americans, Latinos, Iranians and one Afro-American working on the project. Guess who the cops are looking into and for taking the gun? He is also the guy who wouldn't provide a social security number to the police. Hint: The guys with green-cards provided their SS#. The gun was reported in detail to the police and let me say that the officer was surprised after all these years I had the receipt. He said "many, if not most guns, that are reported are listed as simply "a gun". My response was more women should own guns because they keep the receipts for their shoes and their guns. He admitted he doesn't keep his receipts, and his wife likes shoes.

Raw Catfood: Katina made me work to get her to eat any substantial amount of canned catfood. Her fur was looking good, but she was getting TOO thin. No muscle tone. Beruse would chew through the can if he could and wishes he had thumbs so he can use the can opener. So after a visit to the vet (who tried to push on me a sample bag of Poisonous DRY kitten food to see if she's not feeling well because she not eating [misses dry food having ate it for more than 12 years] or is she not eating because she doesn't feel well test)...he tried really hard to get me to be a dry feeder again. Thanks to a new-found friend in Charlottesville, Steph Givler, she gave me a sample of her home-made raw cat food and Keeta devoured it. I'm really glad Keeta pushed me into grinding my own catfood at home. It is really easy, but don't go just feeding your cat raw meat. The raw has to be supplemented with vitamins (especially taurine). http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm Let me say, it was costing about $1.50 a day on canned, now with homemade it's .92 cents and I didn't even buy the chicken on sale. I know what my cat's are eating now and it ain't no melanine wheat gluten acid from China.

Texas for Thanksgiving. I don't think I ever missed a Thanksgiving in VA, but that was when the family had my grandparents, my Mom, and my Uncle Nels. They were the real glue to my family: the ones that were unequivocally true-hearted and knew what FAMILY meant. So off to Texas we went to have a Turkey cooking contest against Sam's brother Mazen. Better luck next year, Mazen. My sister, Paris and her Jug-O-Wine, and her family came for Thanksgiving from San Antonio and we had a Great Time as they stayed with us in Houston for several days!!!

We toured the Moody Gardens http://www.moodygardens.org/ with their Louve-esque pyramids and took breaks, down the street, at Mazen's Restaurant on the Strand for choice selections of beer for the adults and great Middle Eastern food. Mazen has a big a$$ boat called the 'Amazen'. It's sleek and in the 30+ foot range. We look forward to February's Mardi Gra; if it's warm enough then, to taking the boat out for a cruise. The weather was strangely cold during our visit. It was much warmer in Richmond. Damn.

Upon returning to Virginia, I realized that in a week's time, the beautifully colored leaves on the trees had shrivelled up and fallen. Time had visually passed in a way I had never seen before. It made me think about how things used to be, how people and relationships have changed in my life, in more ways than one.

Monkey Do

I am in the mist of the

"Climbing" crazies of toddlerhood. I can understand our Neanderthal evolutionary need to stand up-right and thus the drive of babies to get up off their inefficiently grimy hands and scuffed knees means of locomotion. But where does that deep-seated desire for climbing come into play? If we evolved from ape-like creatures...we evolved and came DOWN out of the trees. But our little loved ones sure do give us a picture of our simian great, great, great times a 100,000 plus years of relatives. For instance: Skye loves loves bananas and has that short legged long upper body orangutanian like gait; she speaks many words, but much is still inaudible jibber-jabber and I swear sometimes I hear those oooh-ooh ahh-ahhs. No.... we aren't throwing shit here at home, but there is alot of animated "pee-pee and poo-poo"conversations (and given the chance, who knows, I might get smacked in the eye with a handful of shit yet one day).

Maybe the climbing aspect came from when it was safer for us to sleep in the trees (the enduring allure of bunk beds and lofts) away from the saber-toothed tigers that wanted to eat us that have since evolved into our pampered housemates. It makes sense that since our domesticated felines still retain many of their ancestral traits; I must assume we hold onto, particularly as children, our monkey-like antics. So as I did before with Canon at this stage, I am the freakishly indulgent parent that allows this dangerous behavior (supervised, if possible because I have to admit I sometimes catch the behavior in the mid or highest point of the climb) Do I rescue her from the height? Normally not. She needs to learn how to climb back down to earth in case she finds herself without assistance one day. Yes, there will come a day when climbing onto the grill, up the 2-story ladder in the garage, or onto the step stool she put on top of the coffee table will seem to her inappropriate and possibly mundane. Or maybe not. Skye might be, as is Canon, an adventurer at heart. One day looking down at earth from the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest while looking eye to eye with a monkey on the next branch. Then, my hope will be (as I've taught them) that she and Canon can get down before the monkey throws the shit.

Missing...Baby Doll

Have you seen this Baby Doll? She's been missing now for a couple weeks........last seen leaving with a 5 year old boy running with her in the vicinity of the backyard, possibly our garage area, but most likely toward our trash cans.

Beautiful warm Fall weather gave me two nice photo opportunities.

Aww, isn't it nice to see the wild beasts getting along? All four of them.

Much nicer to see than THIS!

Beruse Is Off The Juice

"Unbeknownst to me I was making him ill with all my love" by feeding my Beruse dry cat food; a diet more appropriate for a cow than a cat who is a true carnivore. For 14 years, I knew no better. I've found that sometimes life hands you something that initially appears to be an unfortunate event; so that when you can see the bigger picture, you'll find that it was a disguised blessing. When I wrote about Beruse's diabetes a few weeks ago, I never imagined that after only 12 days of diligently following a strict insulin protocol and forever ditching dry cat food that I could say so soon: Beruse is off the Juice. Today is his 16th day of NO INSULIN and counting.

My sweet, affectionate, most tolerant friend never complained through more than a 100 blood tests and I don't want to mention the number of "bloodless" pokes he endured due my incompetency and not wanting to poke a hole clear through his ear (I've done that). His health and my other cat, Katina, are forever changed by this experience: they are healthy young cats again at 14 years old. Their coats look and feel great, they have started grooming themselves again, no more dandruff. They are energetic and social and you won't believe the lack of $hit and Stink in the litter box. Their bodies use what they eat now, so their crap/piss has cut down 75%!! A disgusting, yet nice benefit of wet food.

Since his Diabetes began, I have obviously become more educated about the total inappropriateness of dry cat food. If you are like me, I thought dry had lots of protein and it helps to clean their teeth: Big lie/myth number one and two. Dry is mostly composed of carbohydrates because of the process to make it a dry kibble. Depending on the brand from 20-50%. There is no such thing as a low carb dry. Impossible to create. Cat's lack certain amino acids and enzymes needed to digest the huge amounts of carbs: their diet should have LESS than 10% carbs. Think mouse in a can, as a friend described ideal food. Lie/myth #2 that dry cleans their teeth. Cats mostly eat their food whole. Any crunching is simply cleaning the points of their teeth, not the sides. Next time Fluffy barfs notice the food is almost entirely intact kibble. Those Prescription Dry Diets (includes some canned too) at the vets are not exempt...they are expensive bags/cans of utter carbohydrate money-making crap. Feeding your cat dry is like smoking. It's not good for you at all, yet some people will get severe smoke related illness and some won't. It doesn't change the fact that it's bad...you just never know to whom or when it going to happen.

I took Beruse Monday to his vet to show him off as a poster-child for Tight Regulation of Diabetes and the effects of eliminating dry kittie crack. Apparently he had not read the info articles I have left him because his attitude was at first cynical, but kind, reluctance. He said, "There's a lot of quackery out there." After I explained how TR works and why, the light-bulb went off in his head because it's just common sense to adapt a human diabetic regulation for controlling cats. So he was going to try the protocol on his resident clinic diabetic-we're in the South remember, Bubba the fat cat. The other resident cat has three legs and his name is not Tripod. He pulled out the info articles from Moose's chart, asked me for the list of low carb canned foods since the canned prescription Hill's he sells is too high (16%) in carbs. He was muttering to that he needs to change his cats' at home to wet. Had I choosen to follow my Vet's advice, Beruse would Diabetic for the rest of his shortened life, going to the emergency room because of life threatening low blood sugars, costing a ton of money in vet tests and still dieing a slow debilatating death.