Today is Valentine’s Day 2014
DO NOT DWELL IN THE PAST
DO NOT DREAM OF THE FUTURE
CONCENTRATE THE MIND ON THE PRESENT MOMENT. Buddha
For today when love is in the air…..or it should be……live for today, enjoy yourself, tell someone you love them and give someone a compliment. It only takes a moment to make someone’s day a nice day. Do that for someone today.
Valentine made with Shutterfly
I have a family of rescue animals, let me introduce them:
Chocolate Chip (pomeranian) is the dark brown dog. I rescued him from a family that did not want him anymore. He was wonderful and we lost him in July to heart disease. Chip was 13. While they could not operate on his bad valve in his heart, he did help proves the drug Vetmedin I’d a wonderful miracle drug for dogs with heart conditions.
Cosmo ( white cat ) was rescued from Ozaukee Humane Society in Wisconsin. He was the longest living cat with diabetes our vet has ever had. 9 years of insulin twice a day. We lost him last Monday. He was over 15 years old.
Noodles and Pasta ( black cat and black & white cat) came to live with me when my friend died. Her family didn’t want them and they were trapped by animal control. They live with me now, they mourned her for weeks and I didn’t think they would pull through losing her. I have never seen animals mourn the way they did. They live under assumed identities.
Chai kitty is the grey cat. He lived outside with his friend Latte and we fed them as neighborhood cats. However, last summer we had a little boy in the neighborhood that went around swinging a baseball bat, and one day Chai kitty ended up on my steps with his head bashed in, with the shape of a baseball bat handle indented on his skull. After 36 stitches and the vet says a cracked eye socket along with partial blinded eye, he now lives in the house with me. He wouldn’t be able to survive on his own. He is a carrier of feline leukemia so all the cats in the house need to be kept up with their vaccinations. With appropriate vaccinations, from what I read, the other cats have less then 1% chance of acquiring the disease. Latte still lives outside but this year she has a heated cat house, without it I don’t know if she would have made it through the 2013-2014 polar vortex weather we had.
The black kitten in the red sweater was found while we went for a walk in October, the weekend of Halloween. I couldn’t leave a small seven month old kitten by himself on Halloween weekend in twenty degree weather. I looked all over for his family but the vet said, when kittens get to be this age and are not cute anymore…..people just put them out. So his name is Macaroni. We call him “Little Mac”. Chai has appointed himself Mac’s nanny.
Coffee is my red dog. (Part Pekinese and part Chihuahua) She was rescued from a puppy mill as a puppy. Puppy mills are the worst and Coffee was given to the shelter so they could raise money for the shelter. (She wasn’t perfect, she has a slight lazy eye and puppy mills can’t sell imperfect puppies.) The shelter can ask for higher fee for puppies and anything wrong with the puppy is corrected before adoption. When a puppy is not perfect a puppy mill can’t sell them. They won’t spend money on the imperfect ones so they are drowned in buckets. “Bucket dogs” they are called.
Creamy my white dog with Carmel mask (pomeranian) also came from the same shelter. She was a rescued breeder dog. She never saw the sun or grass or the sky. She had no idea what life was like outside a xerox size crate. She now has a wonderful life. I was told that if puppy mills dogs escape they are so afraid of the outside world…..they will put themselves in a corner where they feel safe and starve themselves there. They are so scared they will not look for food or water. I thought ,well, if I can get her to go in the yard and be happy, she will have a nice life. That was not enough for her….she walks, rides in her stroller, rides in a car…..she loves to be with me and she loves to be tucked in at night. She is a pillow puff princess. She has learned so much in her life. I wish I could be like her more.
I think I belong in that movie “We Bought A Zoo”
Last but not least….three African Waters Frogs…Cheeto, Frito, and Dorito. They were hatched by my third graders 25 years ago. They live in a 55 gallon tank in my kitchen. Two green and one white. The company said we would be lucky to get them to live a year….going on 26 years now. There life span in their native area is 99 years and they get as big a tire. I need to put them in my will.
