No one is sure exactly when the tenants vacated the home, but when authorities were notified by the landlord that they house appeared to be deserted with a large number of animals locked inside, the authorities discovered that the house was uninhabitable, had no furniture in it, and no food or water was left for the animals locked inside.

I hope that they throw the book at the perpetrators!  People like that should not be allowed to own any kind of pets.

My hubby and I were eating dinner a few nights ago, and he had the NASCAR races on.  I’m not interested in NASCAR, but he is totally into it. 

They showed a commercial that I know was a SuperBowl commercial, and I knew I liked it.  I’ve seen it once before.  It was the Budweiser commercial where Hank the horse was rejected for the wagon team and worked out for a year with a dalmation to become a member of the team for the next year. 

Now for how I know I’m losing it – the commercial gave me goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes!  LOLOL!

I searched the whole house and never did find it. I couldn’t go to the meeting with all this dog hair on my pants and the roller brush was missing. So I found a roll of duct tape and pulled off a big strip of that to use on my pants. That got it all off but it took a long time.

I grabbed my purse and my laptop and went out to the car, running a tad late now. When I got in the car and checked the glove compartment for the insurance card, I found the sticky roller brush inside the glove box.Who would have put the roller brush in the car? That makes no sense and it almost caused me to be late for my meeting.

The reason I’d like to put doors in the openings is that from time to time we have too much company to fit all of them in the spare room, so we end up having a few people sleep on air mattresses on the floor in there. We have strung curtains over the openings so that they can have a modicum of privacy, but the curtains do not keep our extra friendly dogs out of there. So I’m thinking that we need to get some baby gates to put in the openings. Obviously we need extra wide gates because of the large openings, and I don’t know if the pressure mount gates are available in extra wide sizes or not. I really want to avoid drilling holes in the walls if it is at all possible.

The folks on the Yahoo groups that I belong to are frequently writing about how they keep a small flock of backyard chickens to help keep the ticks at bay. In addition they say that they enjoy all of the fresh eggs that they could possibly want. From time to time they offer up some chickens for sale and my hubby and I discuss the ins and outs of owning chickens. My biggest concerns involve predators and who would care for them if we went on vacation. I really don’t think we just dump a bunch of chicken feed in a trough and leave them for a week.

When my hubby and I moved into our first house, we were so excited to share our joy with our friends. So we had a big Independence Day party; complete with a pot-luck barbecue and pool party. The guests were completely enamored of our litter of five week old keeshond puppies, which were confined inside their six foot tall chain link kennel run.

One of our guests (which I did not want invited but hubby insisted) decided that he would light a string of black cat firecrackers and throw them into the kennel run. The quick bang-bang-bang and yelp-yelp-yelp brought my hubby and me running quickly to see what in the world was going on. When we saw the inebriated guest laughing at the upset puppies, we asked him to leave the party. Needless to say, feelings were hurt.

The next morning when we went out to feed the puppies, we discovered that someone had removed them from their kennel and put them inside the fenced in pool area. The puppies had all drowned in the pool. My heart was completely broken. Later that day we went to the pool supply store and bought a pool cover for our swimming pool in the hopes that this kind of tragedy never happens again. And I never spoke to that guy that had thrown firecrackers into the puppy pen, as we suspect that he was the one responsible for relocating the puppies. It would have been impossible for the puppies to escape their pen and enter the fenced in pool area on their own.

Our hope was that the waterproof dog beds would be able to be washed off easily enough for the odor to be eliminated, but that was not to be. After a couple of weeks of constantly cleaning those dog beds, we ended up just putting them outside in the hope that the sun and the rain would deodorize them.
You may suggest that we “get rid of “ the cat, and although we did discuss that as an alternative solution, his advancing age was also something we had to consider.

One of the most difficult problems I’ve had to deal with is helping our newest pet, a little white dog to learn proper house manners.  He is an unneutered male dog who has a tendency to “mark” his territory inside the house from time to time.  I understand that when he is neutered that should decrease significantly, and we plan to neuter him when we can scrape together the money.  In the meantime, we are dealing with trying to teach him to stop marking his territory inside, and trying to clean up the spots he’s marked.

But tonight he seems to want more attention than usual. When he sits on the bed next to me, he keeps laying his head across my arm and looking up at me and crying. It is so cute! But I can’t move my hand to type with his head laying across my arm. Every time I push him away, he comes right back and cries louder!

I have a cat! Actually, I can’t imagine not having a cat or two to keep me company. They are wonderful housepets.