Excuse me please but…

Where has common courtesy gone?  Are we so stressed by our modern day lifestyles that many of us have adopted a “me first” policy at the cost of respecting the rights of others?  I’ll apologize in advance as this blog entry might start to sound a bit like that cranky old man from the ‘60 Minutes’ TV show!

 

No cell phones

 

 

Ever followed a driver talking on a cell phone?  Nine times out of ten, they’re weaving and wobbling back and forth in their lane of traffic like someone intoxicated, and they are usually going well below the posted speed limit.  Following them can be a nightmare.  Why can’t they pull over somewhere and have that phone conversation if it is so important that it can’t wait until they’re not driving, without endangering and/or inconveniencing others?  Fortunately many countries are implementing laws for just this reason.

Why is it that when some drivers get in the wrong lane and want to turn left at an intersection for example, they think it’s okay just to hold up all the cars in the lane behind them all through the green light, until they can illegally squeak out into the intersection and make their turn?  Why don’t they just go straight through the intersection and find someplace to turn around so that they can correct the mistake without inconveniencing others?

Why do some people park in parking spots designated for handicapped persons, double park or park across driveways when there are proper parking spots short distances away?  Are they so important or is their time so valuable that they can justify breaking the rules and inconveniencing others?  Ironically these same people would probably be enraged if they needed a handicapped parking spot but discovered it was in use by an able-bodied person, or if someone else had the nerve and lack of consideration to block their parked vehicle.

And then there are neighbours…

We have a neighbour who has speakers mounted on the outside of his house aimed directly at our backyard.  He likes U2.  I used to like U2, but after hearing ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’ repeatedly blasted at a volume so loud that I had to shout to my family in our own backyard to be heard above Bono, I have to say U2 and the neighbour are not ranking high on my list of favs!

Another neighbour believes dogs should be allowed to bark because, well, that’s what dogs do.  I had to chuckle recently when I overheard him complaining to the neighbour directly beside him that the children she babysits were too noisy while playing outside in the middle of the day and he wasn’t able to sleep when he worked the night shift.  As if she read my mind, she told him she’d keep the kids quiet if he wouldn’t let his dog outside until it barked and whined to get back into the house every morning at about 6:30.  I haven’t heard the dog recently, so fingers crossed she made her point.

When we first moved in, another neighbour seemed offended that I would send her dog packing when it wandered over to our yard to do its business.

There are other neighbours surrounding our property who have pools.  One of them sits outside monitoring her children while they’re swimming.  The kids are pretty loud and some days I swear if I have to hear one more round of Marco! Marco! Marco- Polo! being screamed out in that pool while I’m trying to enjoy a good book and the sounds of the neighbourhood songbirds, I might scream, but the mother makes it far worse by constantly and loudly yelling at her children to behave and be quiet.  She makes far more noise than the kids!

In an effort to be environmentally-friendly and keep the cost of our electricity bill down, we often shut the air conditioning off on summer nights when there is a bit of a breeze.  A couple of blocks away, we have another neighbour who likes to play cards in the garage with a bunch of people with the door wide open into the wee small hours of the morning nearly every weekend night during the summer.   More than a few beers are consumed too I’m guessing from the loud, slurred and belligerent conversations that we can clearly hear through the open window of our bedroom at 4:30 in the morning.  I hope they’re having a good time because we’re sure not, having to listen to them when we’d prefer to be sleeping.

I guess I just don’t get it.  Maybe I’m old fashioned, or maybe I’m just stupid, but whatever happened to doing unto others as you would have them do unto you?

The speed of life

I’m sure by now many of you have wondered if I’ve fallen off the face of the virtual earth.  I haven’t.

Sometimes 24 hours is just not enough to accomplish all the things that need to be done in a day.  Such has been the case for most of 2009 in our family.  

Our daughter is getting married in the summer causing a combination of delight and panic as we get excited about the upcoming celebrations, but at the same time are totally worn out trying to get the house – inside and out – prepared for the arrival of visitors.  

The basement renovations are still underway.  I’d gladly welcome Mike Holmes with a cup of Nescafe right now if he’d care to take over this daunting task.  We’re almost finished, but questionable skills and busy schedules have meant that we’ve progressed far more slowly than we’d hoped.  Hopefully just another round of mudding; another round or two of sanding; some primer, paint, baseboards and flooring and we’re laughing.  Sounds easy if you say it quickly, doesn’t it?

My flower gardens, things of great beauty when they’re all weeded, cultivated, and flowering, still require weeding and cultivating, hopefully before they flower.  The largest of the gardens are mirror image perennial gardens, each measuring about 40′ long by, at their widest points, about 15′ wide.  And now, the heat of the summer seems to have arrived.  The weeds are growing by inches daily.  Last fall when the gardens normally would have been cleaned out, we were busy with the basement renovations, then I got a virus with vertigo, then it snowed, and most of the spring the area where the gardens are in the back corner of the property has been rather boggy, making it difficult to work on them without being sucked into the mud as if it was quicksand!  So, here we are at the end of May still trying to whip those into shape.

I don’t know where the time has gone!  Before we know it, the wedding will be history, the basement and the gardens will be done (hopefully!) and we’ll look back on all of it and wonder why we felt so rushed, but until then…

Snow daze

England covered in snow

With headlines like ‘Not even the Blitz stopped the buses…but snow does today’  in the news, I can’t help but think back to the times that it snowed while we were living in England.

It doesn’t snow there very often – maybe one or two days a year, but when it does, the country grinds to a halt – literally!  Traffic stops on motorways for hours, flights are cancelled, and even the possibility of snow or freezing rain in the weather forecast will sometimes result in decisions being made in advance to close schools. 

When we were packing our overseas container, our son, seven years old at the time, was rather upset when I told him the toboggan wasn’t coming because it didn’t snow in England.  But, the day we arrived, landing at Heathrow shortly after 6 a.m. on an early January morning, it was snowing.  Mind you, it was a very wet and slushy kind of snow, but it was snow nonetheless.  We’d left behind three feet of snow in Toronto.  We were cold and tired, and it just seemed like a cruel joke that it was snowing when we landed at Heathrow after being told by friends and acquaintances in the UK that it never snowed in England! 

On the rare occasions that it did snow in England, it was almost magical.  Snow on thatched roofs and stone walls, mistletoe and holly, it was very picturesque.  Children and adults alike couldn’t resist impromptu snowball fights, and much to my amusement, people would walk along the streets with umbrellas to protect themselves from the falling snow.  Schools would keep children in on days when there was an accumulation of snow on the ground, much like we do here in North America when it rains.  It was quite a culture shock to see how England coped when it snowed.

I did understand, to an extent, why the country faced such difficulties when it snowed.  The roads there, for the most part, are much narrower than our North American roadways.  On-street parking is a necessity in many of the older neighbourhoods, often creating even narrower or one lane streets.  In lieu of signage, many roadway instructions such as the need to yield to oncoming traffic, are painted on the roads, and roundabouts, used instead of traffic lights or stop signs at most intersections, are particularly treacherous when roads are slippery.  Snow tires (or tyres as they would spell it) are unheard of.  Add to all of this the fact that it makes very little economical sense to amass a large collection of snow ploughs and sanders (known there as gritters) in anticipation of wintry weather, when they typically experience no more than a day or two of snow in a year.

Having said all of that, I couldn’t help but be extremely frustrated when my husband and I, enroute once again to Heathrow for a flight to Belgium early the next morning, were stranded on the A1, a motorway linking the north of the country to the south.  We had arranged to stay at a hotel near the airport the night before our flight so that we could avoid the rush hour traffic on the M25 the next morning, and when the snow started, we jumped in the car to get to London before the roads got bad.

Little did we know that it was too late.  The gritters hadn’t gone out soon enough and the roads were already starting to get slippery as traffic compacted the falling snow.   Being experienced with driving in snow, my husband had no problems, but after driving for about 40 minutes, we came to a complete standstill with traffic queued up ahead of us for miles.  We were later to find out that because the gritters hadn’t gone out early enough, lorries further along on the A1 were unable to drive up and back down the other side of an incline in the slippery road without losing control so they stopped, forcing all of us, hundreds if not thousands of vehicles, to stop behind them.  From about 7 o’clock that evening until about 4:30 the next morning, my husband and I were in our car surrounded by other vehicles as far as the eye could see, parked on the A1.  We hadn’t eaten supper before we left the house and after a couple of hours I found myself, in delusional desperation, rummaging thru the storage areas in the backseat hoping that the kids had left a piece of a chocolate bar or perhaps some stale potato chips (UK = crisps) back there somewhere!  We listened to the radio, being careful not to drain the battery, and every so often we would turn the car on and treat ourselves to a blast of heat for some temporary relief from the hypothermic conditions. 

While shivering in the car, we discussed how eventually we’d need to seek out ‘facilities’, and watched with amusement as one man slowly ventured from his car, and with hands in his pockets nonchalantly, as if he was just going on a carefree stroll, he sauntered off behind a clearing in the trees edging the motorway, returning to his car from his ‘walk’ a couple of minutes later.  Almost immediately others followed his example, seeking out a bit of privacy in the shadows of the trees out of view of the vehicles on the A1.  Never in the whole time I’d lived in Canada prior to moving the UK had I been forced to get as upclose and personal with the snow as I did that night!

That adventure was all caused by about 2 inches of snow (5 cm), so when headlines today are reporting that  the country has been hit with between 2 to 4 inches of snow in most areas with some parts of the country getting upward of a foot (30 cm) of the stuff with more in the forecast, even though we’re surrounded here with snowbanks nearly as tall as I am, my thoughts and sympathies are with them. 

Stay safe and warm my friends, and stay off the A1!

The Ying and Yang Principle

Within the last week or so, the Catholic church has announced that “The Pill” is causing male infertility.

I have to admit that my very first reaction was to roll my eyes and mumble something about “What next?”, but when I read the article, it made some sense. 

They are claiming that female hormones from women taking The Pill are being flushed into the water supply through human waste which in turn ends up in our drinking water.  When consumed by men, the hormones affect the levels of the male hormones and cause male infertility.  While we’d all like to think that our water treatment plants purge all things nasty from our tap water before it arrives in our homes, the fact of the matter is that pharmaceuticals and other chemicals can’t always be filtered out of the water.  This is not the first time such a claim has been made.  I remember years ago reading about fish failing to reproduce because they were too happy and lazy about spawning due to a surplus of the popular and legal feel good drug Prozac entering into lakes and streams.

I doubt that I am the only one who can see the irony in all of this.  After reading the article, I have to say, for the first time ever, I felt guilty about consuming Nyquil at regular intervals during my cold last week to help me breathe.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was contributing to the chemical cocktail seeping into our drinking water.  Now, mind you, I was feeling really poorly, and being a bit of a wuss when I can’t breathe properly, I still opted to take the drugs, reasoning that probably no one else in the world would deny themselves a bit of comfort from a cold for that reason.

But think about it.  In our quest for longevity and improved quality of life, we are pumping more and more drugs into our elderly and sick.  Where are those drugs going and what are they going to do to the rest of us?  My guess is that we’ll reach a point where the very things that we created to save us from our fates, will ultimately cause them.

When human waste is processed in a water treatment plant, sludge (Number 2’s and other non-liquid waste bits) is filtered out of the water.  This sludge contains a lot of good bacteria but also a lot of not so good things like chemicals and e. coli.  Sometimes this sludge is used for fertilizer for crops and sometimes those crops are destined for human dinner plates.  In recent years, we’ve already experienced e. coli outbreaks in fruit and vegetable crops.  Was contaminated sludge to blame?  I’m not sure.

I’m also not sure what the solution to all of this is.  Do we ban birth control pills?  Without an acceptable alternative, odds are we’d face a population explosion that would further complicate the matter.  Perhaps we devise a policy to control population like the Chinese, i.e. one child per family?  With their cultural preference for sons over daughters, they’ve assured that their population will be controlled for years to come because of an obvious lack of women in future generations to bear children.  Do we let our elderly and sick suffer and die without drug intervention?  Do we struggle to breathe when we have colds?

In these days of global warming, we’ve been so programmed to question the environmentally-friendliness of our cleaning products, our energy consumption and such things, but I don’t recall hearing anything about environmentally-friendly medical practices. 

In the meantime, we have to live, we have to drink water, and we will do what we can to sustain and improve human life – even if it is with drugs.  But, in a few years time, will there be so many drugs and chemicals in our water that a doctor’s recommendation to a patient will be “Take two glasses of water and call me in the morning.”?

Dollhouse days

Lithographed dollhouse like the one where the rubber people lived

When I was about ten years old, my younger sister got a dollhouse for Christmas.  It was one of those lithographed, traditional two storey tin houses with window frames that really opened, and a single light in the living room of the house that was powered by a flashlight battery.  Wallpaper and some furniture were painted on the walls on the inside.  On the outside, red bricks, white siding, a chimney and even shingles were painted on the walls and roof.  It came with molded plastic furniture and a family made of a rubberized compound.  The family consisted of the parents, a little boy, a little girl and a baby.  Their painted-on smiles assured that they were always happy.

I loved that dollhouse.  

I guess Santa Claus felt that I was too old to still want to play with a dollhouse, but he was wrong, and after Christmas I decided that I would have a dollhouse – even if I had to make it myself – from Kleenex (tissue) boxes.  Every time the tissues were getting low in a Kleenex box, I’d be very attentive and would rush to collect the empty box before my father crushed it and put it in the garbage. 

My dollhouse wasn’t glamorous.  It was held together with tape and the rubber family were a bit too tall for it.  I made furniture from things like thread spools, jar lids, and bottle caps.  There were no windows with frames that really opened, no lights powered by flashlight batteries, no wallpaper or bricks or siding painted on the walls unless I used my imagination and drew them on myself.  It was flimsy and the boxes were often mismatched, adding to the charming disarray of the house, and if the “furniture” was too heavy, the floors would often bow from the weight. 

I was so proud of that dollhouse.

My sister and I would play with our dollhouses in the basement for hours, particularly during school holidays in the summer when, in the days before central air conditioning, the basement was a cool oasis from the blazing summer sun.

When we played, we’d load our houses with every miniature doll we owned, and whenever we’d acquire a new doll that would meet the height restrictions or could be bent to fit into our houses, it was welcomed to move in.  In our dollhouse world, there was a never-ending sense of “the more, the merrier”.  We’d add more beds to bedrooms, or put numerous dolls in one bed, and never turned away a homeless doll.  It was so simple – move ‘em in and they always lived happily ever after.  There was never any concerns about the cost of feeding so many mouths, nor arguments among the dolls living in such tight quarters over things like taking too long in the one and only bathroom in the house.  Come to think of it, I don’t recall our dolls ever spending much time at all in the bathroom.   And our dollhouse babies just mysteriously appeared without thought or explanation about how they were conceived.

Children were so innocent back then.  We used our imaginations, and we weren’t burdened with too much information too soon.  In our eyes, life was so simple.  You looked after people without thought to cost or ego.  It was never considered to be inconvenient to help someone in need. 

A year or two after Santa left a dollhouse for my sister, he gave me one.  It was an ultra modern one storey six-sided house made of fibre board with a plastic dome covering the round room in the middle.  I was almost a teenager by that time, and perhaps that was the reason that I never played much with that house.

A few years ago, I bought myself a proper wooden dollhouse and spent a fortune on collectible miniature furniture, wallpaper, and lighting for it.  It’s an ongoing project, and although I haven’t worked on it for a long time, I know I will enjoy finishing it one day.  Whenever I look at it, all wrapped in plastic on a shelf in the basement, I remember my Kleenex box dollhouse and the rubber people who lived in it, and for a minute, every so often, I wonder what the world would be like if we saw it through the eyes of an innocent child.

Love, two, new set

I used a tennis racket this week for the first time probably since high school.  If the truth is to be known, I’ve probably never played a proper game of tennis in my life which was all the more frustrating, I might add, when several years ago I was signed off work with tennis elbow.

I did attend Wimbledon once with a friend while I lived in England.  I saw Tim Henman dash by with the Olympic torch in the rain, but beyond that we weren’t able to watch any tennis because of the rain, and we spent the day strolling around with high hopes and drank Pimms.

Tim Henman with the Olympic torch - June 2004

I’m not athletic at all in fact.  I hated physical education classes with a passion.  I was always the one, particularly when we had to do gymnastics, who would discretely let my classmates get ahead of me in the queue hoping that the class would end before I had to perform the latest maneuver that we’d just been taught.  You name it – the balance beam, floor routines, parallel bars, the dreaded horse, etc. – I stunk at it!  Spraining my ankle in a less than graceful dismount from a horse in grade seven probably did not help to change my opinion that you could kill yourself doing that stuff.

I did learn a valuable lesson in human psychology from my gymnastics classes however.  I had a gym teacher in high school who loved to make an example of those in the class who clearly disliked the particular athletic challenge that they faced.  She’d call them up from where they were hiding behind their classmates wishing they could be invisible and would make them demonstrate whatever somersault or volleyball serve she was teaching at the time.  I quickly learned to flash a fake smile of enthusiasm in this class whenever she glanced my way.  It was a matter of survival and a technique I learned and have called upon a few times over the years!

So getting back to my tennis racket experience this week.  I must confess I’ve gotten somewhat off topic as my use of a tennis racket this week really had nothing to do with tennis.

Last Saturday morning, I spotted the third kitten from the feral litter, two of which we’d caught a week earlier.  It was outside licking drippings from a neighbour’s garbage bag off the pavement.  Yummy, huh?

So, we resolved to try to capture it, and as our garage had been such a drawing card for the first two kittens, we left the door opened about 5 or 6 inches and left an opened can of cat food in to lure it.  It was a very cold night.  The next morning I quickly closed the garage door and managed to catch the mother cat.

With the experience of catching “Cujo” still fresh in my mind, I was less than enthusiastic at the thought of picking “Mom” up.  This is where the tennis racket came into play.  We boxed her in so that she had only one option for escape from the corner of the garage where she was hiding.  Using a hockey stick, my husband was able to gently nudge her out of her hiding spot.  (A hockey stick is his sports apparatus of choice when dealing with wild animals.  Years previously he’d used one on a bat that got into the house, but that’s another story.)  Then, we each used tennis rackets to block any other avenues of escape while she was forced into an animal carrier.  I’m sure we looked very intelligent ganging up on this poor frightened animal with our tennis rackets in hand.

The next night we caught Houdini – the third kitten – so named because in transferring it from one carrier to a larger cage, it escaped necessitating the total re-organization of our garage to catch her. 

Houdini is cute.  She’s mostly black with a white “milk” moustache.  I was able to hold her for a few minutes yesterday so there is hope on the horizon for her that she learn to appreciate human beings just as her siblings are.  Mom, on the other hand, still hates me, probably about as much as I hate gymnastics in which case she has my sympathy.  I’m really hoping with some love and attention she’ll decide she really wants to be a house cat after all and that we’ll then be able to surrender her to the humane society for adoption.  If she stays like this, growling and looking like she wants to rip a pound of flesh off me whenever I am near, the humane society will have little choice but to put her down.

So, does it all make sense now?  With Cujo and the tabby, then there were four – Love, Two, New Set…

Taming the tiny beast

The dimly lit stairwell between our basement and garage has become a miniature brainwashing clinic.  A radio at medium volume pumps out music and human voices 24×7.  The recipients of the brainwashing efforts are two small feral kittens.

As some of you may remember if you’ve read my earlier posts, we foster kittens for the local humane society.  It’s like a revolving door for felines here at times.  Currently we have three utterly adorable babies – a long haired orange and white, a long haired black and white, and a short haired orange and cream kitten with a sweet but mischievous personality.  Although they face somewhat uncertain futures, like all animals that end up at animal shelters, someone had taken the responsibility for providing them with shelter and nourishment and socialization before they were eventually surrendered to the shelter. 

Not all animals are so lucky.  My family and I at various times had observed these young kittens traversing our property for about a week before two of the kittens (my daughter swears she saw a third one with the mother a few days before) ended up trapped in our garage.  In fact, I had contacted the humane society to ask about how best to catch the cat and her kittens and we had been discussing renting a live trap as had been advised.  In the meanwhile, fate intervened.  About a week ago, during an especially cold frosty night, quite by accident, we didn’t close the garage door.  My husband had attempted to close it, and actually thought it had closed, but the sensor malfunctioned, and for the entire night the door was opened.  The next day, after all the doors were once again closed, he realized that one of the kittens had been trapped in the garage.  My son and I were recruited, and we quickly discovered that there were two kittens – a black and white one and a tabby and white one about ten weeks old - huddling beneath the barbecue stored in the garage.  It took considerably longer, however, to actually catch the tiny babies.

Fortunately while we were still discussing what to do about the feral cats, I’d done a bit of research.  One website I’d consulted advised always wearing heavy leather gloves when trying to catch feral cats.  I mentioned this in passing while we were in pursuit of the kittens in our garage, and we all decided to put some heavy garden gloves on – just in case!  Smart move!

The black and white one is feisty.  Catching it (I still don’t know if it is male or female) proved to be very challenging.  It is tiny and managed to hunker down into the smallest of spaces between lumber and drywall being stored in the garage.  With the assistance of a long poled fishing net purchased at the dollar store to help us catch and release wild birds who occasionally fly into the garage, we were finally able to corner this poor, terrified creature.  It was a furball in motion with claws frantically grabbing at anything it possibly could, and the sounds emitting from that poor baby – a loud guttural noise like a wild animal caught in a trap – were definitely intimidating.  The first time we got it, my husband passed it to me, and partly because of the ferosity it was displaying, and the clumsiness of the gloves, I dropped it.  We were able to catch it again shortly afterward, and we placed it in a small animal carrier.

The little tabby wasn’t quite as difficult to catch and was soon added to the carrier.  A larger dog cage we have was fitted with a litter box and food, then I gingerly opened the carrier door and slid the kittens into the cage.  We left them in the stairwell that evening.

"Cujo"

Day One – We moved them to the front porch, still in their cage.  Mommy cat was heard, but never seen, howling for her babies.  Poor dear!  Another website had advised feeding them chicken and broth baby food on an outstretched finger.  I tried this on a long handled sundae spoon through the cage bars.  They were still thinking like wild animals and refused to move as if I couldn’t see them if they stayed perfectly still.  The black and white one wouldn’t even blink.  Eventually I gave up and just dropped some of the food on their fur.  If nothing else I reasoned that they’d at least get the taste of the food, and would probably be more interested in it later on.  The cage was moved to the stairwell again for the night.

Day Two – Another website advised separating the kittens so that they would rely more on humans than each other.  This was a rather terrifying task – for me!  Memories of the flying snarling furball were still fresh in my mind!  I readied another cage and stacked it on the other one in the stairwell.  With the heavy gloves on, I opened the door and fortunately the tabby came out first.  It raced up the stairs in an effort to escape.  More deep and distressing howling.  It attempted to climb the doorframe, but would slide down.  After a couple of minutes, I managed to catch it.  It didn’t fight much.  I put it in the second cage.  A radio was put in the stairwell.  I pretty much left them alone for the rest of that day.

Day Three – Tabby started eating the food offered on my finger.  Cujo, the name I’ve temporarily assigned to the black and white one, still cowered when it saw me and wouldn’t come for the food.  They aren’t aggressive, just scared.

The tabby kitten

Day Four – I was able to stroke the tabby while it licked my finger.  Eventually I slowly and quietly picked it up, wrapped it in a blanket, and petted it.  Surprisingly it didn’t appear to have any ear mites or fleas, but this could be explained by the probable location of its home base – in the back of the neighbours’ yard beneath some cedar and pine trees.  Cujo decided to investigate my finger with some reluctance.  The fact that I’ve left them with a minimal amount of dried kibble that wasn’t nearly as tempting as the chicken and broth probably had something to do with this coup.  It was going so well that I was able to stroke it a bit.  Then I tried to pick up the kitten and bring it out as I’d done with its sibling.  The effort was going well until one of its claws was caught on one of the blankets in the cage, and it realized what was happening.  Let’s just say, I didn’t have the heavy leather gloves on, and sure wish that I had!

Day Five – While holding and petting the tabby, she started purring and sighing – a very good sign.  I could confirm it was a “her” because she relaxed enough to let me turn her over on her back to investigate.  I brought her upstairs and held onto her tightly while watching TV.  She didn’t especially like the strange noises (sans her ever present radio station), but she settled down not too badly, until my husband closed the basement door.  The noise sent her into flight mode and she scratched me quite badly.

Day Six – I brought the tabby out of the cage, and fed her on my lap where Cujo could see her.  I know that I really have to come up with another name for this kitten because, should I succeed in socializing it, what family will want to adopt a kitten named after a rabid dog?  Sad thing is, it is starting to respond to the name when I half whisper it to it while feeding it the chicken and broth.  Cujo is getting a bit braver about coming up to my hand to take the food, but feels obliged to hiss at me before accepting any food.  This has become routine.  I approach with a finger reeking of chicken and broth and get it just close enough.  The kitten looks at me with darkened eyes, hisses, then steps forward and licks the food off as if we’re best friends.  I refill the finger, and we repeat the process – hiss, step forward, then lick. 

Day Seven – I let the tabby roam the stairwell and managed to coax Cujo right out of the cage using the chicken and broth.  This took quite a while.  The kitten still does not trust me, but I made sure that it saw me petting the tabby.  For a while they both roamed around and accepted the food when it was offered.  It occurred to me after a few minutes that this was a good move, but the hard part was going to be getting it to go back into the cage.  With a bit of luck and maneuvering, I managed to get it to walk back into the cage on its own, bribed of course by some chicken and broth.

We are making progress, but the bottom line is this:  If I can’t get these kittens socialized they will never have proper homes and will probably be put down.  I have hope for the tabby, but I’m quite worried about Cujo’s future.  The prognosis is even grimmer for their mother.  If we do catch her in a live trap, unless she was at one time a domesticated pet and could possibly return to interaction with humans, she would be put down.  It takes months, possibly even years, to socialize adult feral cats, and with so many adult domesticated cats already needing homes, it’s highly unlikely that someone will take on the task of socializing her.  In the meantime she is destined to fend for herself – eating out of garbage bags, being exposed to the extreme temperatures of our winters, and popping out endless litters of homeless kittens that will perpetuate the situation.  How she became homeless is anyone’s guess.  There are a lot of rental units nearby, and sadly, it’s not uncommon for pets – dogs and cats – to be discarded and left behind when the tenants move on.  I will never be able to understand the mindset of someone who could do that.

In the meantime, I’m spending an hour or more every day in my dimly lit and cold stairwell making small talk with tiny kittens…

A website for all seasons

A friend just sent me the URL for a rather ambitious website called All My Faves.

Down the left side of the All My Faves homepage there is a list of 45 categories such as Maps, Search, News, Sports, Video, Magazines, Downloads and Astrology.  Opposite each category there are about 10 hyperlinked logos.  For example opposite the category News shows the logos to:

• CNN
• Fox
• MSNBC
• Google News
• CBS News
• Yahoo News
• The New York Times News
• BBC
• USA Today
• Drudge Report
• Digg

Simply click on the logo of your choice and you are taken to that website.

Across the top of the page there are tabs identifying additional topics such as Entertainment, Kids, Shopping, Travel, Weekly Faves,  and AllMyBlog.  On the Entertainment, Kids, and Travel tabs, the setup is the same as with the homepage with a further breakdown of sub-categories for that topic running down the left side of the page.  The Shopping tab requires the user to select one of four options with the choices being Accessories, Apparel, Home & Decor, Shopping, and once selected, a page is displayed with sub-categories for that selection in the same format as the other tabs.  Weekly Faves lists “faves” by each week starting with the most recent.

The AllMyBlog tab takes users to a blog, presumably written by the website’s creator.  Blog entries describe some of the websites that are listed on All My Faves.

A very simple concept really.  This site is very user-friendly.

Halloween treats

It’s Hallowe’en,
The lamp is lit,
Around the fire
We children sit,
Telling ghost stories
Bit by bit,
‘Til somebody says “Shhhhhhh!”
What’s that a-peeping
‘Round the kitchen door?
What’s that a-creeping
‘Cross the bedroom floor?
What’s that a-sweeping
Down the corridor?
Oooooh! It’s a ghost!

The words above are to a song that we used to sing as young children around Halloween.   I love Halloween and to this day, I still decorate our front yard with lights and silly Halloween decorations to commemorate the occasion.  Some years, I even go so far as to dress up to hand out candy to the neighbourhood children. 

My British friends and co-workers could never really understand my love for Halloween, I am sure.  I described it to many of them as “as much fun as Christmas without the expense and stress”. 

When we first moved to England, we lived in the small village of Thorpe Waterville, along the A605 between Thrapston and Oundle.  Our kids were 8, 12 and 14 respectively.  It is a difficult thing to move to a different country and to try to merge your customs and culture with theirs.  Halloween is acknowledged in the UK, but with some reluctance, and as Bonfire Night – the celebration of the execution of Guy Fawkes – is celebrated on the 5th of November, I suppose it is understandable that their focus isn’t on Halloween.

My son, being the youngest, was suffering the most from culture shock I think.  When we’d packed our container to ship it to England, he could not understand why he wasn’t allowed to include the toboggan, and when Halloween rolled around, he still wanted to go trick-or-treating.  Reasonable pumpkins were impossible to find and we had to settle for pre-carved Halloween turnips purchased from the local Coop store.  Then, as per the usual North American routine, we figured out costumes for the children, and sent them off into the darkness with my husband, to experience their first British Halloween.

Of the few houses that did open their doors to my children that night, most of their occupants were dumbstruck by the idea of children trick-or-treating in Thorpe Waterville.  A couple of places sent them away empty-handed, one or two places gave them pound coins, and one house gave them an entire large package of biscuits (cookies) and told them not to come back next year! 

Shortly after Halloween, we moved into a home we had purchased in Oundle, and every Halloween after that while we lived in the UK, we went over the top by British standards and decorated our small front garden for the occasion.  Because we lived on a dead end street and there were few trick-or-treaters prowling about the neighbourhood, my son would often go out and direct children to our house.  Some years the kids would take turns sitting in a lawn chair in the front garden covered in a sheet and holding the candy dish heaped with goodies.  If young children approached, they would sit still or talk to the children and tell them to take candy, but when annoying teenagers approached, they would stay still until their hands were just about to scoop out a fistful of candy, and then whoever was under the sheet would move quickly to startle them.

While the British don’t really celebrate Halloween, they are known for their ghosts.  As a Halloween treat, I’ve included a couple of videos.  Happy Halloween!

 

 

 

 

 

Let the spinning wheel spin

Ladies and gentlemen, it is official.  I am off-balance.  I’ve become a Weeble.

For those of you unfamiliar with Weebles, I’ve added a short video to get you up to speed.

Early last Sunday morning, I rolled over in my bed, only to discover that the ceiling fan was rotating.  The only problem was that it wasn’t turned on!  After a few seconds, it stopped, but a bit later I found myself staggering to the bathroom and when I returned and climbed back into my bed, it felt as if the bed was moving like water sloshing about in a bucket, and I had to hold on for fear of falling off it.

Although it reminded me of my one and only hangover nearly 10 years ago courtesy of a misadventure with some gin (this is still a joke around the small English village where we lived at the time), the previous night I’d only had a couple of small glasses of wine at a family gathering which were certainly not enough to cause this reaction.  And, unlike my memories of “the” hangover (I can decisively say “the” as I plan never to duplicate the experience!), my stomach was not upset except for the brief moments when the room seemed to be moving.  In a very non-egotistical sense, I suppose I could say, that for much of this week, the world has indeed been revolving around me!

Did you know that there is a difference between vertigo and dizziness?  With dizziness you feel rather spacey and unsteady, but with vertigo you feel like you’re spinning on the midway ride from hell.  Vertigo is nasty business.  Since Sunday (this is now Thursday), if the room hasn’t been spinning around me, I’ve been dizzy and have been staggering about like a drunk.  One morning, it took an hour of laying as still as possible on the sofa with my eyes tightly closed, to make it stop.  Even trying to reposition my pillow sent my brain spinning around at a dizzying rate.

I’ve been tired, and have spent most of the last 4 days dozing on the sofa with the television on.  The puzzling thing is that I haven’t had other symptoms such as fever, vomiting, or headache.  Last night I finally decided to see a doctor.  If not for the fact that our doctor is a half hour drive away and I didn’t feel I should be driving, I probably would have and should have sought medical advice sooner.

He checked me over and concluded that I am suffering from either benign positional vertigo or vestibular neuronitis.  The good news is that neither is permanent, but since benign positional vertigo can recur for a variety of reasons including a change in barometric pressure, you can safely bet I’m hoping that it’s vestibular neuronitis.  I never want to feel this way again.

Ironically, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard the term vestibular.  A friend of mine had a dog recently diagnosed with old dog vestibular, a balance related condition that occurs in older dogs.  I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn’t diagnosed with that! 

I’m doing much better today, and due in part to determination, I am trying to function normally.  The world today has so far ceased to revolve around me and I’m dealing with just a bit of dizziness.  I’m still staggering a bit and my stance is a bit wider than normal to help me balance better, but perhaps because I’ve grown used to my warped view of the world, I only wobble, just like a Weeble, and so far, I haven’t fallen down!