Turkeys

We had a board meeting for one of my orchestras before rehearsal yesterday, in an old stone building on the college campus with a big rear porch that looks out to woods. The wall to the porch is mostly glass and is across from the main entrance into the building. As most of us entered, we were greeted by a large female turkey prancing a bit on the porch and staying hard up against the glass. It turns out that she has become a pet of sorts from being fed by staff.

We talked for a while in the meeting about famous "guard" turkeys from Vermont - all Toms. One would stand in the middle of the road and force oncoming cars into the wrong lane over a stone bridge, and another would attack people who stopped in their car to look at a particularly charming farm. There seem to be several of them. Perhaps Vermont grows unusually bold turkeys.

This morning is one of the constant small vacations you get in pet sitting. After several days of morning dog walks, I am off for the week. This is much easier than the wait for the next official holiday when I was working a day job. This wait now - between President's Day and Memorial Day - always seemed very long.

Context is Everything

We brought dinner, pizza and an antipasto, to an elderly relative's house last night. We stayed and talked about the uprisings in the Mideast and television shows about researching family history for a while after eating. It wasn't the most coherent flow. But after my relative went directly from the revolt in Egypt to the demonstrations by public union workers in Wisconsin, television shows seemed to be a safe harbor for the conversation. It seemed that, to her anyway, Wisconsin and Ghadafi and Mubarek were all somehow intertwined.
Some while later she asked if it was dangerous to deal with strange dogs with the owners away. I've been pretty clear since I started pet sitting over two years ago that this is part of the job. But last night seemed to be the first time things connected. I explained the things we do to make sure the situation is safe, and that was the end of it.

On the way home, we were trying to sort out the conversation. We decided that, for her, all of these things are floating in the cloud without context. So pet sitting, Wisconsin, Mubarek, Ghadaffi and the daytime cooking shows are separated by very slight degrees of difference.

Out the Window

Yesterday NPR aired a snippet about Abraham Lincoln, revived because of the Democrats in Wisconsin leaving town to make it impossible to pass the union busting bill. The Whigs found themselves in a similar situation in the late 1800's in Congress over a controversial banking bill. They all departed but left Lincoln behind to report on events. The bills' supporters dragged congressmen out of sick beds and probably the corner bar, and locked them all in the chamber including Lincoln. This would have worked for all but a cat and Lincoln, who opened up a second story window and jumped out. He landed unharmed, likely due to his unusual height.
Thanks to this event, when a new building was erected there was a law made by Congress that the chambers had to be in a structure that was at least three stories high. That might even work for some cats.

Saturday Schmaturday

Saturday or not, our oldest cat pawed at my face until I was awake this morning. This is normal, but we are grateful for each day of normalcy now. Her kidneys are shot, and she relies on regular subcutaneous injections of Ringer's solution. Surprisingly, she still comes to me even though I am the one who sticks the needle under her skin and makes her hold still for these treatments. Maybe she knows that we are helping her or maybe it bothers her less than it does us - I don't know. I am grateful for her continued attention, and we are grateful for whatever time this will buy before she falls off the cliff for the last time. But for now she is still eating, and has even developed a taste for licking our dinner plates. People food never interested her before she became so oooold.

The Times We Live In

Yesterday I started a few days of taking care of a bulldog who would make anyone want to do some pet sitting. She is smart, funny and is an easy keeper. She also does her business almost on command - nice on a cold night. She makes me (and everyone who meets her) smile. But as special as she is, she is still a dog. She needs the same things that dogs have wanted since they joined their fate to man - shelter, food, her daily allotment of new scents and a little company.
Several hours earlier I was listening to a story on the news from a town in western Libya that was astonishing, at least to me. An NPR reporter was interviewing a 58 year old businessman on a cell phone hiding behind barricades in the town square, surrounded by opposition and government forces chaotically shifting back and forth. At one point a burst of machine gun fire broke out and he assured the reporter that it wasn't dangerous, it was opposition forces firing into the air to celebrate. A few minutes later you could hear tanks rumble by, and we waited while he figured out whether they were government tanks that might kill him or opposition forces that would protect him. These events were happening in real time, while I drove the car to the bank and the post office.
I could listen to this man surrounded by a battle in Libya as easily as I could find out who won the tickets to the hockey game in the talk show contest.
These are things that animals don't understand. Perhaps it is best that, if I did try to talk about it with the little bulldog, she'd just cock her head and wait for me to do something important like continue our walk.

Are we bored?

The horses seem to have had it with this lingering winter. They are acting out, harassing each other over the fences between turn out rings and bumping into things. The tally in the last two weeks is one broken metal gate (a big one) that got kicked off its hinge, a section of fence that had to be reset and three broken halters from grabbing at each other. One horse, Bart, a Haflinger built like a small tug boat, has broken the metal buckles on two halters in three days. The third halter was probably broken by a small but high management pony. It was on an Andalusian mare who is herself easy, but is at the bottom of the pecking order when the others get rowdy.
Warm weather can't come too soon.

Pasture Mates

The muck pile behind the indoor ring at the barn is getting massive now - it hasn't gotten warm enough to thaw it so it can be moved without breaking a plow. But the deer love the cover it provides, and the small shoots that are trying to grow from the seeds when the sun stays out for a few days. The first trip out back with the wheelbarrow scares up a deer family most evenings now. The bark has been stripped from a lot of the trees out back and they have had to hunt for food through a deep and icy snow cover this winter.
They take a few moments to decide whether to leave, and do so more slowly than in the warm weather. Often a couple stay behind for a while, looking over the pile at me before they finally follow the others. I sometimes wonder if these are last year's babies, the oldest of the group or just the most frail of the herd. We are all living a little closer together after weeks of  back to back snow storms.

Getting Started

First post on a shiny new blog... maybe an introduction. I retired and decided to spend time with animals, play more music, figure out how to paddle a canoe straight and take naps. I take care of horses at a therapeutic riding barn, socialize German Shepherd puppies at the New Skete Monastery, do some pet sitting and I added a string trio to two orchestras and a chorus. So much for taking naps...

Today is the last visit for this round to a household with two dogs, a sweet but bouncy pit bull and a big shaggy guy who must have some Newfie back a few generations, and a house with a Chow and Samoyed mix. Winter has returned and the Samoyed mix was having a wonderful time without the three layers of fleece that I needed. Dogs remind us that good times can be easy to come by.