six cats in the yard

One of my favorite things to do when I was little (and still actually) was to go to the library. I think even then I brought home about 20 books with each trip and probably barely got through all of them before they were due back (thank god for “renewals” now.

So when I move to a new place I always get my library card before I do just about anything else. That at register to vote. When I’m feeling stressed or disconnected, I will stop at the library and browse the shelves….often starting at “A” and just winding my way through the letters. I pick up a book that has a good cover (I’m so superficial) and if it’s got a good story that fits my mood, I’ll take it home. I try to find my favorite authors first, but generally I’ve read everything by them (Annie Proulx, Richard Russo, Mark Helprin, to name a few). I usually reject a lot of the chick lit books, and there are a surprising amount of them on the shelves. I tried to read Anita Shreve and just couldn’t get through the first few pages. I tried to read the book by the guy who annoyed Oprah and he was too arrogant. I couldn’t stand Snow Falling on Cedars, either because he seemed to be trying to impress as well and it just didn’t work.

When I was in vet school, I’d go to the Pullman Library and get “teen books” similar to Harry Potter just to completely lose myself in the fantasy. I discovered Phillip Pullman (ironic I guess?) who wrote the book which is coming out as a movie (The Golden Compass) and read through all of that series pretty quickly. There’s not much to it. Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much from them that I can overlook a lot of the simplicity or flatness. But The Golden Compass books seemed to have a lot of dimension.

I recently read the Amulet of Samarkand series by Jonathan Stroud (a book I found when Leigh and I were in Australia a couple of years ago, and only recently I discovered it was a young adult book). I just finished the last book a month or so ago. Would recommend it to anyone who liked the Harry Potter series. It’s not really the same, except that it’s about a boy wizard and the struggle b/t “human” and wizard.

I just haven’t been able to read a lot of non-fiction these days, even though I have several books on my shelf that are non-fiction that I very much want to read: Shake Hands with the Devil (about the Rwandan massacre by UN General who was part of the force on the ground when it happened); Guns, Germs & Steel; the second/third books in the MLK years trilogy by a journalist from Baltimore…and I’m sure I’ve got a few others on the shelf just waiting to be read. I might get away without reading “Bury my heart at wounded knee” b/c now HBO has a movie based on the book (see what happens when you wait long enough; they make everything into a movie for us dullards who can’t make it through the book.

But actually I’m trying to read a couple of books that *are* non-fiction, mostly about nutrition: the new Barbara Kingsolver book about eating locally and a book about “what to eat”, written by a nutritionist who apparently did a lot of research on various types of food (organic milk, soy milk, meats, etc.) to help sort out fact from fiction.

This week, when I started feeling really stressed out from work, I found myself in need of a library fix. I found a great stack of books, including 3 I pilfered from the new book section, and have finished one so far: The first book in the Sally Lockhart trilogy (also by Phillip Pullman). It wasn’t too bad, but now I have to go back to get the 2nd & 3rd books before I can read any of my other books.

I will let you know if any of the other more literary books are any good. And I would absolutely love to hear what other people are reading, esp. books that they might recommend so that I can put them into a list I can look for when I get tired of just wandering and want something more specific.

Just a small photo that I forgot to add to the other KY post. I thought this one was a funny juxtaposition of old/new

It’s the story
of a lovely lady
bringing up 3 very loving cats.
Two of them had hair of grey
unlike the other
who was brown tabby

Ok…I can’t keep that up.

After my cat Skinny died at 12 years from cancer, I couldn’t spend more than a week without a cat and decided to get 3, just in case something happened to one I would still have two.

Wilbur, Max, Tinker

Wilbur & Tinker

L-R: Wilbur, Max, Tinker

Leigh, on the other hand, wanted a calico and couldn’t decide if he wanted the long-haired or the short-haired…so he got both.

Betsy & Billie

His don’t much like mine and all mine want to do is play (mostly) except maybe for Wilbur who wasn’t well socialized and likes to ambush Billie and Betsy in various spots, including on the roof.

In California, they all learned to dislike the 5 kittens we rescued and eventually found homes for (see picture of me with 4 kittens in my lap from the earlier post). Then, after we found homes for those 4, Tinker decided to become afraid of anyone who came into the house because she thought maybe she was the next to be given away.

Well, 5 cats apparently isn’t enough because I brought home a 6th cat to foster (yes, just to foster…initially). And she ended up having 6 (yes, 6) kittens…one for each nipple.

Taxi

7 weeks old

7 weeks old

Only a couple of weeks old

It was very hard to give all of them away, but I know that they have good homes, including 2 who went to Tricia (the grey and the black/white). No one seems to want an older cat, however. Even though Taxi (the mom) isn’t really that old either in true age or attitude, I couldn’t find a home for her, so now we have six cats in the yard.

Leigh and I had been looking at the real estate market for almost a year. Since January, when we first moved here, I’d been obsessive about finding the perfect house. We looked at a couple of places with the greatest real estate agent ever (Jane Parker) but just couldn’t find what we wanted and then decided to wait until Leigh found a full time job. I still kept looking every day just to make sure we didn’t miss the right house if it came along.

I saw this listing for a house around the corner from us, and though it didn’t have a picture and was on a busier street than I cared for, I made Leigh go look at it on his daily walk. Needless to say, he fell in love with it from the outside and made me call Jane to get a look at it asap.

These are the pics from the original real estate ads:

The first thing we did was pull up all the carpet in the house. We started with the ugly green/blue shag in the master bedroom and then went on to the cream-colored carpet in the rest of the house, including the stairs. Everything smelled better and became so much brighter. We also pulled out the fireplace insert. We weren’t quite sure how much of a fire hazard it was. Turns out the fireplace works just fine, according to the chimneysweep.

Leigh just had to keep this wallpaper, however. I tried to talk him out of it….

When Leigh’s mom was here, we went to find some flowers for the back deck and this is what we came up with:

So that’s a quick tour of the place. We have lots of projects and we’ll keep people updated. Right now we’re struggling with the fact that today the washer backed up all over the floor and we’re afraid that might have something to do with the potato peelings from 10 potatoes I tried to shove down the garbage disposal. Not having grown up with a disposal, I missed the memo that potato peelings are one of the main things you don’t put down the disposal…

I spent a couple of days in Lexington KY learning how to be an equine dentist. We had countless instructors, which meant that we learned countless ways to do the job. And that’s a good thing because sometimes you start to think that, in vet medicine, if you don’t do things a certain way, you’re either going overboard or you’re not doing enough or just doing the wrong thing, god forbid and you are a bad doctor.

The best part was that I was able to visit with a lot of other vets that felt the same way I did: completely clueless as to how to take on the task of dentistry — even with vets that had been doing dental floats for years.

I should probably explain just what equine dentistry entails: You sedate the horse, put a giant speculum in its mouth (see the pictures below), and then shove a loud, vibrating grinder into their mouths and grind down points (sharp edges along the cheek teeth) or hooks (points on the front/back molars), along with correcting some other strange abnormalities. It’s pretty bizarre and, personally, I’ve scared myself into believing that until I perfect it, I’d better not try it. However, the only way to perfect it is to just do it.

One of the best parts of the conference, though, was the opportunity to just fly somewhere and meet & hang out with some like-minded people and drink beer.

Some highpoints:
• If you’re ever in Lexington, I recommend A La Lucie’s downtown; great food and with a strange French(?) atmosphere. The woman I went with later said she read that it was supposed to be Lexington’s most romantic restaurant.

• Another good restaurant was the Cheapside; very good portobello mushroom ravioli with pecan pesto (mmmm) but not so good margaritas (stick with the beer)

• I also saw Stephen Baldwin in the Chicago airport! He looked very scruffy, but it was definitely him.

I struggle a lot with the fact that the veterinary career I’ve chosen keeps me away from the people and projects I love the most and sometimes I feel like I’d rather work in the library where the books just sit there and don’t require any soothing or sweet talk. They don’t need you to keep a smile on your face when you just want to say “Just give your dog this medicine and don’t ask me ten thousand questions”….I remember having a discussion with my fellow copy editors when I worked at Fishing & Hunting News about how none of us would last very long in the customer service industry. And this career I chose is all about customer service. Smiling sweetly while someone is arguing with you about the fact that they don’t have the money to treat their animal and you should just do it for free because you went into this because you love animals, didn’t you??!

I want more time off and less stress. This is not the job for either of those. I don’t want to come home and growl at Leigh who has just made a great dinner for me, and has waited until 8 o’clock to eat because I had to finish up charts.

But then I help deliver a living, breathing, wet & beautiful, curly-haired cria and I remember why I love this job. Or then I help an owner say goodbye to her longtime horse companion and I remember that I am strong enough to push the solution into the vein and not break down (most of the time) or turn away. I can face it because I know how hard the decision is and how much people need to know that when they make that decision that someone isn’t looking at them, questioning why they didn’t try this treatment or that medication. They need someone to say “I’m so sorry you had to make this decision, but it is the right one and I will support you in it and help you through it”….all because that animal is suffering.

And yet I still feel exhausted at the end of the day and can’t make my brain put together a single sentence. I forget the simplest words and can’t find the time or energy to give a good friend a call because I’m stuck wondering whether my chosen treatments are going to work, or maybe I should have chosen this other medication. I understand the anxiety lessens as time goes on, and it already has. I am learning that it is not an independent profession; I talk more with my old professors at WSU than I do with my husband most likely.

Eventually I will have more pictures of some of my days at the office, but for now I will have to leave you with a picture of some of the kittens we’ve fostered over the last year.

We’ve managed to move 4 times in the last year (my husband claims to have lost count), but we’ve ended up in the best possible place in the world, though I work too much to enjoy it for the moment. For all of my friends who wonder why they never hear from me and wonder what we’ve been up to since we got married in August of 2006, this will hopefully fill the gap.

I will try to, slowly but surely, post the pictures and the stories of the last year since that beautiful Gorge day on August 12, 2006. We’ve bought a house and put down some roots in Hood River and have even taken on yet one more cat to give us the nice even number of six. I’m hoping to use this to keep in touch with people and to give my brain something other than veterinary medicine to think about.