I had to say good bye to Max the One-Eyed Wonder Cat yesterday. (He was the one in the post a few weeks back that had cancer in his throat.) The tumor was starting to affect his breathing. Not all the time, but I couldn't let him go till he was really struggling. Funny thing was, he was still eating like a horse! He had a good last day, I think. Yummy canned food, he sat in his favorite window in the sun and watched the birdies, napped on the sofa and had a long, drooling cuddle with me. (Yeah, he was a major league drooler, but yesterday, I didn't care.) When we got to the vet's, and she heard him breathing, she said, "This has to happen." Yeah, I know. It was still so very hard to make that phone call. And it pays to be a long time customer. They fit me in between appointments in the afternoon so I could stay with him. He was about 14, and we'd had him for maybe 12 of those years. It's hard to lose a long time friend.




OTOH, the pathology on the dog's surgery was good. Did I mention the dog's surgery? Oh, well, two weeks ago, on Wednesday, Murphy and I were out for our daily walk. It's warmer now, so he's panting a lot. I looked down and said, "What the heck is wrong with your tong... Oh, that's NOT your tongue!" Got home, sat him down and pried open the mouth. One good thing, that dog will let you do just about anything without issue. There was a big, bright pink growth under his tongue. Not normal. Called the vet, they got us in on Friday, and she said (I knew this) it was going to have to go. From what she could tell, there was no infiltration in the bone of the jaw, nor anything in the throat, and his lymph nodes were not inflamed. All good, because some mouth tumors in dogs are very, very bad news. She did the surgery and I picked him up later that afternoon.

{Side note: Labrador Retriever on anesthesia is pretty comical. I mean, I felt sorry for him, but he looked like a drunken sailor coming down the hall at the vet's. I had to boost him up into the car, and help him get onto the seat. I had the van, but would he lay on the floor where he'd not have to climb? Uh, no.}

But the lab report said it was a benign granuloma, which from what our vet tech daughter says, is not uncommon in dogs who like bones and sticks. We think what happened is that at some point, when he crunched a bone to nothing, as he is wont to do, some shards of bone got lodged in the soft tissue under the tongue. They would not work out by themselves, so the body formed the mass of immune cells around it. He's all recovered now. I do have to check his mouth every few weeks to make sure nothing else is happening. One more thing to go along with checking between his toes for allergic reactions, the ears for infections.... Good thing he's a good and patient dog!

All in all, it's been a long couple weeks. Two friends lost, Murphy in surgery, and then Max. I'm emotionally wrung out right now. I would like an up period, now, please. Or at least a neutral stretch.

We are off in a few minutes to go to the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, to see a good friend who is rapidly losing a battle with lung cancer. He's one of our chili cook family, and the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He is, at this stage, not going to be with us long. In many ways, I don't want to go, but I know I would be more upset if I don't.

I cannot imagine what his family is going thru.

My heart is very heavy today.

I should have posted this Friday, but the lawn service guys cut our phone cable with the trimmer when they were here, so I had no phone and no internet till the nice Fairpoint man came and fixed it yesterday!

Anyway, I got these pretty flowers delivered from Steph:




Mini roses and daisies with a big happy balloon!

Thanks, Steph!

Yesterday afternoon, there was a knock on the door. I answerd it and a very nice man gave me a bag with a box of this inside:




From Kryss, Kleber and Will. Mmmm. Happy Mommy!

Perhaps. I'm going to try a holistic, alternative treatment for Max. Basically, it's an herbal supplement that MAY help. I did some investigating, and this is one of the supplements that appears to possibly help, in many cases. There's a lot of crap out there, of course, and you do have to sort thru the bogus nonsense, but this company (and one other, tho their stuff is currently out of stock, so...) seem legit.

http://www.nativeremedies.com/petalive/

I'm putting him on their C-Caps. They have a whole bunch of herbs that I know from my own interest in herbal therapies and such can be beneficial. Whether they have the tumor shrinking effect that some of their customers claim remains to be seen. The company itself says they make no cancer cure claims for it, but that clinical trials are encouraging. I figure, at this point, it can't hurt. I mean, not only can I not afford the radiation and/or chemo that are traditional treatments, but this carcinoma doesn't generally respond to radiation, and the chemo- well, at Max's age, that probably would be worse on him than the cancer. Worst case, I'm out a few bucks. Best case- well, we can only hope. I just think it's worth a try.

Crazy? Probably. But Max is worth a little crazy.

I just took Max, our 14 year-old orange and white tabby to the vet. He's been losing weight lately. It wasn't good news. He has a very aggressive carcinoma in his throat. It's partially blocking the throat, and since he has no teeth left, he has not been able to eat the dry food well. The tumor is just visible if you pry his mouth open. And is invading the soft palate, and is into the lymph nodes, as well. Prognosis in bad- maybe a few months before he can't eat at all. We went through this with another cat, many years ago.

Max was a rescued feral cat, who was living in a shopping cart in the lot of an abandoned building. He was trapped and pulled from there because some half-brained kids shot out one of his eyes with a bb gun. He recovered from that fine, tho he did lose the eye. He also has a kink in his tail, a broken toe so that he can't retract that claw, and his ears are all notched. But he's lived here, as a pampered, indoor cat for many years. And despite all he's been thru, he is a complete sweetheart! Loves to be petted and fussed over, will drool all over you in pure happiness, and is just a nice cat.

I'm sitting here, teary-eyed. I'm going to miss him.

Have been busily working on getting the garden set up. The raised bed frames came last week. I ordered them on Wednesday, and they were at the door on Thursday AM. Granted, they were only coming from VT, but I did not expect one day service. Nice surprise.
(Gardener's Supply Company, http://www.gardeners.com)

We set them up on Sunday and filled them with soil, humus and manure. Really nice set up. It's 4x8, and divided in half with one half 6" deep, the other 12". Also came with the poles and stuff for a hoop frame, so we can put netting over it later if need be, and next year, I will be able to start cool weather stuff much earlier, as we will be able to put plastic over it and make a cold frame. It will be intensive raised bed gardening, so we plan to pack a whole lot of stuff into it.

I have lettuces, spinach, collards, beets and carrots planted out there now. More greens started indoors, as well as cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. Onion sets will go out soon, as will beans. Now, if the stuff would just GROW! I'm impatient- I want my nice, fresh veggies now!!

The daffodil bulbs that I bought late last year, and then lost and didn't get planted started to sprout in the bag (after I found them!). So I put them into planters. One is near the pond, the other on the front porch. The pond set is blooming and the other is not far behind. Will get those planted in the fall.

Also took the hardier pond plants out of the basement and put them in a tub of water outside to take advantage of the warm sun during the day. They still get covered at night, and the lily is still in the basement. But all are showing green, so that is a good thing. I got the patch for the pond liner, and I can see the tears, so I just need to get out there, drain most of the water, clean it up and put the patch on. Then the filter can go back online and the netting can come off. Hardy plants (reeds and pickerel rushes) will go in then. Don't know what I'm going to add this year. Maybe some mini cattails and canna. We'll see.

Meanwhile, clean up of the rest of the yard has slowed down. We had a string of rainy days here. I really need to start working on the front again. I want to pretty much pull out all the foundation plantings and start over. Only one side this year, I think. And the areas around the veggie garden where the day lilies are need some work, too. It will keep me busy!

A couple pics from the Frozen North (which is thawing nicely now):

(With apologies to those on Facebook who may see these same pics twice. They're pretty! LOL)

For those unsure if Spring is Springing, these are swelling buds on the forsythia bush. There is also just a hint of yellow visible now:



And look what bloomed in the front yard!

The first annual Rhode Island State Chili Cook Off was Saturday, in Middletowne, RI. It was indoors, at a Knights of Columbus hall, which was a change from the original location. I guess the sponsors pulled out and they had to scramble to keep it on. Rhode Island was the only state that did not have a cook off, so it's nice that they were able to figure it out.

But the timing was really odd, since the K of C had a meeting in the morning, and we couldn't get into the hall till noon. Red turn-in wasn't till 5, and it is normally at 3. We only cooked red this time. I knew I wasn't going to have time to chop all the stuff for my salsa, and we decided to just take it easy this first time out this season. It was a nice, relaxing day. The BaldMan made some hot ham, provolone cheese and jalapeno mustard rolled in puff pastry snacks that the other cooks seemed to like quite well!! They were darned good!

One of the cooks there has now cooked in all 50 states. Wow! He got a nice plaque for that achievement. And there were a whole bunch of former World Champions there: 4 Red Chili winners (including the current World Champion, and this is her second time winning it), 3 Verde Champions (including the current winner) and one Salsa winner. There were cooks from 13 different states and one from Canada, who won the Verde category. There were (if I am remembering the numbers correctly) 34 red entries, 24 verde and 19 salsa. Lots of people wanted to be there for this first RI competition. There is already a date for the cook off next year, and from what we were told, it will be at the RI Convention Center next year.

So how did we do? Not great. Neither of us made it off our preliminary table. (Since there were more than 25 entries, they split them into 2 prelim tables and a finals table.) We both cooked good chili, and, honestly, thought they were better than the winner, but obviously, the judges did not agree. Ah, well, a good cook won, and I am happy that he did.

On to the New England Regional Cook Off in May!

For Will's first birthday party. And it was bear-y cute! (Sorry.) It also took all day Sunday to decorate! LOL Glad I decided to bake the cakes on Saturday.







And one of the birthday boy, enjoying his cake:

You may want to, as well:

7 Things You Won't Beleive Are Legal

As I'm sure you've figured out by the silence in here.

The most exciting thing that happened recently is that I got a nice, shiny new ergonomic keyboard for the computer, and an underdesk keyboard tray to put it on. It is much better for my hands while typing, but I am going to have to rethink the two monitor set-up I've been using lately. I have the laptop open and a second monitor on an arm above it. I like it- it's handy to keep some stuff open on the second monitor while I'm working on one. But with the keyboard tray, I'm too far back and I can't see the second monitor very well. And the arm isn't all that adjustable. I'm going to try setting the laptop on the side, and loweing the arm with the second screen. That will bring it somewhat closer. If that doesn't work, then I guess it will have to come off the arm and go on the stand. Then I can pull it as close as I need it. Get one thing working better, and something else is knocked out of whack!

And I got my desk chair back! The BaldMan stole it after his broke. And I've been using an old wooden kitchen chair. Well, it was a reasonable thing, because when he works at home, he needs a good chair since he sits there all day, and I had been just taking the laptop in the living room, since I could get the keyboard at a better typing height than the desktop. But since I started using the two monitors, and now have a keyboard here at the right height, I've been using the desk more. So he got a new desk chair yesterday, and I've got mine back! Yay!

Not much else going on, really. Starting to get some meat cut and frozen in prep for chili season. We have a cook off in RI the end of Feb., but we are only cooking red at that one. Then we don't have any till May. But this looks like it could be a busy season. If all the cook offs that are usually scheduled happen, plus the new ones we've seen added, we could have as many as 14 or 15 this summer! So we want to get a bit ahead on meat cutting, as that is time consuming. Good thing we bought that freezer last year!

of Will that were taken when we babysat on Monday.

He loves the dog and cats. Most of the cats just run and hide, but Dougie, our 14 year old eldest cat, seems fascinated by the baby. And he lets him do pretty much anything- pull fur or tail, poke ears, bang on him. The cat just lets him go. And the dog is just wonderful with him.

So, we decided to change our virus protections software. Not necessarily a big deal, right? HA! I tried to delete the Norton stuff off my laptop last night and it did something to the whole durn computer. Wouldn't restart, wouldn't repair, we couldn't even reset it from a backup. Ended up needing to reinstall the whole freakin' World! So I spent most of today getting Windows reinstalled, trying to remember what other software I had on the thing and getting all that reinstalled, and configuring and resetting and getting stuff set up the way I like it. I think I've pretty much gotten it all, tho I am sure there will be a few things I run across in the next few days/weeks that will need attention.

I did not lose any writing, thankfully, as I really got not much of anything done yesterday, and all the data gets backed up daily, so I had the previous stuff available.

It was still frustrating. I pretty much lost the whole day to babysitting my machine.

Oh, well, it cleaned up a lot of crap that was accumulating, anyway!

Well, ok, there are places that are colder, but this is quite enough for me! Walking the dog the past few days has been a chilly prospect. But we've been out there. In the best weather, we'll do a mile and a quarter to a mile and a half. Before this cold snap hit, we were down to about a mile. The past few days? Less than that! Murphy doesn't seem to mind, but my face and fingers, even with the scarf up over my face and good gloves, still get frozen. I hope it doesn't last too long.

So I rather failed miserably at reading 25 books last year, but at least I read. And I'm resetting it this year: 20 books. Ok, I didn't get close to that, either, but I don't want to make it too easy on myself.

Last year: 12 read
This year: ??

Another year is almost behind us. All in all, it was not a bad year, I think. Things changed, as they always will. There were good and bad times, but more good. And that's how it should be. Remember the good, learn from the bad, and let it all go. Start again, because as long as you are still breathing, there is always the ability to start again.

Resolutions? I don't make them. I think you are just setting yourself up to fail. So I intend to just do better this year. At what? Whatever comes up. Because I think there is always room to do better for all of us.

I'm looking ahead to the New Year, knowing there will be some changes already, and that there will be others unforseen. All will come, whether I want it or not. No sense worrying about it now.

I hope everyone has a wonderful evening, and wish only the best for you all in the coming year.

Putting the flu on my "What I Want for Christmas This Year" list, but, apparently, it was on there! I woke up on Saturday, and was supposed to babysit, but got a call from Kryss saying she was sick and so didn't need me all day long. I hadn't slept well, and decided to try and get an hour or so of sleep before I went down there to try and give her a break. Well, I lay down on the couch and within a few minutes, was running for the bathroom! I will spare you the gross details, and just say it was an extremely nasty stomach/intestinal thing, and I haven't been that sick in years. It will be just fine with me if I am not that sick in many more years.

I did not make it to Kryss's, naturally. And everyone had it between Friday and Sunday. We were getting suspicious that it may have been something we all ate, but then, not everyone ate everything, with only a couple exceptions. And it seems the entire world was deathly sick over the weekend, so it appears to have been some sort of really nasty bug. People that the kids work with, friends, family of friends, my piano teacher- so many people were really, really sick this weekend, it would seem the food has been ruled out as the cause. Whatever it was, all I can say is "Good riddance!"

Feeling much better now.