Annie wants to come along
When I came in to finish packing for a trip to the states a few years ago, i found that Annie had decided she’d like to come along so she had packed himself. I wonder if that is her passport or mine showing in the upper lid pouch?
For RDP, the prompt word is “Pack”
The day Annie died, Pasiano buried her in front of the peanut terrace wrapped up in her favorite rug with her pull toy and one of my shoes. I was working on a blog chronicling all the places she had carried my shoes to in the brief time she was with us. Seemed fitting for her to get to take one with her. The next day Pasiano and Yolanda and I walked up the dry river bed of the arroyo a block from my house and found these stones. On Wednesday I went flower shopping and arranged the flowers. On Friday, Pasiano planted them and yesterday and today I culled succulents from other plots to complete the planting. The peanut terrace behind her spot has room for two chairs and a small table. It is in the shade of the huge pistachio tree that I planted as a sapling 15 years ago or more. It is a good spot for us to come and visit her. It is the spot where I’d had Pasiano dig up a tree that was getting too big and growing up through the limbs of the pistachio. Although we planted it with grass, for some reason it never quite took hold, perhaps because the dogs loved to dig there. Zoe and Annie chose it as their favorite wrestling spot and would come up covered with dirt and leaves. It seemed just the right place. R.I.P. Annie.
For Cee’s FOTD
You must wonder why after so many posts on Annie, I have suddenly not mentioned her at all. Thanks to Forgottenman, you probably already know that she passed away yesterday and I really appreciate all who have expressed sympathy for Annie’s death. Later I would like to do some further posts revealing her last adventures, but I’m not ready right now to do so.
R.I.P. Sweet Annie.
Guess who discovered the equipale I hid in the guest room? If you don’t know why I hid it and why Annie was looking for it, go HERE.
Click on photos to see the damage…and the doggies.
So, Annie has taken to jumping down off the bed and I could hear her chewing on something. Finally I had a close look, and it is the wooden and leather equipale chair! So, I went out to the terrace to get the can of spray doggie repellant that keeps them from using the terrace as a potty spot and sprayed it all over the equipale, but I’ll be darned if she didn’t start chewing it again minutes after I’d sprayed it.
So, I decided I had to remove the wooden and leather chair and replace it with a metal one from the dining room. She ran after me, barking, as I dragged it out of the room and tried to follow me out into the hall but I stopped her by shutting the door, dragged the heavy and bulky chair up two stairs and down the hall to the guest room, then dragged a dining room chair into my room to use as a desk chair. I’d put decorative pillows from the bed onto the seat of the equipale to store them overnight and so moved them to the seat of the metal chair, but Annie immediately stood on her hind legs to try to grab the oval Virgin of Guadalupe pillow that Zoe, in her first year, had already chewed the decorative cord off the outside edge of! Pillows up on the desk, Annie disappeared, but I could still hear chewing. It must be my display panels for art shows that I have stored under the bed. Guess I’ll have to move those tomorrow.
When Zoe was shedding her puppy teeth, she ate the corners off my wooden desk and file cabinets. Morrie destroyed 4 dog beds and Zoe equally as many. Coco was a jumper, not a chewer, but it cost me over a thousand dollars to fence in the whole yard to keep her from jumping up on the wall and down to the lower lot. I’ve already caught Annie making off with my shoes..so once again, I need to exercise puppy vigilance. I may have to rename her “Beaver.”
After a day of wrestling with Zoe, Annie is now sleeping on her back at my elbow with all four legs sticking up in the air. Zoe is lying below her, along my leg.. Coco is on the
pillow next to my ear. Silent night, except for the tapping of these keys. It is well past midnight, so time for that to stop, too. To all a good night!
Click on photos to enlarge and read captions…Annie’s side of the story!
And now, my side of the story!!
I just looked for Annie for over 1/2 hour. She was miffed when I set her down to go let the plumbers in. They are here to fix an outside leaking broken pipe junction that is killing the plants it sprays with hot water when water is running. Cats inside, dogs locked in the doggie domain where they won’t bother the plumbers, Annie , however, is nowhere to be found. I worry that somehow she slipped out. Did she slip into the front yard and did the plumbers go out to get equipment and let her out into the street? No, I was sure she was securely inside when they came. Finally I let the other dogs in and Morrie found her under the bed in my room. Always a new thrill.
Now I am trying to polish my nails–something I started attempting to do over an hour ago– and Annie insists on being held. When I opened the door to search for Annie, Ollie slipped into the spare room where cats are not allowed because I am keeping it hypoallergenic for friends allergic to cats.. Plumbers just replaced a broken pipe join.This hot water can be a curse at junctions. Luis says he’s figured out one that will expand with hot water and not spring a leak. Crossed fingers. Annie has been begging to be picked up since she was located under bed, but wiggly puppies and nail polish just don’t mix. I wonder if she’ll ever understand that. She seems to be sulking how, her head buried under my desk skirt. She won’t even play with my favorite little toy made by the ladies of Operation Feed that I decided might distract her from less appropriate playthings.. She just must not be in a playful mood.
Click on Photos to Enlarge
It is very difficult trying to manage three different groups of animals: Coco and Morrie and Zoe, the cats and Annie. I let Annie sleep with me because she cries if I am not within reach, then this morning let other dogs in to my bedroom and they jumped up on bed with us and were too frisky because they were hungry and wanted to be fed and she got scared so I had to put Coco and Zoe and Morrie out to feed them, then took Annie out front hoping she would pee but cats came in so I put cat food out and picked her up so she wouldn’t eat it, brought her in to the kitchen to feed her and afterwards took her for a walk which was a real adventure.
When we came in, I came into the bedroom to get my computer and the other doggies were at the south screen door to my room. Annie ran over to touch noses so I cracked the screen a bit to let her out . The others were gentler so she ran away to play with them, but five or ten minutes later she was crying at the screen and they were jumping about her. I let her in and noticed wet footprints on the terrace and her legs and feet were sopping . Evidently she either stepped on the hot tub cover and then withdrew before sinking all the way in or stepped down one step into the pool, but if so more of her would be wet. At any rate, she is now sleeping by my side. It is tricky getting her acquainted with her new complicated environment. While I had her out front, Coco was up on roof over the front door watching .Yolanda had left the outside gate to the upstairs open and the dogs can run up the stairs, jump up on the low wall and run over the top of the doggie domain (room I built on just for the dogs) and get onto the dome and run all the way around the roof of the house. Only Coco does this at present, but the others can get up on the dome over my bedroom. See photo above as proof. I always keep the gate to the stairs closed for this reason.
No, I won’t Annie out on the back terrace around the pool unless I am near, but she has to learn about the pool. Yesterday the other dogs kept getting between her and water when she was near the pool. Diego and Morrie did this with Zoe, too. Slowly, she will learn not to enter into the pool and they will get used to each other. They are all very curious and not violent. Yesterday when I was in the hammock, Annie kept checking up on me, then would run away to play with them. It made me so happy, She has a babysitter this afternoon as I’m going to lunch at my friend Brad’s house and then out to an art show of my friend Isidro. Moms need to have some social life away from the kids! Really does feel a bit like dealing with a newborn. This was not as much of a problem with any of the other puppies, but none seemed as damaged as Annie does. I think she is doing pretty well for as terrorized as she was just two days ago!
Note: that big dog on the roof is actually a statue of Frida. Her ashes are inside of it. Just had to put her up there in her favorite place where she spent most of every day surveying the neighborhood. This was pre-gate when she had full access.
Heeeeeere’s Annie! Garbed in her new collar and i.d. tag. Today she learned not to be scared in a room with 5 people in it, learned how to play with her sisters and brother, discovered she preferred cat food to the very expensive puppy food my vet sold me, discovered she liked chewing on the corners of rugs, and decided she is only secure when her new mom is in the room or in the yard with her. May create problems. Tomorrow I’ve hired her a babysitter. She’ll go stay with Yoli, Yolanda’s daughter, while I go to Brad’s for lunch and then to an art show at the new Riberas Art Center.
P.S. She looks big here, but she is really tiny. Less than 2 kilos. Here is a photo of her next to a 12 inch ruler. She prefers sleeping on the floor to sleeping in her cushy bed. Perhaps she smells Zoe on the cushion and wants her own?
This is a piece i wrote 19 years ago that I found when I was sorting through old files. A few months after Lulu’s arrival, Annie decided to join us as well, and although both of the kittens have now joined Bear in that great scratching post in the sky, I enjoyed reading this story after so many years, so perhaps you will, too.
Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.
New Intruder
My closet rattles. One door is slightly ajar. Something is being batted about on the floor inside. A paw is visible now and then when it comes close to the bottom edge of the door. Once a nose with white whiskers peeks out, then shoots back in like a jack-in-the-box.
My tiny new kitten was a street waif. She arrived complete with sticky streaks on her underside and chin. She arrived with fleas and one sore eye–– the green one. The other eye is blue. There is a perfect fish outlined in white on a charcoal colored patch on her back. Her very long ears are a pale peach color and her head is big on an extremely thin body. Already after 4 days, she is starting to acquire a small pot belly from regular meals. The vet says she is four weeks old, but her body is so tiny and weightless that she seems more like a large mouse than a cat. I fear stepping on her and in fact have, but when I did, she made not a peep and her bones seemed to spring back like a sponge.
Her long eye whiskers were singed back almost to hair level in an unfortunate encounter with the gas burners on my stove. She is so fast that she leaped up on the counter before I could stop her. In similar fashion, she had walked across the bubble wrap jacuzzi cover that floated on the top of the water, so light that she made it from one side to the other without sinking. Another time, she leaped from the back of a chair to the top of the high metal display case, where her claws made little ingress into the metal and where for a few seconds she clung from the edge like a mountain climber before falling to the tile floor five feet below. Five minutes later, her head peeked up from the opening at the top of the lampshade of the lamp on the telephone table. This house is her new world, and she is the Magellan of cats.
Two weeks before, I had found Bear, my cat of 15 years, floating lifeless in my pool. It was horrible. I had seen the cat born and his burial seemed a reversal of the birth process. We buried him in the garden wrapped in his favorite silk sari from the end of my bed, and with the mouse-shaped doorstop he loved to bat around the house. I buried with him my intention not to have any more pets for a while. None could replace him.
Then, two weeks later, a mouse had streaked across the street in front of me and entered the store I was about to enter. Upon closer examination, the streak had been a tiny kitten that had leaped into a huge display basket of scarves, and it hadn’t taken too much encouragement by the shop owner to get me to promise to stop back by before we left that night to see if the kitten had been claimed by an owner or adopted by someone more determined to have a cat than I was.
Every animal I’d ever had in my life had come to me by accident or by its own volition, so when this placeless cat appeared, I had by habit accepted the karma and now she sleeps each night on my chest or on the pillow by my right ear. I am slightly allergic to her, and although she doesn’t flinch when I cough and sneeze, when I get up for a drink of water, she miaows. This word perfectly describes the sound she makes. She is loud. The sound of her echoes through my high-ceilinged brick and stucco house. “ Miaow, miaow, miaow, miaow,” but somehow it seems to belong here––to fill out the silence that might otherwise only be filled by the sounds of the television or the computer or the stereo––sounds that do not breathe or jump up to the arm of my chair or respond to a reassuring pat or the sound of the can opener. With the appearance of this newest little intruder, once again, my house has become a home.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 