Well, it's been a while...Sorry. Everything got crazy once our house got full of boxes. Paul has been great! He's emptied a ton of boxes. I've emptied some. I'm still working on it. I figured it's about darn time for another post. We wanted to keep this blog going while we were here. Just another way to stay connected.
The animals are really happy. The dogs love the yard. The cats love the windows. The piggies just love it. And the humans love it too. We didn't realize how different the piggies had been acting in Kodiak until we got here. They are boooking and wheeking like crazy! They are talking up a storm all the time. They pretty much quit doing that once we got to Kodiak. We're glad they're happy again!!!
On last Saturday, we were invited to a barbecue by the neighbors across the the street. We had a great time. They had invited a bunch of people from around the neighborhood. It was great food and great conversation. We stayed until midnight and we weren't the last to leave. We're hoping to return the favor soon, once we get some patio furniture and some more unpacking done.
Paul is enjoying work. The train he takes is really convenient. I drive Paul to the train in the morning. It is literally a three minute drive. It takes him 30 minutes to get to downtown and a ten minute walk to get to his office. I pick him up from the station again in the evening. Work is going pretty well. He's enjoying it. We're getting lots of calls in the evenings and weekends as all the people in his office have to check in with him if there is a case going on. He has to approve all press releases and such. I have dubbed him King of the Run-On Sentence People! I swear, every single one of the press releases has at least one paragraph of a run on sentence and sometimes more, depending on who is writing it. It's actually pretty funny. I do feel bad because one evening, Paul was checking the release and the run on sentence was terrible. He was trying to figure out how to fix it. I told him to call the guy who wrote it back and make him fix it. Paul said, Duh! that would be the smart thing to do. The guy called back after he had "fixed" it. The problem was that is was the same run-on sentence with only three words taken out. I said as much, but unfortunately said it a little too loudly and the guy heard me over the phone. He called back once more when it had been fixed and said that Paul should tell me that it wasn't "exactly the same sentence." Luckily, he took the unintended criticism of mine in good spirit.
Now, if we could just get the pay screw-ups fixed, we would be set. Somehow things got screwed up and the Coast Guard says they overpaid Paul when they didn't. They're paying him less this paycheck and who knows what else. It should be fixed sometime soon. Luckily, we have some savings set aside for these times when the Coast Guard screws up.
Well, we had a scare a few days ago. We had a heat wave here. It had been in the low 70's during the day and down to the 50's at night. It was great. It got hot though, in the 90's. Because of the type of windows we have (bottom swing out), they don't have screens on them. Nobody here has air-conditioning. It's usually hot for only a few days a year. Everyone just leaves their doors and windows open. Well, that's not so easy when you have cats that you don't want to go outside. We opened the windows, intending to leave them open only a little while. Then dinner was ready and we started a movie and guess what...That's right! We forgot about the windows being open. I went to go feed the cats at about 9:30pm and nobody came when I made the kissing noise (that signals feeding time). We looked and the window to the guest room was open a lot more that I had left it. The cats were out. And, of course, Sam wasn't wearing his collar because it had pulled off when he and Mike were wrestling.
Paul and I went outside and called and looked for the cats until 12:30. We thought we heard Mike's collar bell a few times near this one house, but there's lots of brush all over our neighborhood. There are also tons and tons of cats in our neighborhood. We had flashlights and kept checking out the eye-shine we saw, but it was always other cats...well, except for once when it was two racoons. It was really cool though. Paul had seen the eyes in the back of some really thick brush. There were two raccoons and when they turned away and you couldn't see their eyes, they basically disappered.
The dogs were out in the yard and had been quiet the whole time. Finally, close to midnight, they started barking. I was about a block away and headed for home right away, knowing something was up. Paul shouted that he had found Mike and I saw him (Mike) dash into the yard. We tried to corner him, but he was scared and bolted past me. I, meanwhile, bashed my thumb into the fence trying to grab Mike as he darted past me. I bent my nail back and it bled under the nail. It really hurt. We managed to get Mike without being bitten or scratched. Flash really helped by working with us to corner him and keep him from escaping the yard again. We put him in the bathroom (which has no windows) and kept looking for Sam for a little while longer. I wasn't quite as worried about him because we're pretty sure he went outside with his former owner. He is front paw declawed (GRRRR...declawing) but we were hoping that wouldn't make things too much worse. We decided to call off the search and hope that he would be waiting on the doorstep when we woke up.
The next day, Paul called in sick to work because he had gotten less than 3 hours of sleep. Sam was NOT on the doorstep when we woke up. I made a few calls to animal control and such just in case and was ready to make signs. In the early afternoon, we decided to take the dogs for a walk around the neighborhood and look for him. We were hoping that he hadn't tried/succeeded crossing Edmonds Way which is close behind us and 5 lanes of really fast traffic. We saw a man outside watering his flowers at the end of the block. I decided to ask him if he had seen Sam. I explained that our cat had gotten out the night before and asked if he had seen him. He asked if it was a Siamese cat, which it was, but I had not told him yet. I got excited and said yes. He said that the girl who lives in the house (I'm assuming he was the landlord or something) had called and said a Siamese cat had showed up in her living room (inside!) at 11am that day and was bothering her cats. She has shooshed him out of the house and he had headed back in the general direction of our house. YES!!! Partial success! He was alive that day, at least mostly unhurt, and was still in the neighborhood!! That bodes well. We decided to go door to door on our block and a few houses on the 2 surrounding blocks to see if anyone had seen him and also to tell them that he was ours and we were looking for him. Everyone was very nice about it. They said that if they saw him they would let us know.
We did get one funny story. Apparently, Mike had been doing some visiting the night before. The gentleman at the house with lots of brush, where we thought we heard Mike's bell, asked if Sam was black. Apparently a black longhaired cat (Mike) had come into his house the night before (when we had originally lost the cats). He peeked around until he saw the homeowner and ran out when the man said hi to him. I apologized profusely, but the man was very nice about it. He said if he saw Sam he would let us know.
We finished our door to door and decided to head home. We called for Sam every once in a while so he would perhaps hear us in case he was confused. It had been hot that day. We were hoping that he had found a place to stay cool and would head home that evening when the temperature cooled off. We were on the phone with Paul's parents when I saw an elderly gentleman from down the block heading towards our house with something in his arms. IT WAS SAM!!! I shouted to Paul and told Paul's mom to hold on. We went out and got Sam. We couldn't thank the man enough. Sam was home safe and sound. The man had seen Sam sitting near his front door. YEA!!! Door to door saved the day!! And neither cat was worse for wear. They both want to go outside now and have been meowing and caterwauling for the past 2 days, but no outside for them and no more heart attacks and sleepless nights for mommy and daddy!! Well, maybe a few until the figure out that meowing won't get them outside.
I've been back on my allergic elimination food plan. I haven't been feeling good the past few days. This is normal as the body slowly eliminates the allergic inflammation and normalizes. It's amazing what allergic inflammation can do to the body. I'm sure I'll feel better in a few days. It's at least not as bad as last time when I had been so sick and run down by the time I started. Today was an up-down day. My emotions were screwed up, which happens when you go on an elimination. Part of the withdrawl. I know it sounds weird, but the inflammation affects all of your body chemistry, including your brain. I'm feeling better now though.
Well, actually, I'm a little upset. Paul told me about something that happened in the neighboring city that is very disturbing. A man's two pitbulls were found hung over his fence. He tried to save them but they were dead before he could cut them down. This was a responsible owner who trained and socialized his dogs. Neighbors had expressed concern that there were pitbulls in the area as he walked his dogs. They had never hurt anyone. These two innocent dogs were strangled to death because some moron was scared that they might possibly hurt someone even though nothing had ever happened. There is a special place in hell for such people. It's right next to the special hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk in the theater (inside joke-ask if you don't get it). Sorry, but breed specific predjudices and laws are a huge pet peeve of mine. You can read the article about what happened at:
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003157827_pitbulls28m.html
What a terrible thing to happen to a responsible dog owner. I'm more worried that there is a lunatic that will strangle a person's dog with no provocation out there as opposed to some pitbulls. I sent an e-mail to the article author and asked them to forward the letter of condolence to the owner.
While I'm on my soap box, I'd like to talk for a minute about food. I just finished reading a book by Morgan Spurlock (the SuperSize Me guy) called Don't Eat This Book, that is a well researched book about food in the USA. It shows how "Big Food" (food corporations) are really bad and how most of the food isn't even food, but basically chemical and pesticide residue with some semblance of food. It is very scary how bad the food situation has gotten in the country. It is good to see some turnaround with the rise in popularity of free-range and organic food. This book makes you never want to eat corporate food again, which is so prevalent that it is very difficult to get away from. It helps to explain why everyone is getting sicker and sicker with weirder and weirder diseases. It is eye opening and I recommend that everyone read it, along with Fast Food Nation (Very inciteful) and possibly Food Politics (which I haven't read yet-but will as soon as Paul finishes it)!! Having been through food difficulties with allergies and chemical sensitivities it all makes sense. It really is so essential to eat healthy and biologicially appropriate food (not chemicals that some corporation says is food but can be left on a counter for years and won't grow mold). Your life does depend on it. So say no to corporate food and drink (like soda-especially diet soda which is chemicals in a can, and processed food-with its insidious MSG which often is labeled under many other names and can cause very serious health problems) and say yes to clean drinking water (no flouride-Europe has banned it because of health problems) and nutritious, free-range, organic, pesticide and chemical free, real foods. Your body and future generations (environmentally speaking) will thank you. Also, with the preservative and chemical free foods that we have bought, they seem to stay fresher for much longer than treated foods do. Weird huh? Just some food for thought...Pun intended.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

Renee (and Paul and all the mammimals)