Reason #27 why I am not a cat person

I wouldn't exactly describe myself as a cat person. I'm not anti-cat, but let's just say that I didn't spend my last year in Venezuela daydreaming about coming home and getting my own cat.

It just so happens that my mom got a new barn cat while the rest of us were out of town a couple weeks ago. I will concede that she is pretty cute...despite being a real yowler. And so far she's been feisty enough to evade Hannah's attempts to turn her into the newest squeaky toy, so I've got to give the little girl credit. Her name is Clementine. I've since taken liberties with her name and started calling her Myddie since my first significant interaction with her was helping take care of her eye that was infected with chlamydia. (Apparently that's normal, but I can't get past how gross it sounds). Myddie works just fine for me.

Last night we had a whopper of a rain storm. Unfortunately we are discovering that the roof of our new barn leaks like crazy, so li'l Myddie ran outside seeking shelter under our friend Holly's truck and thus begins the saga....

Holly needed to cut her visit short and as she was getting ready to leave we realized that Myddie was no longer just under the truck but had climbed up into the undercarriage to avoid the standing water accumulating in the driveway.

Plan A was to startle her and hope she'd take off running from the truck. But after several minutes of banging on the sides of the truck and setting off the panic alarm, still no Myddie.

That's when we moved to Plan B: Emily crawling under the truck (note previous comment about standing water) for operation Kitty Extraction. I have no idea where she was hiding but she was doing it well. We could hear her cry every once in a while, but couldn't see her. And you better believe I crawled all around under the truck on my back looking.

Holly helped out by hitting the panic button a few times while I was under the truck. It was nowhere near as loud as I expected it would be. That's a plus, I guess.

I crawled from the exhaust system to the engine and back again before I finally found Myddie on top of Holly's spare tire. And even though she was yowling like mad, there was now way that she was going to come down. I was just trying to help and all she would do was hiss at me. Yeah, like I'm excited to be under the truck in a puddle, Myddie. Just give me a break already and come out, would ya?

After a couple rounds of her "kitty doesn't want to take a bath" routine of bracing her legs against any available surface I managed to pry her loose and hand her to my mom. At which point Myddie stopped hissing and started purring like a boat motor. Figures.

I was soaked from head to toe but by that point had stopped caring so I took a moment to admire a bright double rainbow with Holly. While pondering the significance of the rainbow I quipped, "Isn't that God's sign to say 'I promise I'll never do that to you again'?"
I sure hope so. **Please note that the stinkin' cat is bone dry in both photos. I'm wet, the cat's snuggled into a raincoat. Myddie's only a few months old and she's already figured out how to work the system.

Parading Around

This year we did the 4th of July parade the way the locals do: from the back of the pickup (which we strategically parked last night for a primo view). We're Texans now, I guess.

My brother tells me (and rightly so) that I have the reflexes of a dead cat. So you can imagine all of our surprise when I caught the piece of candy thrown at me by a passing parader.

This is for real: there was a roller derby float. And here I was thinking that was just an invention of cable television.

And then the local weather guy went walking by and I got all excited. Seriously, Doppler Dave is the man.

And I just can't leave out the cute little old lady sitting in front of us. Kind of a sassy thing, don't you think?

The kids.

It's been an eventful first week of life for these little pups. The runt of the litter just wasn't strong enough to survive no matter how much we tried to help her. So now the numbers are down to 7. These little guys are growing like crazy and even showing bits and pieces of their personalities. They've picked up names along the way. I'll admit that I got some help from my new 9-year old friend, Micah, to come up with names for all of them. I just wish Micah had been around to help me take these photos. Do you have any idea how tricky it is to get 3 puppies to pose for a photo at once? I'm afraid these are the best shots you'll get with a photographer of my low caliber.


Three of the females are white so far, but getting freckles on their noses and ears. That means pretty soon they won't need to be marked with nail polish in order to distinguish between them. From left to right: Hope, Pinkie, and Olivia.






There are 3 lookalikes with eye patches: Curly, Larry, and Moe.




Last but not least: Batman. He's the explorer of the group.

The Big Day

Waiting became a group activity. Belle helped keep Tazz company all day long and even helped break in the whelping box. She left me to handle the phone calls from folks wanting play-by-plays. What a pal. Thanks, Belle.




Finally, Tazz's water broke just after midnight (how come nobody told me it would be green?!? kind of a gross surprise, if you ask me). And we all spent a sleepless night waiting for something to happen. At 7am the first puppy showed up and within an hour the total was up to 5. The last 3 must have been busy doing their make-up and didn't sneak into the mix until a couple hours later. The late ones were all girls...wouldn't you know it.
The final breakdown: 5 girls and 3 boys. (Mary T, you're the big winner with your guess of 8).

Once the puppies grow a little bit, get names and stop looking like gerbils, I will post some more photos.

Still waiting...

No puppies yet, folks. I don't know if I've ever waited this hard in my life! Seriously, even the UPS guy asked this afternoon if Tazz had her puppies yet. sigh
Thanks for all of the guesses. Judging by the way Tazz's belly keeps stretching every day, Andrea you might just win. Win what? I don't know.

Waiting

No one loves 100 degree weather more than a pregnant woman. Between the heat and the puppies that are due any minute now. all our poor little buddyTazz can do is wait.

This week I'm taking care of our friends' house and dogs and maybe, just maybe, I'll be helping Tazz deliver some puppies. It's my rookie year as a midwife, so I'm banking on nature to cover my back on this one.

The photo doesn't do Tazz's swelling justice, but trust me, she's enormous. When she lays on the floor her whole belly is alive with who knows how many puppies jostling around like a pack of WWF wrestlers. Either that or I am about to witness the next sequel in the Alien series before it hits theaters. I'd prefer the former.

Remember those games where you have to guess how many jellybeans are in the jar? Let's play our own version. Go ahead and leave your guess in the comment box.

Here are our family guesses:

Deb: 12

Emily: 11 puppies and 1 kitten

Thrillseekers and Babysitters.

Sometimes the only place to hide from the relentless wind and 105 degree heat is on our back porch. Few know this better than our newest tenants. This pair of barn swallows (I like to think of them as Maxwell and 99) spends the afternoon on our ceiling fan, which turns softly with the what little wind reaches the porch.
They've grown quite comfortable with people, dogs and even the cat moving through the area. Perhaps a little bit too comfortable...so every once in a while I like to give them a little thrill by turning on the fan. They go nuts squawking and flying about. But as soon as the fan turns off, they're right back for more. Action junkies.

Tell you what, Maxwell and 99, you can hang out on our fan just as long as you keep on babysitting Hannah. Deal? Deal.

Flirting with disaster

I just changed up the music on my ipod. I have it on shuffle mode to keep me cruising along on the treadmill. I think I should probably take the stuff with a Latin beat out of the mix. I really love it, but that's the problem. Whenever it comes on I feel this craving to bust out a little salsa move. I have a track record with disaster (I guess I even have a track record with falling off of gym equipment) so trying to dance on a moving surface is like, well, sticking a match inside a gas-filled oven. Trust me, that doesn't turn out well either.

I asked for it, I got it.

I've never really been afraid of spiders. Never really gave them a second thought until today. If you have issues with spiders, just skip this post.
It's laundry day today. I was taking my clothes hamper out of my closet and noticed something odd. So odd, in fact that I ended up throwing everything out of my closet to see just what was going on. The floor of my closet was covered in dead spiders. A hundred dead spiders. Last week there were none. Today, there were one hundred. Sick. My question is if it's still called arachnophobia if don't scare me so much as make me want to vomit?
So, in response to my last post, I think I've found a new gross. Well, whoopee-ding.

Re-evaluating gross

Lately I've been puzzled by my lack of odd and/or gross experiences. I'm used to having a "guess what happened to me" story in my pocket. And must admit that over the last few weeks I'd been wondering if my special Emily charm had worn off.

It hasn't.

We came in the house this evening after a day of staining the wood in our new barn. I was sitting in my chair, attempting to both pay attention to family conversation and decide of that slight odor was anything to be concerned about and if so, where it was coming from. I did the usual glance at my shoe bottoms. Nothing. Smelled my dog. Nothing out of the ordinary. I resigned to the fact that I might just be going crazy and headed into my office. That's when I walked into what can only be described as a thick wall of stink.

My brother's dog was hiding in the corner and that's when all the pieces of the puzzle came together. Suddenly I understood why the horse had been so intent on sniffing her earlier. It turns out she'd taken a nice long roll in a skunk carcass. Personally, I don't know what smells worse: skunk on the dog, or skunk coming off the dog in the bath water. Six of one, half a dozen of the other I suppose.

I always thought skunk would top the gross list. But now that it's all said and done I can honestly say, "I've seen worse."

Happy Birthday to Jeff!

Well, there it is, folks. Jeff Gordon (my car) hit 100,000 miles on the last road trip. He's beginning to show his age. Last night, just 200 miles from home, the service engine soon light started flashing. But, hey, there's nothing like a flashing orange light and that nagging fear that the engine could drop out at any moment to keep a person alert for the last 4 hours of a 17 hour solo trip. Thanks, Jeff. You're always looking out for me.

A serpent in the garden

There is a prophecy in the book of Genesis that speaks of the enmity between the serpent and the descendant of Eve. "...He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel." In my understanding this prophecy was fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Satan thought he had his victory when Christ was crucified. But that crucifixion was actually just a bruising of the Savior's heel, not the end of the story. Christ won the ultimate victory when He defeated the powers of sin and death with His resurrection from the dead. In my mind Easter is the celebration of Christ's resurrection and the fulfillment of the prophecy that the serpent's head will be crushed. Keep that in mind as you read the following story about my Easter Sunday afternoon.
I'm in Kansas at the moment and staying with a great, gracious family that is kindly hosting me and encouraging me as I try to raise some financial support in the area. They invited me to join them in their family Easter gathering at Grandpa and Grandma's house. Every year they have an Easter egg hunt in the yard for the grand kids. Apparently Grandma has been saving the large plastic eggs from pantyhose containers for decades and there were almost 100 eggs to hide. I jumped at the invitation to help hide the eggs outside. I was given the task of hiding the eggs for 4 year old Laci. It was a sweet job because you don't have to be sneaky at all to hide for someone that young. Literally, I was setting the eggs in plain sight in the grass. While placing one such egg I screamed and nearly had a heart attack when I realized a little too late that I put the egg on top of a snake! I hate snakes. Apparently so does Grandpa Lyle. He came right over and killed it by stomping on its head. All on Easter Sunday...what are the odds?

Chocolate Milk Mustache

Hannah spent the morning drinking out of mud puddles. Her muddy snout doesn't look so bad because she wiped most of it on my pants when she came in.
I'm going to miss her clown antics for the next couple of weeks while I take a short trip to Kansas. While I'm in Wichita I'll get to meet up with some friends I haven't seen in a long time and hopefully meet some new folks, too. Join me in praying that God uses these 10 days in Kansas to bring in the next 15% of my total support needs so that I am at 85% of my total goal by the end of the month.
And you can pray for my family, too. They're going to need a little bit of extra patience taking care of crazy Hannah. :)

Sleep on it.

If I got a buzz cut I don't think I would mind all the wind so much. Tonight I almost got blown down by a 50mph gust. That was after I got blasted with gasoline blowing off the nozzle while I was filling up. I smell like a truck stop. Last week an empty dumpster about had its way with me while I was trying to bring it up from the street.
Now for those of you who know me well you're thinking, "Emily, all those things would happen to you regardless of the wind." You're right. And that's not what I'm complaining about. What irks me is that my hair gets tied in knots and smacks me in the eyes while all of the accidenting is going on. That's why I want a buzz cut...so I can stumble in style. Maybe I'll wait a few days to make any big decisions.

Close to home

I'll be the first to admit that in this day and age when we are constantly bombarded by waves of urgent news and tragedy on the news all I want to do is turn it off. I've even become so hardened by it that I find myself apathetic to world events all together. I get tired of media hype that seems to last just a little too long and then forgets last week's tears and moves on to this week's sensation. Call me cold, but I tend to stop caring about the news because I don't actually think about it affecting real people. With all of the information overload, I have reduced these people in my mind to nothing more than extras in a never-ending made for tv movie.

But this morning my heart breaks as the world news headlines strike close to home and I realize my foolishness. There was a plane crash in Venezuela. Not just any plane. It's a flight that I've flown a dozen times before: from Merida (which is the last place I really called "home") and heading to the capital city of Caracas. In fact, one of my dear friends missed being on that flight by just 24 hours: same route, same time.
We always picked the same airline and condsidered the questionable nature of the aircraft part of living an adventure. I still have my frequent flyer "card," which is really just a piece of paper, tucked in my wallet as a humorous reminder of the backwards ways things often work in my beloved Venezuela.

Today that worn piece of paper becomes a reminder of the fragility of life. In the face of instant and continuous news sensations that little paper card now sits as a reminder of the deep reality of our fallen world. Friends, we are deeply fallen yet deeply loved by the God of the universe who sent His Son, Jesus, to die for us while we were yet sinners. (Romans 5:8). For the moment I find myself torn between emotions of grief and joy. We live in a place that is overwhelmed with tragedy and brokenness, but yet there is hope in Christ.

Redefining genius

Last night I happened to catch this little gem from the less than witty banter between the local meteorologist and the 10 o'clock news anchors.
"Today's wind speeds topped-out at 45 mph. Just imagine getting in your car and driving 45 miles per hour. That will give you a good idea of how fast the wind was blowing today."
Sheer genius.

Mission accomplished.

Yesterday I was talking with my new friend Melina, who is from Mexico City. We were just shooting the breeze in Spanish when she stopped and said, "You know, you really do speak Spanish with a Venezuelan accent. It's funny. You don't even sound like an American."
That's about the best compliment a foreign language geek can receive, I think.

The week my PhD genius brother came home to play with me

For a kid who has 5 brothers and sisters, I spend an amazing amount of time feeling like an only child. My younger brother came home for Christmas this year. It was nice to have some sibling company we quickly returned to our normal habits :
Watching the Discovery Channel...







Watching the Discovery Channel and pretending like mom hasn't already taken 20 pictures of us...









Going on a hike and putting all those years of watching The Kids in the Hall to good use...


And then there was the photo shoot... Supposedly we're the same height, but each of us claims to be taller than the other. I'm taller. That's the truth. We took turns standing in a hole just in case.

Weekend Warriors

The fence is in, the barn is almost finished, and the new place is starting to look and feel more like home each day.

Life looked like a Chevy commercial the past couple of days with all of the work vehicles around this weekend. My parents and some local helpers spent the whole weekend putting up a whole lot of split rail fence. A job well done, I'd say, especially considering the way they dodged the gasline. I can't claim much credit for any of the finished product. My job: Junior Credit Card Swiper. I did a couple of odd jobs here and there buying construction materials and food, but all the credit goes to the Weekend Warriors. Here's a look at the weekend in pictures:

One crazy thing that makes me smile

Meet Hannah. She's my sassy Australian Shepherd puppy who absolutely loves to keep me on my toes. There's no snooze button on this 4-legged alarm clock. She'll do whatever it takes to wake me up, even if that means hitting me in the head with her water bowl.

She's beautiful and has all the dignity and delicacy of a WWF wrestler. And I have to admit that's exactly what I love about her. Lately she's had to spend a lot of time inside and seems to keep herself busy by herding the flies that make their way in from the yard. She'll chase them all around the house with great enthusiasm. From time to time I'll hear a clatter and thud coming from the kitchen where Hannah has jumped into the air and body slammed the cabinets in pursuit of a stray fly. 'A' for effort.

I've been grateful for her companionship and crazy antics throughout this transition of leaving behind some dearly loved friends and life in Venezuela to walk into this next glorious chapter of life.