Well, they are finally all done. There are a lot of pictures for you all to enjoy in the photo gallery. Now maybe I can finally catch up with all the posts required by law from when a bunch of people recently tagged me. Patience…
Add comment September 7th, 2005
I have almost all the vacation pictures ready in the photo gallery. For lack of a better system, I have them organized by day. As of now, it is complete through day 13. Actually uploading the photos is trivial, but I want to have a caption for each one, which is proving to be a bit more time consuming than I thought it would. Day 14, which I hope to have ready sometime tomorrow, will have all the pictures from our trip through Yellowstone National Park. I took over 180 pictures that day, and I’m going to upload 70 of them for your viewing pleasure, plus I have five photos from Day 15, the very last day of our vacation, including the aftermath of a very scary and potentially deadly highway incident (don’t worry, we’re all fine).
I’m also going to have a bunch of posts soon about more specific things on the trip, general observations, as well as things we learned about long car trips, kind of like a how-to guide for family vacations via automobile. What worked and what didn’t, ya know?
This was an epic journey for us (5450 miles in 15 days through nine states to visit several family members, three national parks, and a seemingly endless parade of tourist traps), and I don’t know when (or if) we’ll ever be able to do it again. It was a lot more expensive than I’d planned (we spent $687.50 just in gasoline), but I would gladly do it again if given the chance, and if I had it to do over, I would change very little.
4 comments September 6th, 2005
I just received a visit from a lady around the corner. She said that she has been walking door to door to see if anyone owns a gray cat. Well, we do. Apparently, a gray cat is stalking the neighborhood attacking cats. Now if you know our cat Tiger, he is not even aggressive with anyone or even with our other animals. I told her we have a cat and four dogs and he has never attacked them. Now come on he sleeps in Lexi’s bed. If I thought he was aggressive I wouldn’t have him here. She tried threatening me that if she sees him again she is going to call the humane society.
So, what is with people these days. Don’t people have better things to do with their time.
1 comment August 17th, 2005
The picnic was loads of fun! OK, so not a lot of people showed up. I know that Breanna and Rebecca Marie had health issues that prevented their appearance, but why no one else? Feel free to leave explanations as comments to this post. I mean, I wasn’t even able to give away all the wide-screen plasma TVs and Sony PSPs that I had as door prizes! OK, so there were no high-end door prizes. Actually, there were no prizes at all, even for the winners of the two games I had available for everyone to play. I’m not sure who won “Guess The Blogger” (thanks RM for the most amazing artwork), but I’m pretty sure I speak for all of us in attendance when I say that Stephanie was the winner of the “How Many Words Can You Create From The Letters In Blogger Picnic” game, based solely on being the first one to write down “boner”.
Even though we couldn’t setup a live webcam (no wi-fi within range in the area), Gabe and I were still able to geek out. Each of us used our Blackberry to leave a comment on the previous picnic update post while we were munching on chips and yelling at our kids to stop leaving the cooler open.
Is there a second Blogger Picnic in the future? I’m not sure. There was a lot of preparation that went into this, just for almost no one to show up. Summer’s winding down, anyway, so if I am going to try to plan another get-together, it will probably have to be something indoors. I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted if anything comes to mind.
Still, even though there was a very low turn out, it’s always a party when the two Hayes families and Justin and Stephanie get together, so of course we had a blast. There’s a whole bunch of pictures in the Photo Gallery, just click on Blogger Picnic.
2 comments July 31st, 2005
Years ago, before Billy and Matt were even in school, we lived in a tiny rental house in SE Portland. The house was really old and drafty, and we soon discovered we had a mouse problem. Before even getting in touch with the landlord, I figured I’d try to be mister responsible and take care of the problem myself, and I bought half a dozen or so mouse traps. These were the old fashioned, spring loaded, wood-base, Tom and Jerry cartoon style mouse traps.
We knew we had mice in the house because the boys’ pet hamster’s food was being eaten. (This was the replacement hamster, by the way, after the first one was found teats up in his cage early one morning for no apparent reason.) See, the hamster was a picky eater, and would only eat certain seeds from his bowl of expensive pet store brand hamster food, and he would shove the rest of the food (usually dried corn kernels) out of his cage, where it would gather on the top of the dresser until Kathy or I would clean it up. At some point we started noticing droppings outside the cage, and along the walls on the dresser and the floor, and so we knew that a mouse was coming in and eating the hamster’s rejects.
So I set the traps, and loaded them with, what else, swiss cheese. (Seriously, everything I knew about unwanted rodents, I learned from cartoons.) The cheese was never touched, and dried out and got moldy, but we knew the mice were still around, because we were still seeing droppings along the baseboards.
I next loaded up the spring traps with peanut butter. Same result, mouse ignores the peanut butter, still eats the hamsters rejected corn kernels. By the way, the irony of trying (unsuccessfully) to kill an apparently intelligent rodent with a strong sense of self-preservation that ate the unwanted rejected hamster food, while at the same time trying to keep alive another rodent that didn’t appreciate the food I worked so hard to put in his food bowl, and that was seemingly so fragile that a stiff overnight breeze would kill him, was lost on me.
Anyway, for round three, I tried embedding the corn kernels in the peanut butter. The next morning, the traps weren’t sprung, there were little kernel shaped holes in the blobs of peanut butter where the corn used to be, and more droppings along the walls. These were the same traps that took me like 15 minutes each to arm, and that would snap and spray me with peanut butter if I so much as looked at them the wrong way.
Finally, I gave up, and had the landlord bring over some kind of poison traps he set up around the perimeter of the house. Within a few days, there were no more visits from Jerry or his friends.
The best part of all this, however, was how jumpy Kathy was when she knew that there were rodents running around our house at will. She was taking a shower one day, and I sneaked into the bathroom, reached my hand into the tub under the shower curtain, and very gently tickled her toes while her face was lathered up and she couldn’t see anything. I think she might have actually left shampoo on the ceiling from how high she jumped. Oh, and I was very lonely for the next couple weeks, if you get my drift.
I sometimes wonder why Kathy still loves me…
3 comments July 25th, 2005
And I don’t mean incredible in a good way.
As you read in my previous post, Kathy was hospitalized last Sunday the 12th with a severe asthma attack. It was also the last week of school for the kids. They go to three different schools, at three different times in the morning, and get home at three different times in the afternoon. Needless to say, I was busy feeding them and shuttling them around, plus taking care of the two cats and six dogs (oops, I mean five dogs… more on that in a moment.) Between all this, I made sure I was at Kathy’s side at the hospital as much as possible, and that the kids got to visit her at least once each day.
The first few nights, I sit with Lexi as she cries herself to sleep because she misses mommy, and she knows that mommy won’t be there to wake her up in the morning. I explain that I will be there in mommy’s place each morning this week. This does not make her stop crying, which makes me feel even worse. At least she likes the breakfast I make for her.
Some friends from church brought me and the kids dinner on Wednesday, which was a wonderful relief. I didn’t have to cook anything, and we didn’t have to go out for fast food. Again.
Then comes Thursday. I get the kids off to school, the adult dogs are brought in from the backyard, the two puppy’s kennel is cleaned, and I notice that the smaller of the two puppies (the apricot colored one) is barely able to stand on his own. I put him by himself so he can eat as much as he wants before his brother pigs out, but he barely touches any food, and doesn’t seem to want to drink any water either. His eyes are closed, and his hair is starting to fall out (poodles don’t have fur that sheds, they have hair that continues to grow, just like people.) I go to the hospital to have lunch with Kathy again, then rush to make it back home before I have to pick up Lexi at school, not knowing that her school let out an hour early on that last day. When I get home, she is already home and is having a snack; she had walked herself home. It is only 1/2 mile or so, but she is only seven, and has never walked it alone. She is mad at me for not being there waiting for her. I feel like a monster.
Billy has already arrived home, and is giving the apricot puppy a bath because he stinks. We think it is because he has been wetting himself, but we will soon find out otherwise. Billy, Lexi and I take the puppy to the vet. He is 11 weeks old, and weighs only 1 pound 1 ounce. His temperature is ten degrees below normal. He is skinny and dehydrated, and he still stinks. Since the other two dogs from the litter are fine (one was sold a few weeks ago, and the other is active, and weighs almost twice as much), the doctor thinks this one has some sort of congenital liver and kidney problem that is not uncommon in small breeds. When the organs start failing, the body in effect starts secreting through the pores the toxins that are normally filtered through the kidneys. Basically, the puppy is sweating urine, and he is dying. I pay the doctor $25 for the office visit, $35 for euthenasia, and $1.12 for the cremation, based on the weight. Lexi is hysterical, wants me and the doctor to make the puppy healthy, and is mad at me because we can’t just take the puppy back home. She cries again for hours.
Kathy slowly got better towards the end of the week, and she came home yesterday morning. She was in the same tiny room for the entire seven days, leaving only to be wheeled to the X-ray lab a few times, and to walk around the nurses station the last couple days when she started getting better. She was going crazy being cooped up. Most of the nurses were great, but one of them was straight out of school, literally (this was her first nursing job, and she had been employed at the hospital for just two weeks.) Kathy had to actually tell her how to administer one of the medications into her I.V. (”NO! WAIT! You have to flush the line first! FLUSH THE LINE! Then you can inject it!”) She is now on twelve different prescriptions, at a grand total of $185 out of pocket. I shudder to think how much all of this would have cost if I didn’t have good health insurance.
I missed work every day last week, but everyone at the office was really great about everything. I have a bunch of forms I have to turn in to HR, some of which I had the doctor fill out, and I can charge the 40 hours against my sick leave. I went back to work today. Duirng the week I was out, I guess I kinda forgot how completely swamped my department is. By the time I left today at 4:00, I actually had more things outstanding than when I first got there at 7:00.
Still, just about anything’s going to better than last week.
5 comments June 20th, 2005
No foolin’ this time.
Our toy poodle Lucy just had one puppy minutes ago, and more are on the way. I’ll put some pictures here as soon as all the babies are born and cleaned up. No one wants to see sticky, wet, new born puppies, right?
3 comments April 1st, 2005
As reported earlier, we got another dog. This makes four (not counting the soon-to-be puppies waiting to burst forth from Lucy and Sissy’s bellies).
A friend of a friend knew of someone (no, this is not the makings of an urban legend) who could no longer take care of their pomeranian Heidi, and if they couldn’t find a good home for her, they were going to have to take Heidi to the pound. Hayes family to the rescue! Heidi’s previous owners were an elderly couple. The wife died recently, and the husband was going to be moving into a retirement home and couldn’t bring Heidi along.
She is eight years old, housebroken, and extremely mellow, very much UNlike our other three dogs, all purebred toy poodles, all on crack. At least, that’s what it seems like to me.
(Click the thumbnails for larger images)
3 comments March 30th, 2005
We do love animals, but honestly, what is it with us and small, blind, lost housepets?
We were in the front yard Saturday, and Kathy noticed a pudgy little dog walking down the middle of the street. She looked like a dachsund-beagle mix, and generally seemed oblivious to the fact that she would’ve been hit by the next car to come around the corner at the end of the street.
Kathy went out into the street to look at the dog’s tag, but she was a bit skittish and recoiled from Kathy’s touch. She turned direction as if she was going to walk into our yard, but instead of hopping up onto the curb, she just bumped right into it, chest-first. She shook her head and turned and kept walking along the curb a bit more. I gently picked her up and took her into our yard.
She had a tag on her collar, and looked like a very well-fed, gentle old dog. The address on the tag was several miles away in Tigard, so we were a bit puzzled how this blind dog ended up in our neighborhood. I called the number on the phone and got an answering machine. There was no indication from the outgoing message that this was the correct number, so I left a simple message saying that we were taking care of the dog, and to please call back.
The dog’s owner called several hours later, extremely grateful that we had taken the dog out of the street and had cared for it. She had just moved from her place in Tigard into a house just down the street from us, and didn’t realize there was a hole in the fence just large enough for the dog to fit through. Her husband came down to meet us and take the dog back home.
This had a much happier ending than the previous blind stray pet experience (we confirmed with the vet a few days later that they had to put that cat down. Lexi cried and cried when she heard the news.)
Add comment March 7th, 2005
We rescued an otherwise doomed kitty Saturday night. We were on our way home at about 6:00, driving down a pretty busy road. I saw a cat walking down the middle of one of the side roads that meets up with the street we were on. She was walking very slowly and kind of crouching, as if she were stalking something. She was about to walk into traffic, seemingly oblivious of the cars racing by.
We turned at the next street and went around the block, and by the time we got back to the intersection, two other good samaritans had also stopped. They apparently saw someone else hit the cat, look back to see what happened, then quickly drive away. The cat wasn’t crushed anywhere, so the car must not have rolled over any part of the cat, it must have just bumped against it somehow. Neither of these people wanted to take any more responsibility for the cat, so we took it home. One of them had just come from the grocery store, and gave us a couple small packets of wet cat food they had just bought for their own cat.
We did everything we could for the cat, and she did eat a bit of the food. She stayed in our bedroom overnight, away from our other two cats. She was very lethargic, and seemed to have almost no strength. We would bend down to pick her up, and she would almost fall over as we gently upset her balance when we lifted her.
While watching her slowly stumble around the room, almost bumping into everything in her path, we realized that the cat was blind. She walked slowly enough that she wouldn’t hurt herself if she did walk into something, but she was able to avoid things by sensing them with her whiskers. Her eyes were cloudy, and she would not track objects that were moved in front of her, nor blink when something was rapidly moved close to her face. She wasn’t deaf, as she would respond to snapped fingers near her head.
She had no collar, but she didn’t look like a stray cat that lived on the street. She could barely walk, let alone fend for herself. There are no houses or apartments for several blocks in all directions where we found her. We can only conclude that someone abandoned her in the area.
She was in worse shape Sunday. Kathy, Lexi and I drove her to an animal hospital in Beaverton. By the time we got there, she was almost completely unresponsive, and Kathy thought she had died in her arms a few times. They took the cat in, and said they would take care of it. They said it looked like the cat was very old, and that she was even starting to lose some of her teeth.
I don’t understand how someone could just abandon their pet like this.
Update 3/7/05: Read about another lost pet adventure with a happier ending here.
1 comment February 14th, 2005
I turn 35 in two days. My oldest son starts high school next year. It’s weird though, I don’t feel old at all.
A lot of things have happened since the last update. On January 12th, just four days after the last update in fact, 12 people in the IT department were laid off, most from my division. 11 of the 14 people in my division were let go, and one person from another division was moved to ours.
Last Sunday, our dog Sissy had puppies again. Kathy was here to help with the delivery, and actually did a little bit of puppy CPR on one of the little things when it came out limp and unresponsive. All four made it, and they are doing fine. Here are some pictures:
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Add comment February 20th, 2004
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