Wevis and The Kindest Cut

I spay and neuter cats and dogs for a living. Occasionally I get to do other surgeries, such as non-elective soft tissue procedures – cystotomies, mass removals, entropion repairs and such, but only when we don’t have so many spays and neuters as to fill up the schedule. Most of the time the schedule is indeed filled with spays and neuters. Sometimes I get to work in the treatment department at the other end of the hall, frantically trying to examine, diagnose, and treat the dozens of ailing pets received by the shelter on any given day. Mostly however, I stay in the same operating room, moving from one table to the other, back and forth, back and forth, from spay to neuter, neuter to spay, spay to neuter . . . for eight hours each work day. It can certainly be monotonous, but it’s not for this reason that I would like to find another line of work.

If there were no more spays and neuters for me to do, it would mean that the large metropolitan animal shelter I work in would no longer be receiving hundreds of unwanted cats, kittens, dogs (and rabbits!) every week of the year. That would only happen if all residents of the county began to practice responsible pet ownership. If they neutered all pets before allowing them to reach reproductive age. If all breeding happened intentionally by experienced, licensed, responsible breeders who bred only healthy pets and only enough to meet demand.

If this were to happen, the shelter would still receive pets, but they would be only lost pets (destined to be returned to their owners via microchips of course), pets whose owners have passed away, or pets whose owners can no longer keep them because of unforeseeable circumstances. Then, spays and neuters would only be performed in private practices, and I would be doing a lot more cystotomies, dentals, and mass removals. The non-profit dollars now spent on eight hours of spays and neuters every day could perhaps be spent providing non-elective surgeries for the pets of low income elderly and disabled owners who truly can’t afford veterinary care for their beloved companions. This is that other line of work I’d like to find.

So to help this plan along, I designed a small book to encourage pet owners to neuter their pets. It’s cute and light, not at all preachy, and shows a little of what a pet experiences when getting neutered. Just a little. It also shows a bit of what happens in an animal shelter. Just a bit. My experience has been that there are still too many pet parents out there who just don’t fully understand how many unwanted pets there still are in communities all over our country. Most county and municipal animal shelters still have to euthanize many, many healthy cats and dogs because there aren’t enough homes. I want to do more than just surgeries to stop this from happening. I want to address this problem at the root. Maybe my book can convince just a few pet owners to neuter their pets in a timely fashion.  Just a few. Okay, actually, a lot. A whole lot. I want the entire country to care about our pets and be better owners. And once that has happened . . . let the translations begin.

Wevis and The Kindest Cut can be purchased in paperback or Kindle at Amazonsmile.com or Amazon.com here:

 

 

 

 

Amazing Teenager Publishes Book About Saving Homeless Kitties

(Minnesota, USA) – When you first meet him, Justin M. Anderson, 16, who lives in Minnesota, seems like your typical American teenager. He enjoys drawing, playing computer games and texting with his friends. But in the summer of 2015, he took on a cause not too many teenagers delve into. He became an advocate for the […]

via American Teenager’s Book Making a Difference for Cats — Katzenworld

Thrift Store Fairy Garden Birdbaths

Thrift store junkie, flea market fanatic, junkroom gypsy, call me what you like, I’m one of those. It’s inherited, my brother and mother are ones too. So I’ve surrendered myself and combined this love with others to avoid becoming a hoarder. (That runs in the family too.) I also love to do things myself whenever possible, decorate my gardens, and provide for the wildlife that visits my home. Birdbaths are one wonderful way to scratch all those itches at once. Second hand beautiful or interesting plates or bowls can be glued to candle stands, flower vases, mason jars, cake stands, lamp bases, and even plain old tin cans filled with sand, to make instant birdbaths or butterfly feeders. Mixing and matching the parts is especially fun. Here are a few non-traditional results from my gardens:

And two elegant examples from my Mom’s gardens:

Some are quite small, and some are full size, but all were made from discounted items found at thrift stores or flea markets. I think they are more interesting than the standard issue concrete or plastic birdbath, not to mention a lot less expensive!

There are some precautions that should be taken, of course. Any glue used should be appropriate for the surfaces and outdoor safe. Some materials are temperature or moisture sensitive. Many ceramic and glass items will crack or shatter if frozen. Unfired clay items will turn to mush in wet conditions, and painted items that have not been sealed may peel or fade. Birdbaths with those features should be taken inside and stored for the winter or rainy season. Stands should be substantial enough to support the bowls or plates, thus, the sand used to fill tin cans. Mason jars or lightweight vases can be filled with pretty stones or painted rocks. And, of course, taller birdbaths with fragile components should be stabilized to avoid tipping over and breaking.

I’d love to see pictures of similar items made by readers, and add them to this post. Please comment with your ideas or send me your photos!

Of Witches and Goddesses

Even as a kid I always knew there was more to Halloween than costumes and candy. Halloween was my favorite holiday, as it seems to be for my children now. As much as I loved it however, I knew there was something we were leaving out. I could smell it in the air and feel it in the tingle of my spine. Not until my mid-thirties did I discover what was missing. It was the part the early Christians edited out, the part that really scared them, more than any witch or werewolf tale could scare a child today. It was the maternal pagan version of the afterlife that terrified them, and so this version was contorted, demonized, and ultimately replaced with the secular and (literally) sugar coated capitalist orgy it is today.

Earlier tonight, after the trick-or-treating and the sorting of the candy, and the shedding of the ninja and Grim Reaper costumes, I read a bedtime story to my boys. It was called “A Journey to the Shining Isle” by Starhawk. It’s an amazingly gentle story written for children that helps explain the origins of Halloween, or Samhain (SAH-win) as it once was known. The full story can be found in Circle Round, Raising Children in Goddess Traditions, by Starhawk, Baker, and Hill.

This is my favorite passage:

You step up onto the shore of a magic land that looks different to every person who comes here.You see the most beautiful place you can imagine, and just the sort of place you like best, whether it’s a valley or mountains, or a beautiful garden or a beach or a warm house. Someone is there to greet you, an ancestor, someone who loves you very much. Who is it? Is it someone you know and miss and remember, or someone you have never met before? Or is it someone you have met in a dream?

You play for a long time, and at last, when you get hungry and thirsty and tired, an old, old woman appears. She is so old her face is covered with wrinkles, but her eyes are so bright they glow like two big moons. At her feet is a big, round iron pot – a cauldron – and she is stirring something in it with a big wooden spoon, around and around and around.

You go close to the cauldron and look inside. At first it seems dark, but then you notice thousands of tiny, glowing lights, like little stars. Around and around and around they swirl, until you get a little dizzy from watching them.

“Those are the souls of the dead,” the old woman says. “And they are also the souls of the unborn. In my cauldron, I brew them back into life. Would you like to taste my brew?”

She holds out her spoon and puts one drop of her brew on your tongue. It tastes like the best thing in the world you can imagine. Just one drop is enough to leave you perfectly satisfied. You look into her eyes again and realize she is the Goddess.

“Remember this taste,” she tells you, “whenever you are afraid or have to do something hard. It will give you strength and courage. But now it is time to go.”

Sadly you say goodbye to the Goddess, to your ancestor, to everyone you have met here on The Shining Isle. You walk slowly back to the shore. A whole year will pass before you can visit here again, but you will remember your ancestor, and maybe in your dreams you will meet again . . .

Today when I smelled the air and felt that familiar tingle, I knew it was the essence of the afterlife, wafting through the gossamer veil that separates that world from our own. I know that tomorrow that veil will be a little less porous, but that one day it will disappear entirely for me, as it eventually does for everyone. When it does, somewhere on that Shining Isle, I’ll find my own grandmothers again, sewing quilts and laughing as they sip their dandelion wine, and stirring their own cauldrons in a stone cabin nestled in the mystical mountains of my childhood.

There’s Nothing Like a Good Stick

I love trees. Especially intact trees that have not been cut down. Lumber trucks loaded with freshly cut tree trunks make me cringe. I avoid the use of new lumber, paper, and other tree products as much as possible for this reason. One thing I can get from a tree without guilt is a stick. Sticks normally fall from trees for a variety of natural reasons, and can be found anywhere trees are. Sticks are useful for many things.

My first son was playing with sticks by the time he was nine months old. He has been a stick connoisseur ever since. His younger brother has learned the value of a good stick from him, and many a scuffle has been born over ownership rights to found sticks. These include one particularly memorable stick conflict that took place at the very edge of a 300 foot precipice at Pinnacles National Park, as the condors circled hopefully overhead. My husband terminated this one by snatching each party up and away from certain death by the scruff of the neck and proclaiming them “Idiots!!” . . . . Well, it was a good stick.

Because good sticks are so abundant in our area and because I love sticks, I use them for lots of things around my house and out in the field. Curtain rods, towel racks, wall hangings, garden stakes, bird perches, decoration, furniture, hiking sticks, mushroom hunting sticks, etc. I know a lady who once fought off a mountain lion with her mushroom hunting stick. Yes, a good stick can save your life as well as help put food on the table.

This year I decided to make a stick fence to keep our chickens and ducks out of my new fairy garden. In this way I could honor my appreciation of trees instead of contributing to their demise, however small the gesture. The fence works well, looks quaint, and cost about seven dollars for two rolls of eighteen gauge wire to attach the sticks to the boards, which came from a discarded trellis. It took several months to attach all the sticks, but I was never lacking for a steady supply. Every walk or hike we took in the woods yielded at least a couple of good sticks for the fairy garden, and our backyard trees contributed regularly. My boys were great help in this endeavor. Of course, they always kept the really good sticks for themselves. And to this day they still fight over the best ones, precipice or no.

Truckers Like Horse Art Too (conclusion)

After having so much fun adding vibrant colors to Valraven, I was a little reluctant to bring it back down to grayscale. I had to do it for the book though, and I couldn’t wait to see which colors other artists might choose for it. It took its place as page fourteen in Fancy Prancers – A Fine Art Coloring Book of Horses.

Truckers Like Horse Art Too (cont.)

The sketch was originally intended to stand alone and I called it something generic like “Pony in Motion.” Later I grew bored with the plain graphite image. I wanted a more dramatic background, some color, and I wanted to play with acrylics. After some collage work, I mixed up a bunch of paint and carried everything out in the front yard.

My two boys were hopping around like fleas in their excitement over me being outside with cups of paint. They’d never seen me splash paint on a canvas before. Not that I hadn’t done it a thousand times already with watercolors, but that was mostly before they were born. So I splashed and flicked and poked and splattered to the tune of “Can I do it??!! Can I do it??!! Can I do it??!!” Not that they hadn’t done it a thousand times before with finger paint and watercolors, but this was different – this was Mommy’s “‘spensive paint”.

So I let them each flick some paint on with a large brush, and they were somewhat satisfied. What they really wanted to do was fling the paint at each other. I was more satisfied after gluing the graphite pony on and adding a coat or two of varnish. Valraven was fun to do, and I believe more fun to look at than a plain graphite pony.

Truckers Like Horse Art Too

Not long ago while on vacation, I was riding in our van with my sketch pad in my lap. I was working on the horse in Valraven, a mixed media painting. Wearing motion sickness wristbands, trying to convince myself they were working, I scribbled, erased, scribbled, erased. The guys were listening to a book on CD and my husband was in a driving trance.  We were on a four lane highway in Northern California, heading south.

An eighteen wheeler inched up along us on my side. He was keeping the cab of his truck right there, next to me. There wasn’t much traffic, and just as I started to wonder “What the . . . ?” he tooted his horn very briefly. I looked up and saw him leaning forward, pointing down at my sketch, which was almost finished. He smiled, gave me a big thumbs up, and then rolled on past us.

My husband glanced over. “What was that about?”

“Oh, just 80,000 pounds of art aficionado . . . “

There’s A Problem With My English

I know there is a problem with my English because my youngest son is hearing different messages than what I believe to be issuing from my lips. Early this morning, while trying to get out the door to go to work, after directing him to wash his face, brush his teeth, and put his shoes on, he met me in the foyer with a loud “Bang Bang! Stick ’em up!!”.

The message that actually reached his ears was “Go put on your cowboy belt with holster, your Indiana Jones hat, and a pair of Zaffre blue latex exam gloves (they’re in the veterinary bandage supply cabinet which you aren’t supposed to mess with, but it’s okay this once) and then come back and pretend to be a cowboy with OCD as if I don’t have to be at work until noon.”

I Rescued A Spider With My Bare Hand Today

Lifelong arachnophobe that I am, my left hand reached down in an unauthorized move and deftly scooped the creature from the churning waters, then unceremoniously dumped her on the floor while the rest of my body fainted. I had been running water for a shower, waiting for it to warm up, scowling at all the dead hairs from yesterday in the bottom of my tub, when I felt one brush my bare left shoulder. “Oh great, one more hair away from complete baldness.” Only it wasn’t a hair, but a hair-like leg of a Pacific Northwest house spider with uncommonly long, thin, well, hair-like legs and a body smaller than a lentil.

It was falling from the shower curtain, spiraling downwards toward a swirling spider deathpit. Instantly, my brainstem and insular cortex were at war. “Let the turbulent gush shred it!!” shrieked the brainstem. “It’s struggling so hard not to drown!!” shrieked the cortex. I had made peace with these frail, wispy roommates many years ago, but the agreement is no physical contact. Ignoring the alarms issuing from below, the empathy center overruled. . . . . afterwards I felt supremely evolved.