Spring!

I declare it spring in North Stormont county! Some of the crocuses (that were a lovely housewarming gift and that I planted around the well in the fall) are starting to come up. The tiny delicate pale blue ones are coming up first, which seems appropriate. The pussy willows are out, all soft and fuzzy and silver-white in the hedges and by the sides of the roads. There are fish in the spring streams that run through the roadside ditches. I thought that they were tadpoles, at first, because tadpoles are what you generally find in ditches, but these were much too fish-shaped. I presume that they  must migrate to the ponds and streams that the ditches flow into. A solitary female wild turkey was ambling across my back lawn when I got up this morning. And one of the previous owners planted these

at the back of the house where they get the morning sun, as I discovered yesterday when I hung the laundry out on the line for the first time this spring. Does anyone know what they are? The closest I can find by googling is something called Chionodoxa luciliae, or “Glory of the snow”.

 

And in Carter news:

Last Tuesday, he got a new, more sturdy cast to deal with the fact that he had re-broken his broken leg. On Thursday evening he chewed through the fiberglass cast. I called the vet’s emergency number, and on Friday morning she met us at the surgery when she was meant to be on holidays, with her two small sons (aged 5 and 3, I’m guessing) in tow. She opened up the cast and found that a swollen area on Carter’s leg had caused a small pressure sore, which was no doubt painful enough to make him gnaw through his cast. She cleaned the sore and fixed the bandages and padding inside the cast to relieve the pressure, and put his cast back together (they’re made in two halves), and patiently answered all our questions about how much he was allowed to move and walk (not much at all) while the leg healed. And told us a horror story about a previous patient that increased our determination to keep his cast clean and dry.

So now, in addition to the cast, he has to wear a cone to keep him from chewing the cast again (now that he knows he can chew through it if he tries, he’s much more likely to). And we have to watch carefully for any signs of irritation. And we have an appointment to get the cast checked again on Thursday.

I can’t begin to say how much we love Dr. Ingrid, our vet. She called me back within 5 minutes of me leaving a message on her emergency number at 10:30 on a Thursday night. She came in on the Good Friday holiday, with her kids, to check Carter’s cast for us. She reassured us (yet again) that we weren’t responsible for his injuries, and she answered all our questions. She chatted with us about her life and her work while she worked on re-bandaging Carter’s leg. 

We will be getting her something very nice as a “Thank You” gift for all the wonderful care she has given Carter.

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Poor puppy!

Carter broke his leg.

We were on a walk in the back field, and he took off after a deer into the woods. I heard him yelping and by the time I caught up with him he was sitting on the path waiting for me, looking very contrite and holding his front left paw up, obviously injured. He let me examine it, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t dislocated, but couldn’t tell if it was a break or just a bad sprain – no deformity and no blood though, thankfully. It took us ages to get all the way back to the house, I carried him part of the way, but he weighs 60 pounds, so I couldn’t carry him for very long. He limped slowly and pathetically on three legs back to the house. By which time it was 7pm and the vet was closed. 

t! stayed home yesterday, and we called the vet first thing. They didn’t have a free appointment until 5:45 (the vet recently had to take a week off due to a death in the family, and so she’s still really backed up). Carter spent the day dozing on our bed, whimpering whenever he moved his injured leg, which would bring both of us running.

We took him to the vet with me driving and t! riding in the back with Carter. At the vet’s, despite being in pain and on three legs, Carter made friends with everybody, greeting all the dogs and getting pats from all the people. The vet was very busy, and we needed to wait for the x-rays to be developed, so we were there for 2 hours, all told. The x-rays showed one bone broken and the other cracked (the radius and ulna), but in a very good position to splint, so that’s what the vet did. He will be on painkillers/anti-inflamatories for 2 weeks, and the leg will take 4 to 6 week to heal. Since he’s young, the bone should knit with no problem. I said to t! that this was pretty much the equivalent of a 14 year old kid breaking his arm playing hockey.

We both love our vet. She showed us the x-ray and explained everything very clearly, including the possible complications, and answered all our questions. She gave us the option of having him  anesthetized while she splinted his leg (we declined), and had me hold Carter while she put the splint on.  He even got a cute happy-face sticker.

The splint isn’t slowing him down very much. This morning he trotted next door to say hello to the neighbor dogs and our neighbor Milvie, and to have a drink of water from his favorite ditch. 

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Excuses, excuses

A number of things have been conspiring against regular blog updates recently:

1. Work. I’ve been picking up a steady trickle of freelance copywriting / editing / proofreading / miscellaneous jobs over the past few weeks. Nothing very big, but the work I have been doing is a good start towards building a solid reputation and portfolio. Some of it has been simple advertising copywriting, some slightly more interesting (100 cooking and gardening tips for a website), but the bigger jobs I’ve picked up have been in the technical writing / editing field, one involved me re-writing an RFP response for a small company that was bidding on a municipal contract, and the other was a high-level editorial review of a set of technical software manuals. The variety keeps it interesting, at least. I have a possibility of a larger job coming up soon – 30,000 words worth of work-for-hire in a specific field of horticulture. Of course if I get it, there goes my time for a month!

2. Winter. My SAD has actually been astonishingly good this year, for a variety of reasons. But since it’s winter, there’s not a whole lot of homesteading-type activity going on, which is (for my own reasons) the main purpose of this blog. I’ve ordered the apple trees for planting in spring, and the chicks, and bought all my seeds & seed starting supplies. There will be more posting about starting seeds and vegetable garden planning beginning next week, rest assured.

3. Dog. Due to the above two factors, all I would be blogging about, if I were blogging, is the puppy. I would be talking about how we’ve started letting him off leash in the yard, how he loves going over the the Fearsranch to play with Jack, how I now make all his treats myself from scratch, how he’s shedding his winter undercoat, and so the entire house is covered in soft white fluff, and so on. And though his antics are endlessly fascinating to his father and me, the rest of you would almost certainly find endless doggie posts very boring. So in lieu, here’s a single, solitary cute picture of Carter:

I will be posting more regularly starting next week, including the post I owe Allison about the status of all my current craft projects.

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Carter

Here are the promised photos of our new dog:

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Dog

We have a dog.

He’s a one year old Collie/Shepherd/Husky mix. He’s mostly German Shepherd brown, with a Collie’s white front paws and chest/belly, and a Husky’s curly tail. He’s a very good looking dog (pictures soon).

He’s house-trained, quite calm in the house, and knows how to “sit” and “stay”. We’re slowly and gradually working on peaceful coexistence with the cats. He doesn’t really know what cats are, and seems to feel they are some strange kind of little dog that doesn’t want to play with him – which confuses him terribly. The cats know what he is (big and strange-smelling) and hide or hiss or both. But both are getting better at tolerating each other (we’ve had him for just over 24 hours) so we’re quite confident that it will work out. For now, though, we’re being vigilant and the dog is never unsupervised.

After a huge (really, really huge) amount of deliberation, we’ve named him Carter.

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