The Dogs Know...

how to take care of one another.

Little bitty Lily the Yorkie has been having eye problems lately.  She either has a sort of cold that settled in her eyes or it is allergies.  At any rate, her eyelids become matted with gook.  If it gets to the point where her sight is hindered, she will come to me and pester me until I take her to the kitchen, set her on the table, wash the gook from her eyes and administer the drops from the vet.  Then she goes bouncing away, a happy pooch again.

She will also pester me if she decides whatever I am doing isn't nearly as important as pets, ear scratches and belly rubs.  Yesterday I noticed when she wanted attention, the fur around her eyes was wet and there was no eye gook.  Same thing this morning.  So I started watching both the dogs closely.

It appears that Jessie Jane has taken it upon herself to keep Lily's eyes clear.  She spends a lot of time cleaning them.  Lily just sits there and lets her.  Almost like mama cleaning her pup.

I have two kennels.  A smaller one and a larger one.  I don't lock the dogs in unless there are people here.  They are free to come and go and they sleep in them.  Both of them love the smaller kennel and there is always a race to see who gets to it first.  Jessie Jane usually wins.  But the past couple of days, Jessie Jane sits and waits to see which kennel Lily wants, and lets her have the small one with no fuss at all.   Under normal circumstances the one who loses the kennel race will come to me and tattle, but not lately.  Lily's eyes are much improved and I expect the problem to be cleared up soon, at which time I have no doubt that the great kennel race will be on again.

Whoever says that dogs can't figure things out for themselves has had either really dumb dogs or never had one at all.

My Son...

left his home in Minnesota this morning.  He checked in via Facebook from the other side of Omaha this afternoon.  I pray that he has a safe trip and finds what he is looking for at his destination in Phoenix.

Even though I want happiness and contentment and all good things for him, my heart hurts a little.

So You Don't Have Room For Preps...

I hear that excuse for not preparing often.  Usually from folks who have large homes.  I'm here to tell you that you do have room and here's why.

I live in a 1-bedroom apartment that measures a little over 500 square feet - about half the size of your average 3-bedroom rambler. There have to be a lot of people like me living in similar conditions.  Now if you are one of those people who has to have the perfectly decorated living space then read no further.  This is not for you.  But if you are more interested in staying alive when things get really bad - and I have no doubt they will - then read on.

My living room couch is pulled out about 8 or 9 inches from the wall.  Behind it are 2-liter soda bottles full of water.  I will be laying a board or heavy cardboard across the tops of those bottles in order to stack another row on top.  You can't tell that there is anything behind the couch.  Water bottles also live in a corner behind my TV stand.  More reside on a closet shelf.  Water is important.  You can live a while without food, but lack of water will kill you fairly quickly.  When you have no room for the large water barrels, find another solution.  This is mine.

My bedroom holds two heavy duty shelving units, each four feet long and seven feet high.  These hold all of my home canned food.  There is another smaller shelving unit that fits behind my bedroom door that holds all of my dehydrated food plus extra canning jar rings.  My bedroom stays fairly dark and cool.  This is important for the food stored there.  Light and heat are the enemy of home canned foods.  Light and moisture are not friends to dehydrated food.  My bedroom will never make the pages of House Beautiful.  I don't care.  I will be able to eat tomorrow.

I have two closets in my bedroom.  One is small but deep and that holds clothes and odds and ends in plastic tubs.  I got rid of the junk.  I don't need stuff.  I need space.  The other closet is a standard double door sized closet.  The top shelf holds more water bottles.  Because this is a rental unit, filling it with built-in shelves was not an option, so I bought several small, free standing, stackable shelves and set them against the back closet wall.  There is space on one side of the shelves for buckets of sugar and flour.  The shelves hold things like baking powder, peanut butter, powdered milk, etc.  Even though it is not really handy, there is room in front of the shelves to stack boxes containing rice, beans, pasta, etc., so I bought cardboard banker's boxes and they work well.  Yes, I have to move them to get to the shelves.  I can live with that.

The one storage area that I can not use at present is under my bed.  My spring and mattress sit on a wooden box frame so I can't access that space under the bed without lifting up the spring and mattress.  Next year I will be ready to replace the bed.  At that time I plan to use the space underneath for storing toilet paper, pet food, kitty litter, etc.  Cases of store bought canned goods will also slide easily into that space.

If a person does home canning, there are always empty canning jars to deal with.  I use my canned food almost daily and that rotates out the older food which is replaced with newer.  But what to do with the jars.  My cupboard space is extremely limited.  What is here holds dishes, pots and pans and the items I regularly use for baking and cooking  I bought three free standing units that are about six feet tall and 18 inches wide.  Each has two small cupboards with doors and three shelves.  These units hold everything from my cookbooks, spices, packages of jello, etc.  I make a lot of my own seasoning like taco and chili seasoning mixes, and those are in jars on the shelves along with other mixes like for scalloped potatoes or gravy.  Canisters for brown sugar, powdered sugar, coffee and flour are in those cupboards, handy when I need them.  When I run out of something, I just go to my closet pantry and grab whatever I need to replace it.  No running to the store.

Back to the canning jars.  The only solution I have found is to neatly stack the jars in their original boxes.  I have space beside the free standing shelves in the kitchen and the jars are stacked there.  It may not be aesthetically pleasing, but they are neatly stacked according to size and they are clean.  I need the jars for my survival more than I need a picture perfect kitchen.

There are lots of ideas for small space storage on the internet.  This is just some of what works for me in my situation.  I like to have things pretty, but I am way less concerned about house beautiful than I am about staying alive when disaster strikes.  There are those who think the stores will always be there, full of food.  We all saw a while back what happened when there was a glitch in the welfare system and EBT cards didn't work for a few hours.  How long do you suppose it would take, should those cards be cancelled altogether, for the riots to start and grocery shelves to be cleared.  If we don't remember the Katrina debacle, we should.  The pictures of people looking in dumpsters for food after Hurricane Sandy are still fresh in my mind.  So are the interviews of irate citizens complaining that the government wasn't there to take care of them.

I'll be damned if I will be one of those people.  As long as I am able to care for myself, I will.  I will endure the glazed look that appears on faces when I mention food storage.  I will put up with those who ridicule my efforts, believing that nothing will ever change.  But in the end, I will survive.  And attain my goal.  Which is to live long enough to be a problem to my children.

I think I am close to achieving that goal!

Don't Forget the Pets

I've pretty much figured out how much food I need to store for myself for one year.  And I go over that amount a bit to take into consideration the jars of peaches, pears and other goodies that walk out of here with my kids.

But I hadn't figured out how much pet food I needed for the same amount of time.  I hate to say it, but I only plan to store six months worth of dog food at a time because my Yorkies are getting up there in age.  At 13 - 14 years each (I never knew their exact birth dates), they already have had long lives.  Both are healthy, but Jessie Jane has slowed down considerably and Lily is prone to catching colds or coming down with other doggie related health problems.  They may fool me, though.  My last Cocker Spaniel lived to the ripe old age of 16.

Anyway, the last time I bought dog and cat food, I got small bags of each.  I kept track of how long each bag lasted to give me an idea of how much to buy before winter sets in.  I wound up shivering at the bus stop more than once last winter just because I was low on their food.  Not gonna happen this winter.

What I discovered was that, pound for pound of food, Kizzie the cat consumes as much as both dogs put together.

I wonder if they make exercise machines for cats.

An Interesting Start To My Day

Now and then sleep eludes me.  Last night was one of those.  I went to bed around 11:30 and finally gave up on sleeping over an hour later.  I got up and came into my living room where my computer is located, sat down and decided to write for a while.  I had a couple of ideas for blog posts, so I worked on them.

Somewhere around 2 AM I shut the computer off and settled down in my recliner.  Sometimes I sleep better there than in bed.  I was just starting to doze when I heard a sound that resembled a thud.  I remember thinking that some damn fool drunk had run his car into the corner of the building beneath my open window.  My nine pound early warning system, Lily the Yorkie, was peacefully snoozing in her kennel.  I knew there was nothing in the hallway to worry about or she would have been loudly protecting her food dish.  She can go from a sound asleep to standing stiff-legged barking like mad in about three seconds if anyone lingers outside my apartment door.  I listened for a minute or two for any other sounds, heard nothing, and then fell asleep.

About 6 AM Lily wakes me.  She is loudly guarding her food.  Between barks I catch the sound of a sharp rapping on my door.  I ask who is there and a voice identifies himself as a police officer.  A look through the peephole confirms this.  His face is familiar to me so I ask him in.  He says they noticed my open window and wondered if I had heard any noises during the night.  I describe what I heard.  He wants to know if I heard anything that sounded like breaking glass and I reply that I did not.  He is particularly interested in the time of night I heard the sound.  He then explains to me that during the night someone broke into the bicycle shop beneath my apartment and stole a particularly expensive bike from the show window.  He apologizes for waking me at such an early hour,  asks me to call if I remember anything else, apologizes again and leaves.

This is the second time this summer that something has occurred here that involved the police.  Earlier my neighbor's grandson had broken into the bar behind my building, had cut himself up in the process and had then raised all sorts of hell trying to get his drugged up self to his grandmother's apartment to hide.  And now this.  Even with a bar next door and another behind the building, it is a fairly quiet neighborhood.  There is the usual Saturday night whooping and hollering from the younger set who, after a few beers, don't seem to have the sense that God gave a goose.  There is an occasional fight but even those are few and far between.

My slightly paranoid, tin foil hat wearing self has to wonder if this might not be a sign of things to come.

So True

I saw this a while back and stole it.  I forget who I stole it from.  With a bitter winter predicted for us here in Minnesota, I thought perhaps those of us living in the tundra might want to rethink our plans.

Well, nobody but my friend Rob who moved with his family back home from Florida.

And me, who came home from southern Missouri.

I said goodbye to my oldest son this morning.  We had breakfast at the little family restaurant where he worked years ago and where he and I have shared breakfast many times.  He is on his way to pick up the trailer and will load it up with the help of friends, and will be on his way to Arizona in another day or so.  I'm sad because he is leaving, but at the same time glad that he won't have to suffer through another Minnesota winter.

He tried to give me back his keys to my apartment.  I wouldn't let him.  I want all of my kids to know that no matter what, they can always come home.

Monday Smile

"And it was my idea to plant sunflowers, Dad."

Dad said he would probably need a bobcat to pull out the roots.