SAINTS

next sunday…here in the MP room at 1 pm for all of the folks who love these guys to bits and work so hard to give them happiness in the twilight of their lives.

4lane had another stroke today..he is happily back in my bedroom creating chaos again so i did not cause him to have this one. i spoke to the vet and she said to start him on a low dose of prednisone for a week and see how he does. i am not a big pred. fan in dogs, it sometimes makes them crazy…oh right, he is already crazy so i guess he will be fine.

speaking of crazy..lily is totally nutz. she managed in 2 minutes or less to piss off every single dog on the bed..she tried to hump felix, that pissed him off and while she was trying to hump him she walked over top of spot and that made him mad. when she jumped out of spot’s way she landed right on top of yuki, which put her in a rage and in trying to avoid her, she slipped past caspar, took a double take because she thought it was felix again (the dog who still has testicles) and decided she’d try humping him again. this really made caspar mad cuz no one is allowed to hump him..not even a half blind, newly spayed, but still horny shitz head who functions with considerably less than one half of a brain…. in avoiding his teeth she managed to land on daphne 2, prudence and jerry all at the very same time…suddenly it all got thru to her…EVERYONE was mad at her so being lily, she peed…. right in the middle of the bed, right on the clean bedspread…ok, so i was somewhat pissed at her now too.

she really is an air head but she also is really cute…is that not how most air heads survive?

before this all happened i was getting the diabetics done. felix was not so patiently waiting in his playpen for me to pick him up. felix sleeps really tight up next to me and so does spot so spot decided that since felix was fussing, he should go and sit quietly next to the play pen and mush his face into the mesh up against his soon to be sleeping buddy felix….that way i could pick them both up together and carry them both to bed. it was one of those awwwww moments….spot is such an incredibly kind, intuitive and intelligent dog unlike that idiot lily.

we were putting the barn guys to bed..
and tunie and herman had already been fed.
when all of a sudden, what did i see?
tunie turning back to whence she came originally
with a mouthful of sheep’s hay,
to the bed belonging to ellie-mae.

oh no you don’t!
stop right there.
turn around
and go back to your bed there!

little miss tricky said…
i was working fast because i can
and you just wrecked
my brilliant pig bedtime plan.
ratz!

not money, true love, somewhere over the rainbow..i think it is plain, odd shaped, puzzle pieces.

i think every time we meet any challenge successfully, every time we do something right, every minisual meaningful moment, we collect one more little puzzle piece to help us create a meaningful life.

i think kids who are having a hard time just have not had the opportunity to collect enough puzzle pieces to help them see what their own picture in life can be all about. i think if they grow up with not collecting enough puzzle pieces or not knowing how to fit them together..life becomes bleak, hopeless, beyond their control..just a jumbled mess of unhappiness.

and kids don’t know that each and every puzzle piece is of profound importance to them because we don’t tell them. we don’t celebrate when they find one…it is too small for us to even notice…we want to see the whole big picture of them laid out fully complete for us. what kind of message are we sending to them?

why don’t we tell them that each little struggle they survive is a victory..that each tiny thing of goodness they do is a another miracle piece of the puzzle they are building?

how many adults do we each know whose life is just a mess of chaos..puzzle pieces loose and lost, clutter collecting dust in some forgotten corner…. not only in their lives but messing up others too? i think it is because they never learned that those little seemingly useless pieces of seemingly the same shaped and colored cardboard, were really a thousand tiny keys to their own happiness.

but even adults can at some point stop and choose to look at the scatterings of lost opportunities all around their feet. they can take a deep breath, sit down and patiently look and examine each one and try to find another to fit it to. with time and effort and a wholesale committment, they too can one day have their life laid before them and see what treasures those keys opened up inside of them. it is more work because unhappinesss has sucked out the light and made the good things harder to see, it has blurred the edges of what was right or wrong or good or bad and how they could have put things together differently.

but who wants to feel at their last moment of life that their life was useless, of no value, nothing special..just a never ending frustration of wanting, needing, searching without ever getting anywhere? i don’t think anyone ever wants their last thought to be that.

for the kids tho…we have to be proactive… show them what those puzzle pieces are for..we have to teach them that each tiny good thing they do is connected to the whole picture of living for them.

and that is the problem with kids today…we are too busy…we are more interested in the big things that stare us right in the face, we are too lazy to smile at childish small attempts at goodness, at rightness, at building success, to tell them what a wonderful thing they are doing, collecting and fitting tiny pieces of puzzles together to shape the rest of their life.

that’s my deep thought before i head off to work today.

i see it in rescue, i see it in my nursing career, i heard about it tonight in the voice of my daughter who was close to tears.
i see the the more difficult dogs, the less than attractive ones, the ones who don’t squeeze our hearts get left by the wayside while others get picked up.
i see it in nursing, i see the difficult clients who live on the edge or the bariatric clients who we won’t help because their bodies are too big, or the ones who don’t agree with us or argue over their treatments..i see how they get written off and the blame switches back to them.

my daughter is a teacher in one of the high schools, she teaches a special program for grades 8-12 with marginalized at risk youth. kids who come from difficult homes, maybe abuse, maybe such poverty that they are always hungry and don’t have clean clothes, kids fighting substance abuse issues, or an anger so deep that they become disruptive or violent to themselves or to others and they become a problem to the schools and the teachers..they in short become the enemy.

how sad is that..hungry kids without clean clothes, unhappy, acting out children, standing before us and all we can see is the anger and frustration they cause. she feels like it is a losing battle to have the kids recognized as something other than a problem.

what i find incredible is people who love and will go to the ends of the earth to help a suffering or dysfunctional animal will buy into the whole good kid and bad kid thing..if there are no bad dogs, just bad owners..maybe there are no bad kids either, just the ones whose life is too hard for them to win in.

simple acts of kindness to troubled children or teenagers can go as far or further as simple acts of kindness to animals can.
it would infuriate me when my teenagers would go to the corner store and be told to leave their knapsacks at the door or only 2 kids were allowed in at a time. like teenagers were second class citizens or something or because a few might shoplift, they all had the same potential…they didn’t treat adults like that but is was ok to treat kids that way? i think not.

what is with us anyway? as a society, we treat animals like things and we treat kids like the enemy. we cut funding to social programs to the very most vulnerable because for some reason what? their vulnerablitiy is their own fault? i told you a few weeks ago, our health region cut the funding to the seniors volunteer drivers…dontcha think that folks who actually drive and still have a car could have handled some kind of alternative cut better?

when did animals, and kids and old or sick people become the ones who were the most expendable? what were we thinking?

so here is my thought for today…it is not just the governments fault…it is our own fault too because we turn a blind eye to different kinds of suffering out there, we chose to not see or blame the sufferers for whatever it is that they are suffering.

we paint this world ugly, we pit us against them, we determine who is worthy or who we will ignore…..simple acts of kindness are easy if given to someone easy to give to…lets try giving simple acts of kindness to the more difficult ones to give to…we actually might change the world for them too.

but sometimes it just seems so mean. we really do have to get the fruit loop trio off the adoption pages and create a permanent sanctuary page for them and a few others.

this is the first enquiry we have had on all three in several years…and i can’t even send a somewhat hopeful email back about them….the second sentence has to say “they are chronic sprayers, they pee on beds and couches and toasters…they pee everywhere..probably has something to do with their feral beginnings but it is unlikely to change.’
let me know if you are still interested and we can discuss them further????

really carol…do ya think they might still be?????

but it just seems so mean to reduce those lovely cats to just little piss tanks…which they really are, but there is so much more to them that will not be the least bit of interest to anyone once they know how much they spray.

its like asking….do you know anything about carol at SAINTS?…yeah she is crazy and lives with peeing cats.
that is like only 1/99th of my story but it certainly does accurately define one part of me.

nicole…i want a permanent sanctuary page and the fruit loops on it….they are never going to get adopted and i don’t ever want to embarass them or me again in explaining to someone who thinks they may want to adopt them, why they really don’t.

early shift today, have to leave by 6 am for work, my sucking holidays are over….hopefully i will feel better once i get back to the more sane and predictable sick human world.

1. my daughter and her friend baked 61 gourmet cupcakes for the bake sale tomorrow.
2. my daughter drove them out here tonight after work so i did not have to drive into maple ridge to get them.
3. my daughter would not let me taste test #61..that was for the bake sale and worth money to saints.
4. my daughter politely asked me if i cut my own hair again (i have in the past, but today i paid 20 bucks for the haircut in question)
5. my daughter brought me out brand new boots for winter so my feet don’t get wet (and probably so i quit wearing those ugly brown rubber crocs that drive both of my daughters and nicole nutz)
6. my daughter quietly and cheerfully suggested i brush the hay off of my left sleeve while we were waiting for our dinner to be served in boston pizza.
7. when the server brought her a chicken stuffed stromboli when she ordered a vegetarian one…she very graciously and nicely asked for another.
8. she regrettfully made note of the fact that some chicken died in vain cuz the chicken stuffed stromboli was headed straight for the trash can.
9. as we parted for the night and shared our good bye, love you hug…she chuckled and brushed more hay out of the hood of my hoodie.
10. and when i said in parting, well at least you liked my new haircut, she smiled again and said..i don’t know what you are talking about.

grown up kids are the best…they love you anyway.