from fresh air and open range...

...to car exhaust and exhaustive traffic.

I'm back from vacation. It was kind of a working vacation. After the renters left my house (after they stopped paying rent and water and trash pick-up and I evicted them), I found out that I had to repair the back yard and have sod laid, and clean up what seemed like a year's worth of trash in the house, and wash and paint the walls and ceilings to get the odor out of the house. The little Chinese Elm tree in the back is struggling after a dog took all the bark off it. I wonder if it will survive. The landscaping & sod guys said that if I trim out the dead stuff and cut back the live branches some, it would probably make it, so I did. I hope it makes it. And the majority of my roses survived, too, inspite of a dog digging them up and chewing them up. That makes me very happy. I hope the sod has a chance to form a root system before it freezes. I have the impression that the dog's people just threw him out in the backyard and forgot about him, so he began to chew up everything he found. Celeste tells me that dogs do that when they feel abandoned and lonely.

After working on it a bit, I went to talk to a property manager about renting it again, and after speaking with that gentleman, I decided against renting at all. It seems that there are MANY renters that totally trash a home just because they can. So no more renters for me. I was totally dissillusioned and I felt violated when I saw the state of my home after those people were through with it. My house will just be closed up until I return next year. I had a huge rant all typed out about these particular people, but thought better of it just now and deleted it.

Anyway.

Poor Celeste has a boo-boo. O found a couple of hot spots on her head while I was gone, freaked out (luckily), and took her to the vet. The vet said it was fungus, shaved her head and applied some meds. She looks like a punk rocker, with pink and purple colors on her reverse mohawk haircut.

And my little Sunny left us, too. He was my basset hound that stayed on the farm. I'd tried to take him with me 2 or 3 times to Peru, but each time, the weather was too cold or too hot, and the airline wouldn't let him travel. So he waited for me on the farm. This month he traveled with me every day from the farm to the house in Cheyenne and back, supervising and playing and having a good time. I noticed that he wasn't dancing anymore, and he didn't seem to be the same happy little guy he had always been before, but still, every morning he charged to the house and waited at the car till it was time to go up to Cheyenne and work. Until he began to decline to eat. I took him to the vet and she found a mass in his stomach that had closed off the intestines. She also said he had "messy lungs", and thought that it might be cancer, from whatever caused it in his stomach, that was spreading to the lungs. So the decision was to put him down before he had much more difficulty or pain. It was the right thing to do, but it hurt to do it.

Sunny touched so many lives in his 8 years. The neighbors in Cheyenne knew him and loved him. He worked periodically at Triangle Cross Ranch with disabled people, who loved him, too. He taught us to love forever and forgive quickly and to let go of grudges. He even loved someone who didn't particularly care for him, ignored him, and called him ugly names.

I'm glad he waited for me to come home before he had to go. I'm thankful that we had some good times together this month, too. I'm glad that I was able to notice that something was really wrong and make that decision before he was in too much pain. I still cry when I think about him being gone.

After I'm done being sad about Sunny, I'll write a little more about my vacation. Just now, though, I need to go deal with my tears.