Birthday day.....

Sixty-one. Six One. 61. No matter how you write it or how you say it, that number is a big ouch. Ouch, with a capital O.  How can this possibly be?  I don't see 61 when I look into that mirror...... I would guess maybe 45, possibly 50, but definitely not 61. 

I thought turning 40 was really no big deal........ I think my sister took my turning 40 harder than I did.......... she must have called me five times during that day, to let me know that it was ridiculous for her to have a sister as old as 40.  I would like to be 'as old as 40' now.  I would like to have a sister who still picks up the phone.  Neither one is going to happen, and life does indeed go on in its own sensible way. 

50 was a little harder than 40. Okay, let's be honest.  50 was a lot harder than 40.  I didn't see 50 looking back at me in the mirror back then, nor did I feel like what I thought 50 should feel like.  Last year's 60th birthday was depressing...... at that point, you're more than middle-aged, unless you have a guaranteed life span of 120 years.  (Which wouldn't be all that bad if you could be chronologically 120 and physically 48. Is that too much to ask?)

I think of myself at 61 and remember that my Aunt Dolly will be 100 years old this coming June. And even she says that turning 100 is impossible for her to believe.  Aunt Dolly still does everything she has always done, just not for so many people.  Our family doesn't all live within the same close-by zip codes any longer, so she's not cooking for a small army, but she's still cooking.  She's not cleaning a three-story-plus-basement house anymore, but she will 'clean up after the cleaning lady' leaves the house she lives in now.

In all of my memories, Aunt Dolly was the one always moving, doing, giving, going, thinking.... everyone else told her to 'slow down and relax a little.'   Her answer was "I'll be a long time dead, and I'll have plenty of time to relax then."   Maybe that's the answer to living till and beyond that 100th birthday---- keep moving, doing, giving, going, thinking. 

61. Not exactly a magic number. I'm past the big 5 - 0, and I'm past the big 6 - 0 now. So now I'm on the path to the big 7 - 0.  The next big one. Good grief.

But on the bright side....... life is good...... lots of family, lots of good friends, lots of birthday cards in the mailbox, lots of good books up in my new library that my husband worked so hard to put together for me.  All of those bookcases.... 14 of them...... and as he carried each one up those 15 steps, he was thinking "One little Kindle and these bookcases could be history."

He had asked me if I wanted a Kindle before we started that library.  "No way... not for this little library-bunny, thank you."  I need the book itself, the feel of the pages, the crispness of a new dust-jacket or the lovingly worn smoothness of a vintage volume.  A book. Real books, with gold-dusted page edges on the classics and that library-ness that a Kindle could never offer. 

A new third-floor library filled with bookshelves and books............ 61 is looking pretty good after all.

The library is open....

My husband was able to find the last four bookcases at another store in Clear Lake.... and we put them together this past weekend.  14 bookcases up in the newly christened library now, and there are no longer piles of books on the new carpeting up there. 

So many bookcases... for fiction..... for the home decorating books, for entertaining.... for travel books and seasonal books, non-fiction bookcases, with the books on the British Royals having their own space....... everything so easy to find, and I've already paged through books I hadn't looked at in a few years just because they were buried on the bottom shelf of end-tables around the house.  My husband calls me on my cell phone at times when I'm up there to ask if the library is open to the general public.

Such a pretty and cozy room up there...... I knew it would make the perfect library the minute I saw that room in its unfinished state when we first saw this house.  What once looked so dark and dreary and uninspiring is now a glorious Library. With a capital L, if you please.

Our cold weather has left us, finally.... and we've had some very pretty sunny and warm days. I've been able to put the cats out in the coop and they're watching the birds and climbing the ladder and they don't seem to want to come back into the house at the end of the day.  I still won't let Mickey and Sweet Pea roam around the property..... Sweet Pea gets himself up on the roof of the house and can't get down, and Mickey wanders further than our own property---- both of those inside cats have no common cat-sense when they get outdoors.

We've already had an evening of Valentine card-making.... J and J and S......... the four of us sitting around my dining room table surrounded by papers and scissors and Valentine cut-outs, and (from S) googly-eyes for cards for their grandchildren.  We all laughed like kids ourselves when we saw those plastic googly-eyes..... and some of those crazy eyes had long eyelashes.   And S showed us how to make a cat-face using three hearts.... so of course I had to make one of those for my cousin F.

Valentine's Day isn't that far off......... we're having our annual Valentine Party, except I'm calling it the "February Feast Potluck Dinner," since some of our friends here aren't really into Valentine's Day. The invitations say:  "A Hoot 'n Holler."  Now if that isn't a country-invite, I don't know what is. So sayeth this city-girl.

Bookcases R Us.

The search for bookcases has ended, without having to pay a small ranson to have them custom-made.  Better Homes & Gardens sells beautiful bookcases in two sizes.... we bought ten of the three-shelf size, and my husband and I spent the last three days putting them together.  It was kind of daunting at first, looking at all those boxes stacked in the second-floor hallway, but he carried them up one at a time and after translating the instructions (which always make everything sound more complicated than need be) we were on a roll with those bookcases.

There are now 10 cherry-wood bookcases lined up against one side of the library.... and my books seem happily content.  From the vintage children's books to the 40th anniversary edition of "To Kill a Mockingbird," from my set of Charles Dickens to the Harry Potter volumes, to all of the Edith Wharton books.  A very eclectic library, to be sure.  The travel books are in place, next to a world globe. All of Lawrence Sanders' books are comfortably shelved, as are Joe Coomer's  and John Steinbeck's and Anne Tyler's.  I thought of having one bookcase just for the classics, to avoid shelving Jane Austen and Pearl S. Buck in the same alphabetical rhythm with Elizabeth Berg and Anita Shreve, but I stuck to the public-library A to Z method with the fiction.

We've ordered four additional bookcases, which will take another week or so to come in...... and then my collection of non-fiction volumes, and the books on the British Royals, and the memoirs of Beverley Nichols, can come up off the floor on the other side of the room.... and all the books on home decorating and entertaining.  So many books.... never enough time.  If there could be a rule that a person would not leave this earth until every last book one wanted to read had been read, then I'd be living to celebrate my 345th birthday, at least.

Our Miss C called here this afternoon, all excited about 'the new puppy.'  What?  "The new brown puppy!  In Gracie's old puppy crate! Why didn't you call and tell me?!"  Apparently, Miss C was reading my blog and got to the part about Captain January...... but as soon as she read that my husband had brought Gracie's puppy crate in from the garage, she picked up the phone, wanting to hear the story about our new puppy instead of reading all the way to the end........ so she didn't realize we had taken the little dog to the shelter.  I could hear her jumping up and down at the other end of the phone when she called, and I heard the deflation in her voice when I told her we didn't keep him.

"But he sounded so good... and so cute."   Well, he was.  I haven't come across many little dogs that weren't cute..... and they're all so very good when you first find them and rescue them, but you can't keep all of them.  My dog-loving friend A in North Carolina tells me that she was never fond of dachshunds either, until friends of hers got three of them.  She said their loving dispositions just cannot be beat, and A has had dog after dog after dog for all of her life.

Oh well.... having Captain January for even that short a time was a lesson in itself.  That tiny brown floppy-earred dog taught me that you really can give up something that you think you really want because life does indeed go on... and I learned the correct spelling of dachshund.

My kingdom for a bookcase........

Okay, maybe not one bookcase, but quite a lot of them.  We searched for the perfect bookcase today.  Found a bunch of them, but none of them were exactly right.  My husband is now on a mission, searching the Internet for bookcases that are no higher than 44" and have three shelves.  The side walls of the third-floor library are slanted, which is why we have a height issue, but the walls are long (33 feet) so my newly-carpeted library will hold a lot of books on those low cases.

That's what I've been doing for the past couple of hours.... bringing stacks of books up the stairs (15 stairs straight up, no landings) and arranging them in alphabetical rows on the floor.  I knew it was time to quit when I put Jane Eyre into the E's instead of the B's.   My plan is to have non-fiction on one side, fiction on the other side, with the travel books and the biographies on the non-fiction side, and my collection of vintage children's books in a corner near the window on the fiction side. 

All of my Christmas books, the Mary Engelbreit books, and the books on the British Royals are already on their shelves (bookcases that we had in the house), and I even had a little shelf for my collection of cat books, with a little vintage 1950s cat-lamp for the top of that bookcase. (Details... it's all in the details.)

We carried the love seat up there, and the two rattan chairs from my grandmother's porch, and I had small tables and lamps, and pillows for the window seats.... they're all up there and arranged in their places, as well as all the decorative items that I've been collecting from the stores in town for the past few months.  I've got pictures for the walls, resting up against the wall where they will be hung up.... but for right now, I'm just looking at them and making sure they're in the right spot before I get the hammer out.

It already looks beautiful up there... very cozy even though the room is quite large (16 x 33' approximately)...... and it's very library-looking even without the bookcases, which I'm sure we'll find.

Captain January..... that little dog was brought to the shelter, just as we agreed. (As in "No more pets, no more pets, not one more pet.")  Even though he was very well-behaved, and very sweet, and he looked adorable in the little blue & white sweater that friends J&J gave him to keep warm.... to the shelter he went, where he was the only small dog, so that was a good thing since most people want to adopt smaller breeds.   We weren't in the market for a dog, no matter how cute.  We wouldn't have picked a dachshund, no matter how preppy and cute that sweater made him look. 

When my husband left that morning with Captain January, I held him and fixed the collar on his little sweater, I told him to smile at everyone he meets, and just be very good and very nice..... and I'm hoping that he has already found a new home (a good home).  I'm not calling the shelter to check up on him...... I'm wanting to believe that he will live happily ever after for many years with people who will realize that dachshunds have very thin hair and really need a little doggie-sweater to keep them warm on cold damp days.

It was nice to have that dog in the house, if only for a little while.... he slept right where I put him, that poor thing was so tired...... and staying up during the night with him when he cried reminded me of the days when Gracie was a puppy..... she would whimper and cry in the middle of the night, just wanting to see a familiar face when she woke up in the dark.  I hated those middle-of-the-morning wake-up puppy calls, and you forget about all of that when a little dog looks at you with those sad little eyes....   Jeez.  Enough already.  We are a three-cat household, and that's that. No more pets, no more pets, no more pets.

Captain January

That was the name of a character in one of the old Shirley Temple movies............ can't remember the name of the movie, and I don't know the story behind it, but that was the man's name--- Captain January.

It is also the name that I gave to the little dog brown who is sleeping right now in our kitchen, tucked into Gracie's old puppy crate.  My husband heard a dog howling outside at 8:30 tonight.  I heard the dog also, but thought it was one of the neighbor's.  My husband said the dog sounded too close to be a neighbor's dog, so he went outside to look.  Five minutes later, he came to the back door and told me to put the cats into the TV room. My first thought was that he found a stray cat out there, and I was determined NOT to take in another cat.

When I got the cats tucked away out of sight in the TV room, I went back to the door and there's my husband with a little brown dog wrapped up in his arms.  Poor little thing was shaking like a leaf, and of course it was cold out there again tonight.  The dog looks like a dachshund, with slightly longer legs. And the collar that's on this dog is way too wide for such a small dog..... honestly, pet owners need to be more considerate of what they put around the necks of their dogs and cats.

My husband got his camera and took photos of this little brown dog and off he went to the neighbors, asking if anyone had lost their pet.  The dog didn't look familiar, but you never know.... maybe someone got a new dog for Christmas.   I got some cat food into a dish for this poor starving dog, and then I started calling neighbors up and down the road. No one had seen such a dog around, no one had recent holiday company that may have lost their dog, and of course everyone wished us luck with our 'new dog.'

By the time my husband got back from the neighbors' houses, and by the time he set up Gracie's old puppy crate in the kitchen, our 'house guest' was asleep in my arms, still shivering, and I had silently christened him 'Captain January.'

Into the puppy crate went one of the soft cat blankets... on top of that I put an old fleece vest that I wear around the house.... on top of that went the puppy, and on top of the puppy went a soft fleece sweater of mine.  Within minutes, Captain January had settled himself into a nap.  I was so tempted to cut off that wide collar that he was wearing, but Gracie's leash fit into the clasp on the collar, which would let me walk the puppy in the grass.  (Which I've done four times already in the last few hours.... the last time being successful.)

As I type, it's nearly 2:30 in the morning.  I've been up and down the stairs at least five times, each time in answer to the puppy's cries.... he seems to like the crate, but he likes my lap much better, and the last time I went downstairs, I wrapped up the puppy in that old sweater, then put him underneath my fleece wrap that I wear around the house when these ridiculous cold-snaps hit us to remind us that the rest of the country is going through Winter, so we may as well get some of that also. 

My husband and I were recently talking about another dog...... he was looking at Border Collie rescue sites on the computer..... and of course, there's always a puppy that looks like our Gracie.  My husband would gladly take a Border Collie, and I would gladly take a smaller dog. Preferably one with long silky hair that you can tie up in a cute little bow at the top of its head.  I'm not fond of dachshunds, and Gracie hated every dachshund that she met on the Greenbelt in our old neighborhood. And now there's one sleeping in her crate. Poor Gracie would be crushed.

In a moment of weakness, I asked my husband if there was a chance that we would keep this little dog.  He really doesn't want to... and I understand that.  If we were to get another dog, it would be a Border Collie, unless I could talk him into a smaller, less energetic dog, which I doubt.  The decision is not to keep Captain January...... we've agreed to take him to the shelter in the morning. 

Actually, my husband will be the one driving this dog to the shelter..... I'm the one who was just downstairs in the living room with that little brown dog wrapped up in my sweaters and sleeping against my chest.  Like all small dogs, Captain January likes to hear a heart beating while he sleeps.

Speaking of hearts, it's heart-breaking to me that people either lose or abandon their pets.  Dogs are pack animals, they're like children, and they need their families. No matter how well your dog is trained, its emotional age never progresses further than that of a two-year-old child.  Some of the neighbors told us that this little dog was probably just dropped off.... others said it could have wandered away.  We're so far from town, so far from the main road, and I doubt very much this little dog would have ended up on our porch if he hadn't been driven down this road and booted out of the car.

It makes me very sad to know that puppies and kittens end up in the hands of people who don't deserve them.  And I have to say that since we've moved to Texas, there are unwritten laws here out in the country as to what pet-owners can and cannot do with and to the animals in their care.  Go far enough out into the country and there are no 'laws,' and people get away with the damnest things that tear your heart into pieces. (What happens on someone's property, stays on someone's property.)

We cannot keep this little dog. If we were looking for a dog, a dachshund wouldn't be our breed of choice. And I'm long since over the time when I believed that if a cat or dog ends up on our porch, then it was meant to be here. My husband will take this little brown dog to the shelter in the morning, but I will send him along with that red fleece vest that the puppy is sleeping on, and it wouldn't hurt to tell the people at the shelter that his name is Captain January.