Saturday morning...

...and Savannah is still missing. I have walked up and down our road here, going all the way up to the main highway, calling Savannah's name and then listening for a bark in return. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. How does a 65-pound dog just disappear into thin air?

The first thing I saw this morning when I came into the kitchen and looked out the window was one of our friends from down the road... he was out walking along the road with his own dog. He has done this repeatedly since Savannah ran off after those blasted fireworks.  This friend is hoping that Savannah will respond to the scent of his dog or the jingling of his dog's ID tags and leash.

We had thunder and lightning and pouring rain last night. The sounds woke me up and all I could think of was Savannah being out there in such weather. The fact that Savannah bolted with her collar and ID tags on is reassuring, but she was also dragging her 20-foot leash, and that could be a disaster in the making if the leash has gotten caught up on something.

We live in a rural community.... homes on large properties with ponds and pastures and livestock and a Normal Rockwell-esque sense of peacefulness. But there are also deep woods with coyotes and snakes and bobcats and heaven only knows what else is out there that would render Savannah helpless. She was a frightened puppy when we got her, lacking in confidence and trust. During the seven months she was with us, Savannah learned how to trust and how to love, but the little frightened puppy always stayed at her core. Loud noises sent her running to her bed, and unfortunately, I was out walking her when the newest neighbor on our road decided to set off bomb-like firecrackers. Timing is everything: Savannah and I were right in front of their property on Wednesday night when the first 'bomb' went off.  Savannah bolted, I fell face-first into the road and blacked-out, and Savannah was nowhere in sight when I got back to the house.

Senseless. It was all so senseless. I have no respect left at the moment for those newest neighbors. They live on 18 acres, not on two thousand acres...... did they not realize that huge cannon-like fireworks going off on their field on a quiet Wednesday night in April would have no effect on anyone else in these hills?  When I was out walking along the road and looking for Savannah yesterday morning, that neighbor was driving by and she stopped to ask me if I'd found "the puppy."  I told her that no, we hadn't found her yet.  Her reply to me was "Well keep looking, dear."  I backed away from her car as if she had slapped me.  She may as well have... that's how much it hurt.

We are still looking. Still hoping. Still hanging up fliers and calling animal shelters and police stations in these little towns. 'Hope' is not an exact science, and sometimes hope can be misleading, but right now that's all we have.

Oh. My. God.

 I don't even know where to begin this.

I was out on the road walking Savannah tonight, just as always, between 8:00 and 8:30.  We were walking along towards our house and we were right in front of our barn when the across-the-road neighbors decided to set off some fireworks on their property. Not just little fire-crackers, but those huge cannon-sounding things that rattle the windows.

Not only did I get scared, but Savannah freaked out and immediately bolted. Thankfully, I didn't have the leash wrapped around my wrist like I usually do... I was holding it in my hand and when she bolted, my first instinct was to hang on tight, which I did. The result of that was that she pulled me to the ground, right smack down on the paved road. Both of my hands are bruised, as is my chin and my knees and my chest. I must have put my hands out towards the ground when Savannah bolted, and that's what probably saved me from literally breaking my chin on the ground, but the palms of my hands are messed up quite badly.

I remember my chin hitting the ground, and then I remember waking up so I think I must have blacked out. I don't even remember seeing Savannah as she ran away from the noise, which was just to the left of us. And it wasn't just one cannon sound from those fire-crackers, it was one after the other because as I was trying to wake up and get myself up from the ground, more cannons were going off. I wanted to scream towards the neighbors' property but my chin hurt too badly.

I couldn't walk very fast because of my knee but when I got myself to the house, Savannah was nowhere in sight. I walked all around the house, the backyard, the guest cottage, and then the barn. I even went into the barn to see if she was hiding in there... nothing.  Then I remembered the leash I had put on her... the long 20-foot leash that she was dragging along behind her and then I got to praying that it didn't get caught on something dangerous, like barbed wire or one of the trees by the creek.

Everything happens when my husband is at work and not at home. It was getting dark and I didn't know where to look first, but I also knew that Savannah was beyond scared. I called our friends up the road.... told them what happened and asked if they would look on their property for Savannah... they called other neighbors and within ten minutes, all the dog-loving people here in our hills had their vehicles out along the road and were shining flashlights into the fields and they even drove up and down the main highway looking for Savannah.  I called that puppy's name till I was hoarse, and then I called some more.

How can a 65-pound dog just disappear?  We looked all over our road, went to all the neighbors to tell them what happened......... and then J & J drove all along the main highway a second time, going both north and south, hoping that they wouldn't see Savannah on that road. Thankfully, the only thing in the middle of that highway tonight was an unfortunate skunk.

Another neighbor took her little golf-cart thing and drove it up and down and all around our 23 acres, all the way around the pond and down towards the woods. Savannah knows J very well and will go to her when J calls her name. But there wasn't a sign of Savannah anywhere out there in the pastures.

As I type this, it is 11:30 at night. I have left the porch light on and I've got the door open so I can hear through the screen door if Savannah finds her way back to the porch. One of our neighbors has a lot of experience with all kinds of animals and she seems to think that Savannah is hiding, and will stay hidden till morning. I'm hoping that she is right... that Savannah got so frightened of those damn fireworks that she found a spot that she thinks is safe and she's just staying there till daylight. But just in case she's out there walking around, I've been going out on the porch and calling her name out into the dark yard.

I've called my husband in his office.... he told me not to worry... that she will find her way home.  He told me to go to sleep and I'll find Savannah on the porch in the morning.  One thing I cannot do is go to sleep. I'm not even going up to the second floor tonight. I'm sitting in the breakfast room typing... the back door is open and I can hear the night-time sounds through the screen door. There must be a million frogs out there tonight.  I'm doing laundry just to have something to do. And I'm praying that I will hear her paws on the porch and the sound of that stupid long leash dragging behind her as she climbs up the steps.

I have no idea where Savannah is... no idea where she would hide... and I can't even imagine how frightened she must be right now. I hate this. I hate the damn neighbors and their damn fireworks. I hate the other neighbors and their damn gun-shots going off at any given time on any given day. I hate that Savannah is out there and not in this house where she belongs, safe and sound and sleeping in her bed.  And I'm grateful for our friends who spent nearly three hours out here tonight looking for Savannah.

 I hate the fact that when Savannah bolted, I couldn't hold onto her and I feel like it's my fault that she's missing now. I hate this feeling that I couldn't keep her safe.  My husband says not to worry too much till we see what happens in the morning. Savannah is wearing her collar and tags, plus she has that micro-chip in the back of her neck. Someone is bound to find her and call my number that's on her tag. But Savannah will not go to strangers if they call out to her. Especially if she's scared. I would be especially grateful if someone found Savannah.

I hate this. I absolutely hate this helpless feeling. And I hate that Savannah is outside in the dark somewhere, off in the pastures where the coyotes roam all night long. Savannah is petrified of coyotes, absolutely petrified. I don't even know what more to do. Waiting till morning sounds logical but it's so ridiculously hard.

As I type this, it's nearly 2:30 in the morning. I've cleaned up my scrapes and bruises and they feel even worse than they look. I don't think I'll be driving for a few days because I'm having trouble typing... I can't imagine having to grip a steering wheel until the soreness in my hands goes away. The house is deathly quiet. Sweet Pea has been sitting by the screen door for a couple of hours, either wondering why the door is open in the middle of the night or he knows that there's someone missing from this house. I've gone out into the driveway and down the road calling Savannah's name every half hour or so. If that wakes up the across-the-road neighbors who shot off those huge fireworks, I honestly don't care.

Timing. I guess everything is timing. Had I walked Savannah earlier than usual, the fireworks from across the road wouldn't have been shot off yet.  If I had waited till 10:00 to walk her, we would have been inside the house when those blasted cannons went off at 8:00. I can play this 'time' game all night long. It still doesn't change the fact that our year-old puppy is out there in the middle of these godforsaken hills somewhere, either too afraid to come out, or her leash and/or collar is caught up on something and she's stuck somewhere.

This house is deathly quiet. And it's deathly quiet outside also. Well, at least that's something... I haven't heard any coyotes tonight.

Puppy Camp

My husband and I spent yesterday afternoon looking at boarding kennels for Savannah. With summer on the way, I know we'll be taking a trip and I didn't want to leave such an important decision for the last minute--- what to do with Savannah when we travel.

Savannah is too young to be left at home alone for days and days, and too big to ask friends to come in three or four times a day to play with her and take her for walks. Little dogs are easy, large dogs are work. I have to admit that Savannah isn't a crazy puppy anymore, but she does have those moments when her inner puppy takes over her common sense and she needs supervision right now, not independence.

Our own vet has a boarding facility but the kennels are very limited, plus they have concrete floors inside, with outside access to grass that is not at all shaded from the sun. Good accommodations but not ideal, so we thought we'd check out the other places in the area.

The first one was a fairly new boarding facility run by a vet on the main highway where we had taken Gracie years ago. At that time, they were undergoing renovations on their building and the staff was trying to work efficiently in an upside-down construction environment. The vet himself was okay but he had no 'gentle bedside manner' with Gracie and at the time she was an older dog who was feeling every bit her age. We left there unhappy, taking Gracie with us, and we found another vet. We knew about their new boarding facilities, so we gave them a look-see. Once again, we left there unhappy.

The facility itself was sparkling clean and just a few years old. However, they had way too many kennels in that dog-room, giving each dog about a three-foot-square kennel... barely enough for a large dog to turn around but adequate for dogs under 30 pounds. The little dogs were in crates stacked one on top of another... not good, in my opinion. The floors were concrete, the noise level was beyond belief, and one look at every dog in that crowded place told you they were stressed out and not 'just barking at strangers,' as the very young attendant suggested. The dogs were brought out into a yard (not a bit of shade) twice a day, and if they had 'an accident' in their kennel, then it would just be hosed down.  Give me a blessed break. In my opinion, the person who designed those boarding kennels had dollar bills in mind, not the comfort of the dogs. As we left, the teeny-bopper girl behind the counter gave me one of their business cards, which I promptly tore in half when we got into our car.

The second place was recommended by our friend C.... a huge veterinary building and boarding facility (for dogs, cats, horses)... up on the main highway but going towards Houston, not Austin. My husband was familiar with the building because he saw it being built last year when he drove that way into the city for work. We had high hopes for this place, mainly because it was our last option that was conveniently near our town.  The puppy gods were smiling down on us yesterday because as soon as we got out of the car we were pleased with everything we saw. Beautiful building, nicely landscaped and maintained, separate facilities for horse-boarding, and everything was just sparkling clean, clean, clean. Not even that medicinal odor one usually gets when you walk up to a vet's office.

The people working at this facility were not students passing the time with a part-time job till they graduated... they were older ladies and men who weren't just working for a paycheck so they could have a party-happy weekend.  Yes, they had dog boarding, and certainly we could come on back and have a look at the accommodations they offered. The little dogs were in little kennels, and the big dogs were in larger kennels. The rooms were huge and clean and the noise level was bearable... a few of the dogs barked at us but most of them were comfortable and happy and they just watched us walking by... not one dog was barking from over-crowding and stress.

As we walked through the room with the big-dog kennels, the woman told us they also offered 'deluxe accommodations' for dogs so we walked further into another room. I could have cried right there on the spot.  Eight lovely large kennels with tile floors and painted walls.... in a tile-floored quiet room, a window in each kennel that overlooked the yard, glass doors instead of the metal enclosures, and this room was on the way out towards the barn with the stalls for the horses... every time the door opened, a nice breeze of fresh air drifted into that air-conditioned 'deluxe' room.  This room was also on the way to the grooming room and the laundry room, so staff members would be walking in and out all day long and the dogs would get to see people during the day, not just the other dogs.

Another great surprise was the outdoor yard for the dogs where they were taken four or five times a day.... huge space for each dog, each area half shaded and half in the sun, with two attendants out there supervising ten dogs in ten separate enclosures. The dogs could see one another but were kept in separate spaces unless they came from the same household.

Happy day. Happy happy happy HAPPY DAY.  Before we left there, we gave the woman all of our information, signed Savannah up with her vet's record of shots, and told the woman we would be reserving one of the deluxe rooms for Savannah before the summer was over. When we got back into the car, it was all I could do not to just cry out of sheer happiness that we had found such a wonderful boarding facility filled with a very caring and efficient staff who clearly were working there because they love animals. I repeat: HAPPY DAY.

When we lived in Clear Lake, we had the most wonderful pet-sitter on the planet who took care of Gracie and our cats as if they were his very own. Gracie was an easy dog to care for because she wasn't a puppy when we first found that pet-sitter and she could stay all day long in the house if need be without having any accidents or issues with the cats or anything in the house.  My friend C has been taking care of our cats for the past couple of years when we've traveled, and she is as loving to our cats as we are. With Savannah still being in the puppy stage, I couldn't have imposed on C to be here so many times a day to accommodate Savannah's puppy-ness, nor could I have allowed Savannah to stay at C's house, as she had suggested. C has her own big dog who stays outside... and our Savannah is very much an inside dog and definitely a puppy princess who is afraid of loud noises and strange places.... way too much of a 'job' to ask of a friend.... and C's own dog is Prince Of His Kingdom and having another dog on 'his' property would have been so unfair.

So now I'm telling Savannah that she will be 'going to camp' at some point during the summer. She looks at me with big puppy eyes and I know she doesn't understand the angst connected with finding a boarding facility that can offer a sense of home for her while we're away. Most important lesson learned from the inspections of the boarding facilities--- don't listen to what the staff is telling you about the accommodations, listen to what the dogs are telling you.

Friday stuff...

Another week has gone by and here we are at nearly the end of the fourth month. I think mostly everyone in this part of the state will be relieved when this rainy April has ended. The landscape in many parts of Texas has been literally changed by the recent rain storms, and it will takes months of recovery for some people to get their lives back to normal. Except for soggy grass and hundreds of ant mounds around our property, everything here is fine.

Mickey Kitty continues to cry and meow and literally howl at times when he's outside looking for Gatsby. During the rain storms this week, I kept Mickey safe and dry in the garage, but he has access to the fenced-in coop when he wants to get some fresh air and look over the property. And that's when Mickey did most of his howling... he would just sit in that coop and cry for Gatsby. At times I was tempted to let Sweet Pea out into the garage and coop to keep Mickey company, but Sweet Pea is an inside cat and very clean, and I didn't want to change his house-cat status here for a temporary situation with Mickey. I'm sure, given more time, Mickey will get used to being an 'only cat' outside.

Savannah continues to be an extraordinary dog, and even though she's a year old now, she's still very much a puppy. With all of her 'big girl' behavior and her sweetness, she still has some crazy-puppy moments that leave me wondering where my mind was when I agreed to get another big dog. Gracie was 48 pounds at her highest weight years ago, and Savannah has already reached 65 pounds and looks to be still growing. I'm thankful that the vet's estimate of 80 pounds doesn't look possible now, but she could get to 70 pounds, and that's a lot of dog.

With the summer coming along quickly, my husband is talking of traveling... and the question now is what to do with Savannah. We called a professional pet-sitter, who took three days to return my call and then told me she wasn't even available for a meet-and-greet for two weeks. One of our friends had offered to take care of Savannah but that's way too much to ask of a friend who has her own business, her own dog, and her own husband and home to take care of without adding Savannah to her list of responsibilities. Taking care of our cats is a job enough for our friend, but an easy one. And being still quite young, Savannah can't stay in this house all day and all night with just an hour or two of company and going out for a walk. So now we're talking about boarding her in a kennel. Good grief. I hate to do this, especially after all the progress Savannah has made since we got her, but there seems to be no other solution. My husband and I will visit the local vet offices who offer boarding facilities, and we'll pick the one with the biggest kennels with outdoor access, and hope that Savannah doesn't think we've abandoned her when we go on a trip. I'm already dreading the day we have to leave her. We obviously didn't think of summer traveling when we agreed to get a puppy.

I've cancelled the weekly tea parties for a while, actually for the entire summer. Everyone seems to be busy with their own homes and families and obligations and most of the chairs around my dining room table were empty each week. Changing the tea day from Wednesday to Thursday didn't help much at all, except for one neighbor whose work schedule had changed. The craft-making didn't go over too well with everyone either, except for myself and two others.  On the last tea afternoon, we talked about making "Altered Art Journals" and three of us have already begun those... we plan to get together from time to time to work on the journals and compare our books and designs and get new ideas from one another.

As I type this, I'm listening to a symphony of barn swallows out on the porch. As always at this time of the year, the swallows have returned to renovate last year's nests and lay their eggs and feed their babies when they hatch. One industrious pair of swallows tried to build a nest on a very thin ledge by the garage door. My husband took pity on their impossible choice of location and he nailed up a piece of wood underneath the ledge to give the birds a good foundation. The result is an ever-growing nest by the garage door and two very content birds who watch us going in out of the garage.

Life is good. Even with all that rain. Especially for the swallows.

An empty porch...

...that's what it feels like on our porch now-- empty. It's been a week since I brought our cat Gatsby to the vet to have him 'put down.'  After three episodes of vestibular seizures, each one being worse than the previous episode, having Gatsby put to sleep seemed to be the right solution to what would be an on-going and incurable problem.

For nearly as long as we've been in this house, Gatsby was just always here. Outside most of the time, unless it was just flat-out freezing, Gatsby was like the mayor of this property-- always visible, always waiting for us, always there. I can't begin to count the number of times I nearly tripped over that cat because he chose to walk so close to me as I went from one end of the yard to the other. "Kill me now, Gatsby, just kill me now!"-- that's what I would tell him because I'd get so frustrated when I had to quickly side-step around him so he wouldn't make me fall. And there were days that I just picked Gatsby up and carried him from one end of the yard to the other, just so I could get to where I needed to go without the walk taking three times as long as it would have if Gatsby had been down by my feet the whole way.

And the days when my husband and I would go out for lunch or into town for errands... when we pulled back into the driveway, there was Gatsby, sitting there waiting by the walkway with a serious expression on that round cat-face of his... as if he were saying "Where did you go and what took you so long?"

Our other outside cat Mickey is still walking around the backyard and the porch, wailing and meowing... and I know for certain that he's looking for Gatsby.  Those two cats spent the nights together in the garage, and shared the fenced-in coop during the sunniest part of the every day, and they each had pillow-beds on top of a table on the back porch for afternoon naps. Gatsby was always in the largest bed, and Mickey was more comfortable in the smaller one. Ever since Gatsby has been gone, I haven't once seen Mickey curled up in his own bed... he's taken to napping in Gatsby bed now.

If you're a pet-lover, then pets become part of your family, and that's how it's always been with us. Gatsby was part of our little family and a fixture on this property and now that he's not here anymore, his absence is more apparent than his presence was.  The fact that Gatsby was always on the porch or always by the driveway waiting for us was a given and something that I thought would just always be. Well, it's not a 'given' any longer, and that porch is just not the same without that big old Russian Blue cat that we called The Gray Gatsby.

Kill me now, Gatsby... the memory of you is killing me now.

Our Gray Gatsby

I found our Russian Blue-ish looking gray cat a few months after we moved into this house in 2009. He was sitting in the grass in the middle of the back courtyard and he would watch me coming and going on the porch but wouldn't come near me. This went on for a couple of weeks and that gray cat was getting thinner and thinner. When I tried to get close to him he would run underneath the guest cottage or out towards the barn. I didn't want to scare him, so I just let him be.

The more that cat saw me, the longer he would sit in the yard and watch me. I started bringing small dishes of cat food with me every time I went outside. When the gray cat saw me, I would just stop and let him see me putting the food dish down on the courtyard, and then I would go back into the house.  His curiosity got the better of him and he walked up to the cat food and gobbled it down as I watched from the kitchen window. Within a few days, that cat was no longer running away from me. He sat there in the yard waiting for his breakfast. And then lunch. And a few days later, he was out there at dinner-time.

When the gray cat decided to trust us, he would come up on the porch and eat his meals there instead of out in the grass or on the stones of the courtyard. We found him in the summer, and he stayed an outside cat, but I did get him fixed as soon as he trusted me enough to pick him up and get him into a cat-carrier. The vet estimated that he was about four years old, and I had to wonder how many gray kittens that cat had fathered during those first four 'intact' years.

My husband said we needed a name for this cat, other than The Gray Cat. Being that he seemed to be such a 'gentleman' cat, we wanted to give him a flamboyant and important name.  It was my husband who suggested The Gray Gatsby, probably because I had been re-reading The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time. As soon as my husband said that name out loud, we both said "That's it! That's perfect!"   Gatsby quickly learned his name and would come when called, and seemed to just fit the personality of what I thought a Gatsby-esque cat should be.

During that first winter with us, Gatsby continued to stay outside... he wanted no part of the inside of the house even though we had invited him to come in on the colder nights. I had a blanket and cat-bed out on the porch for him, but when the temperature got abnormally cold here (down to the freezing point and below) I just picked him up outside and brought him in here. Gentleman to the core, Gatsby was exceptionally good as he inspected everything but touched nothing... and he wouldn't even use the litter box--- he would just hold everything in until the following morning when I let him outside again.

Gatsby was mostly an outside cat, only coming into the house on the hottest of days and the coldest of days. He seemed to be content wherever he was, as long as he had fresh water and three meals a day. Sometimes four or five, if he stole some from the other two cats. Gatsby was not one to miss a meal or deny himself the opportunity of taking one from another cat. When we adopted our puppy Savannah back in September, I stopped letting Gatsby in the house. On the cold nights, he slept in the garage with Mickey... they had cat tents and a heater and both were quite content.

About a month ago, Gatsby's neck started to twist unnaturally and he lost his balance on the porch steps. We rushed him to the vet and Gatsby was given medication and steroids for feline vestibular disease. His condition cleared up within a few days but two weeks later it returned. I gave him more medication, as suggested by the vet, and once again Gatsby seemed fine. Until this morning... his neck was twisted worse than the first two times, and the look in his eyes was vacant and empty. He couldn't navigate the steps and he couldn't control his bladder.

I called the vet and had Gatsby there first thing this morning. I knew what would happen even before I backed my car out of the garage with Gatsby in the cat-carrier in the front seat. As I drove to the vet's office, I kept telling Gatsby what a good cat he had been, and how much we enjoyed his company. I apologized for keeping him inside the garage and coop with Mickey at night, rather than bringing him inside like I used to do. I explained to Gatsby that having both Savannah and Sweet Pea in the house was enough, and besides, Mickey really needed his company in the garage during the night. I saw Gatsby peeking through the little door of the carrier... I don't know if he was really listening to me as I drove, or if his neck was just permanently tilted and he couldn't do anything but look at me.

During the twenty-minute ride to the vet, I told Gatsby all he needed to know about how much we loved him, and how much we appreciated the way he would sit in the driveway and wait for us to come home. I thanked Gatsby for following me up the road when I walked Savannah, and I remembered to tell him how helpful he was in teaching Mickey how to be a smart outside cat when his behavior prevented me from keeping him inside. I said my good-byes to Gatsby in the car because I knew that I wouldn't be able to do that once I carried him into that office.

I cried a little at the vet's office and I cried again when I got back in my car. I didn't break down into heart-splitting sobs because I knew we gave Gatsby a good life while he was with us, and I also knew that we wouldn't have put him through the trauma of trying to control a disease that had already begun to control him. For as long as we had Gatsby, he lived his cat-life with dignity, and that's how I wanted it to end for him.

Time and again over these past seven years with us, Gatsby proved himself to be an extraordinarily wise and street-smart cat.  F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been proud of him.

Welcome to April...

...it's warm and sunny here, but Opening Day for baseball had to be cancelled in New York (Yankees vs. Houston Astros) because of snow and ice and power outages.  My cousins are eMailing me about the colder-than-normal temperatures, the horrible commute this morning, and the frigid weather. I keep telling them all that they're living in the wrong zip code, but no one listens.

My first-ever compost pile is now history. I had to spray it with ant killer because there were zillions and zillions of fire ants smack in the middle of all my carefully-preserved kitchen scraps. Maybe we started that pile on top of an existing mound of ants?  When I raked into the center of the compost pile this morning, I found an entire universe of ant tunnels complete with countless stashes of teeny tiny ant eggs. (Which of course translates into more and more ants.)

I threw today's food scraps into the trash can, went into the garage and got the ant spray, and proceeded to annihilate every blasted one of those ants in their well-planned tunnels. Honestly, the entire state of Texas is built on top of one enormous fire-ant mound.

The new plan (Compost Pile 2.0) is to buy a round plastic container with a tight-fitting lid. I can keep that right on the back porch or the back deck, add food scraps to it every day along with a little bit of water and grass clippings and small weeds, and then I can roll the container around the deck a bit to keep it all mixed up so it really does turn into 'black gold' for the flowerbeds. Hope floats.

Our nocturnal puppy (nearly one year old, actually) is still waking me up two or three times during any given week. Last night she heard an armadillo in the yard. (Let it be noted that such an animal does not exactly stomp across the property in combat boots.) But Savannah heard it, and exploded into her roaring bark at 12:30, then again at 1:45, and once again at 3:30.  I truly have to admire Savannah's sense of protectiveness but I'd really enjoy getting an entire night's sleep as a rule, not an exception.

And how did I know an armadillo was out scavenging in our yard? Because I was out there in my coat and pj's with Savannah, waiting for her to find the perfect spot on the grass so she could pee. The armadillo gracefully walked across our driveway, across the grass by the guest cottage, and made its way calmly towards the barn. And there I was, holding tightly onto Savannah's leash, praying to the stars that she wouldn't lunge towards the armadillo because I knew I was just too tired to control that leash if she tried to chase that poor thing.