Beach House in the Burbs

ZeeDonk. Go ahead, say it. It sounds vaguely like the noise my computer makes when I mash the wrong button. But that's not what it is. A ZeeDonk is a cross between a zebra and a donkey--duh. It looks like a donkey wearing striped socks. Like this- The friendly, caring people at Noah's Ark Animal Sanctuary take in abandoned, injured and abused wild animals. They build nice BIG enclosures for them. And even let them live with their friends. This is actually Baloo and Leo (not Shere Khan the tiger, like I put on the picture). Leo's a male lion who got neutered too young, we learned, and so doesn't have a mane. Poor Leo. But Baloo still loves him. Baloo, Leo and Shere Khan, who's still friends with the others, he just didn't make the picture, have lessons to teach us. Now, if you want to break into a chorus of Kumbaya, I'll understand. But when you're finished, check out Noah's Ark, in bustling (ok, not really) Locust Grove, Georgia. You...

Nothing says summer in the South like the sight and aroma of boiling pig heads in the backyard. Okay, so this little adventure had nothing to do with being in the South and everything to do with having a sister with a dead-animal fetish (and I mean that in the most wholesome sense of the word). A student in one of her anthropology classes bought pig heads from a butcher, shot them with bullets, hacked at them with a machete, then buried them to see what would happen. Susan (the sister) was very pleased at the student's ingenuity. Then, joy of joys, when the class was over, the student told Susan she could keep the pig heads! Rapture! Unfortunately they still had a little tissue attached. And nobody wants that. So, she brought them over to boil in Chris's outdoor, turkey-frying pot. (Thanksgiving will never be the same.) The smell of boiling hog fat--it reminded me of the old-timey candle-making smell on steroids--permeated our yard and house for hours, but look at the payoff. T...

The secret sign in front of our house inviting stray cats in for care and feeding has now apparently been translated into dog. We took to calling him Monster because of his bizarre shape. He seemed so huge lying down, then when he stood up he was revealed as a rottweiler body and head laid over a bassett hound chassis. He appeared to have been put together by a mad scientist, a sort of veterinary Frankenstein, or a committee that had to work with only the parts of dogs no one else wanted. But his sunny disposition soon allowed us to overlook his physical oddities--like the front foot that pointed off to the left as if he was constantly signaling for a turn. Friday morning, after he spent the night in our now barren vegetable patch, I put him in the backyard. Did I mention I was still in my pajamas? He promptly trotted down the few steps to the the pool deck and before I could catch him walked his large, weighty self out onto the center of the pool cover, which is just a heavy-duty tarp...

"A dead cat! She brought me her dead cat," Susan, my forensic anthropology professor sister, said. "Wow! Your students must really love you," I said, after a bite of chicken vegetable soup. "Yeah, they do. Next week she's bringing me her dead ferret. Will you pass the cornbread, please?"

... even the Pomeranians have broken out their winter sweaters! Fashionista the Princess Prissy Pants "Does this sweater make me look fat?"

You think moving a household (or a house, for that matter) is hard, try moving a business full of heavy equipment when you're too cheap to hire movers! My husband owns 3-D Graphics & Printing , a large-format printing business. But just because it's HIS business, doesn't mean I'm uninvolved--and becoming more involved by the minute! Click here you'll see a photo of me holding up a very large aerial photo of Jacksonville Airport that we printed. Anyway, I say all this to explain my blogging slackness--after trying to do better this month. I'm part of an online group that had an August Blog Challenge --to try to blog every day for a month. I didn't sign up to do it because we were out of town, had company, got found by a new cat (looks like his name will be Stewie, since his head is sort of football shaped, like the baby Stewie on Family Guy--a show I can't stand, by the way) and had this move scheduled. But I convinced myself I'd blog at least twi...

How many cats do you have to have before you become a crazy cat lady? Six years ago, Miss Kitty appeared on our doorstep right before Christmas in the freezing cold. Our first cat (we're really dog people) she's with us still. Last year about this time, Dusty Cat showed up in our yard. We were determined to keep him an outside cat, which was easy for me. He wasn't very nice at first. But then it got to be winter. Despite living in Georgia, we do experience winter. So, long about Christmas we got him neutered and brought him in the house. He's now about the sweetest cat I've ever seen. He seems, in fact, to think he's a dog. (It took Miss Kitty five months to come out of our bathroom. But now she likes Dusty Cat okay.) Now, a really cute black cat, with a white spot on his chest and great, huge green eyes, has shown up. (All I can figure is word's gotten out in the kitty community that there's a crazy cat lady on the street, so drop by. She'll take yo...

But try telling that to the Canada geese who took up residence on our pool this spring. We had some trouble with the pump that keeps water off the pool cover during the winter—the trouble was it quit working and we never replaced it. So disgusting brown, pond-like water filled the pool. When we took the cover off, I couldn’t blame the geese, it looked like a pond to me too. A pair of geese has rested on our neighbor’s pond (a real one, not a pool) for years. But this year with the drought in Georgia, I guess their pond didn’t look as inviting. The couple didn’t bypass it completely, but they seemed to look on our pool as their vacation pond. They’d mostly hang out next door, then when they needed a break from the old home place, they’d head to our pool. Or it could have been the vicious Pomeranian, Princess Prissy Pants, who lives at our house that kept the geese at bay. She enjoyed barking at them, but actually never got too close. Though they should have been used to attacks by small...

So the guy came out Saturday to look at the furnace, declared that the blower motor had burned out, and we'd have to wait until Monday to get a new one--it being Easter weekend and all. And that will be one finger and three toes for the good news. Fortunately, this being the South, it wasn't miserably cold on Easter. Though we woke up to 55 degree temps in the house Sunday morning. By keeping a fire going in the traditional wood burning fireplace in the great room all day and having 17 people huddled in front of it drinking hot chocolate, we managed to get it to about 70 degrees. Warmer than we keep the thermostat. We hid eggs, ate too much, including the cutest cake shaped like a lamb. It was red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, so looked just like lamb brains and innards when we cut into it. It inspired many gross comments, but tasted great! So, while all the chaos was going on at our house, our cat, Dusty Cat, disappeared. He tends to do that when we have kids over (w...

No, the addition to our family isn't of the two-legged variety, but he does cry an awful lot, is very needy, has the other "kids" jealous, and, I'm afraid, is going to require that we do some home remodeling that we never intended. Dusty is a tom cat who appeared in our yard back in the fall. He was scrawny and mean. So, as Chris says, we treated him like a wild bird, putting food out for him but not even trying to pet him. Gradually he became friendlier, it's amazing what a little food will do for your attitude, and when it began to get cold (even in Georgia it can get cold) we decided he had become our cat and we needed to figure out how to incorporate him in the family. We already have a very scaredy, indoor cat named Miss Kitty and a pomeranian who is small, but in charge. We (the royal "we," it was actually Chris) wrangled Dusty into a crate and took him to the vet to be checked out before bringing him in the house with the other animals. They prono...

Pets add so much joy to your life! Especially when you have a dog door. It is the portal through which all manner of surprises can come enter one's life. We have a very large Pomeranian, as Pomeranians go, the 10-pound Princess Prissy Pants, who is quite as prissy as her name implies. But don't let that sleek, elegant, black (with coy touches of white on her chin and legs) fool you. She's a hunter. We don't always leave the dog door open. We also have a cat who brought in a live, tail-less chipmunk (The tail was on the floor by the refridgerator; obviously Kitty was saving it for a snack later.), a dead mole and a dead baby bird one day when Chris was out of town. But that's another story. But because of Kitty, we only leave the dog door open when we have visiting dogs because Kitty is a scaredy-cat and won't come out when Leroy, my parent's killer shitz tzu, is visiting. So, there I sat at my desk, writing a magazine article, when my precious little Prissy ...

This was the week of biology lessons in our chicken room. That room as been home to lots of wildlife, from the human to the non-human variety. First the chickens lived there. Then a hive of bees moved into the walls. This week we finally got the bees removed--and discovered the walls had become home to carpenter ants and these disgusting beetles that look like ticks, except when they're in the larval stage and look like maggots--blech! Thanks to Georgetown House who provided a tip about finding someone to take our bees alive! Chris, my husband, found Cindy Bee, a woman who has been ridding homes of bees for 11 years! She came out on Thursday and took ours away--and let me watch, take pictures and learn about the process. She doesn't need to worry that I'm planning to horn in on her business. It looks scary as hell! The first photo shows the outside wall of the chicken room. This is all we could see of the bee hive until Cindy exposed it all. We could occasionally see the ...

Honey bees have been living in the wall of our garage for several years now. They go dormant or hibernate or something in the winter, but spring has sprung in Georgia and they are back. One day--after the yellow-pollen haze is gone and I can safely leave the house--I'll take a picture of them to post. They mostly live inside the wall, but they also come out and huddle close together looking like a big, black blob on the side of the garage. So, they've been there several years. Chris has looked for a way to get rid of them without killing them--he's a nice guy, rescued a neighbor's dog that had fallen in another neighbor's pond at 1:30 yesterday morning and couldn't get out. But he's having a hard time finding one, that doesn't cost an arm and a bee wing! He's also cheap, so when the humanitarian side and the cheap side conflict, he just does nothing. And the bees haven't really been a problem. It's kind of cool to see them hanging out on the ...