I had a strange dream the other night.  Not only did it involve Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Venture, and Uruloki, I also had RL combat pet Porcupine Pigs.  That’s right, Porcupine PigSSSSSSSSSS.  They were pack animals and therefore I got a bonus for having more than one.  These cute little piggies with Porcupine quills were supposed to have been developed by a little boy (who looked very similar t Ash Ketchum only he wore a black shirt and a blue jean jacket).  He supposedly bred the first one, then planted it.  The next day, a pack of others had grown from the original one.  Currently though, they bred like normal animals - you didn’t plant them to get more.  That was just the lore surrounding them in my dream.  The porcupine pigs were always covered in dust clouds too, like Pigpen has in the Peanut strip.  Apparently they’re not clean animals, but would you really expect a pig to be?

This is one time I really wish I could draw.  The picture of the little creatures is so vivid in my mind…cute little pink pigs - round nose, rounded feet - like any piggy bank, only on their backs were quills that would stand on end when they fought…and they had tusks when they fought too, but they generally kept them covered when their owner was petting or paying with them.

I think it would be a great addition to WoW pets…along with Ladybug flying mounts.  =D

So a third puppy showed up.  The boys were walking and found it in the ditch. It was the runt and it was scared of everything/one.  I got it cleaned up, and waited a couple of days.  We couldn’t find homes for them so we called animal control.  The local shelter they take them to is a no kill shelter.  Hopefully they find homes; however, I don’t feel too bad because I did my part.  I took them in, cleaned them up, and got them putting weight back on.  Okay, so I do feel bad, but they weren’t house trained and three more puppies is just too much work - especially with an older puppy with a broken leg that isn’t supposed to be playing. =(

Random goes to the vet tomorrow and will have to have a bigger cast.  He’s outgrown his.  He’s getting tall.  Today, someone left the lid to the potty up and loving water like he does, he jumped in….with all four feet.  He had to be helped out.  That’s not good for his cast. =/  He’s a good dog though.  I can’t wait to get this cast off him!!

Kohl’s mom said he could have the puppy.  Kohl’s dad said no though.  The puppy was gone with them when I heard more whining….yup.  Another puppy.  This one in worse shape than the first.  It was covered in little tiny ticks.  I bathed him and got all the burrs and ticks off, but I simply didn’t know if he was going to make it.  He ate, but threw it back up. =(  I kept making him drink some water and kept offering more food.  He did better when his brother got back.  He finally was exhausted and slept.  This morning, he seems to be doing much better.  He still looks ill proportioned - his hind legs are very thin, but I’m hoping he’ll fill out and it will look normal.   The problem now is keeping broke leg Random from playing with the puppies.  He looks at them and whines and barks.  He brings them toys and nudges them with his nose.  Sometimes they try to play, but most the time they just look at him like he’s nuts while he does everything he can to make them play.

I don’t intend to keep them all.  We have our quota of dogs; however, I couldn’t just send them to the pound like they were.  I had to know they’d be okay.  Robert said I went into mommy mode.  I stayed home from the double feature at the drive in - Eclipse and Inception - to keep an eye on the small one that I wasn’t sure was going to make it.  Once they get stronger, if I can’t find a home for them, I’ll turn them over to the no kill shelter and let them find one.  For now though, I’m working on getting them eating and pottying like normal.  I’m taking them out every time I take Random out and they’re doing pretty good for little ones.

I offered the littlest one some liver treats last night (no dog can resist little jacs).  He ate some and the other dogs all came, said down around me, and patiently waited their turn.  The boys looked at me and said, “Three are so many!”

I said, “Yup.  Wanna join my dog pack?”

Kohl said “Heh.  I was the first one.”

Henley is about 14 years old now.  For a dog, that’s old.  He was sleeping at my feet and I was going to give him a bite of chicken.  I called him and called him, but he never moved.  Apparently his hearing is not what it used to be.  I know he can’t see well.  He depends on Mia to guide him and barks when she barks.  We’d been talking about dogs and what type of big dog we would get to replace him when he was gone.

Robert likes brindle, short hair large dogs.  I like long hair, solid color dogs  =(  I was looking at different puppies trying to find a good balance that we could both like, when Vanessa walked in.  I explained how old Henley is getting and that Robert had wanted a big dog when I got Mia so he was going to get to pick the next outside dog.  When they came down for the fourth of July, Vanessa brought us a chocolate lab.

Robert wanted to name him Corwin; however, that’s his characters names (as well as other Corwin’s I know) and I just couldn’t see naming him that.  I tried for a short time, but Robert kept turning to look at me rather than the dog.  Finally, I told him we had to find a different name.  Random.  Same book, still a good solid character.  I liked it and so it is.

Random is a whiner.  He doesn’t want to be held and loved on all the time; however, if he wants anything at all, he whines.  He knows to use the doggie door, but whines when he needs to go potty until you take him outside…lol  You’re likely to see him sitting watching you.  He does that a lot.  He has pretty green eyes and when you catch him looking, he does that doggie head tilt that can make anyone melt.

Last Saturday night (or maybe early Sunday morning), Random was whining to get off the bed.  Robert gave him a little push and he freaked.  He twisted and tried to stay on the bed.  The next thing we know, he’s crying.  He didn’t get better during the day.   I went to my sister’s and got some children’s motrin.  When I got back home, Henley’s face was swollen.  He got stung by a bee.  I went back to my sister’s and got some children’s benadryl too…lol One got motrin and the other benadryl every4 hours.  Monday morning, Henley was better, but Random went to the vet.  Sure enough, it was a break.  He’s now in a cast.  I took him for a check up today.  We thought his cast was slipping; however, he’s just growing.  We got back Friday to get more xrays to make sure he’s not moving it too much.

Today, I was watching  tv and heard whining.  I didn’t think it sounded like Random, but it was a puppy.  I went outside wondering when Random had gotten past me to the doggie door (he’s supposed to be limited on movements - not likely for a puppy, but I can at least keep him from going up and down the porch steps by blocking the doggie door).  There on the other side of the fence stood a small puppy looking at Mia and crying.

He’s soooo skinny and filled with grass burrs.  I brought him in, bathed him with dawn (did you know it kills fleas?), let him eat, and he ran to cower in the corner.  I forced him out of the corner and made him sit on the sofa with us.  He’s snoozing now.  I’m afraid he ate too much and might get sick.  I’m also afraid that he’s too skinny and might be too weak.  E’s friend is trying to talk his mom into letting him keep the puppy.  If not, Robert’s brother might want him.  If by some stroke of luck he’s as good as Random is and wont eat my furniture, I’ll let the guys keep him like they want…but I’ve had lots of puppies and not any bigger ones that are as good as Random.  He looks like some kind of shepherd mix.  Random wants to play with him, but he’s not supposed to play and at only 2 months, he dwarfs the puppy already…lol

Mycroft was right.  Two dogs just doesn’t seem to be enough at my house. =/  Apparently we’re meant to have more.  As for Henley, he’s old but still doing good.  Not many people have doggie companions still having a good life at his age.   We’re lucky in that respect.  Mia is a motherly dog if you can imagine.  She can’t stand it if the other two need something and we’re not responding.  She’ll lick me and nudge me until I finally get up and see what needs to be done.  Random annoys her, but she continues to look out for him despite him tackling her and pinning her to the ground…lol  I’m holding my breath wondering if this puppy will fit in.

While July 4th may be independence day for the United States, I didn’t earn my independence back until July 6th this year.  That’s the day the swarm of teenagers that had arrived at my house the prior Friday, finally left my house to infest other unsuspecting folk and consume their edibles.

It all started on Facebook.  My Spfacebook - the place were spam goes to die.  My sister and my children have been bugging me for a while now trying to get me to “get in touch” with people on there. I can’t for the life of me figure out why.  I personally think it’s an evil fad - like those skin tight leopard print pants girls wore in the 80’s.  They both show the entire world what you’ve got…good or bad…and at some point, you realize you really don’t want the entire world seeing your every move.  I know what you’re thinking, how is it any different than my blog.  The only RL friend that knows my home on the net, other than my children and boyfriend, is Moose.  (Feel special Moose?  If you tell, I rip your antlers off!)

Vanessa called me up and said, “I’ve been talking to Uncle Jon on facebook and he’d like to come over at our next family gathering.  Can we get together for July 4th?”  What I didn’t know when Vanessa called me, is that she’d already called my mom and sisters and she was bringing bringing a friend too.  Friday at work, Rebecca called asking if she could bring her boyfriend if they promise to stay in different rooms and Vanessa helps chaperone.  I stupidly said yes bringing my weekend teenage totals up to 6 - 3 girls and 3 boys…including E and his friend that basically lives here.

Knowing the food in my kitchen would only be an appetizer for a pack of teens, I went grocery shopping. $225 later, I thought I had enough to make it through the weekend.  I was wrong.  Lucky for me though, half the kids went to the lake with my sister for one meal one two separate days.

The first night, I cooked two pots of American Spaghetti (a variation of chicken spaghetti).  The second night, I made a huge roast (that included an entire bag of potatoes).  The third night, we grilled out 15 lbs of hamburger meat.  Silly me, I thought they’d leave Monday, I was wrong.  Leftovers and sandwiches that night!  Tuesday, they finally left…when the kitchen had only appliances and dirty dinnerware left.

We had fun, but man was it stressful.  More on the non cooking parts later.

Has anyone other than me read these books?  Oh my goodness.  I just finished Changes the last one (so far) and it’s driving me nuts to have to wait a year for the next one.  I love love love the characters in this series.  All of them.  I don’t think there’s any of the main characters (or even a lot of the not main characters) that couldn’t have their own spin off series with their own stories (different from Harry’s) and still be great reads.  I was loving Lea particularly in this one.  Anyone read them????

Robert bought pit tickets for Edgefest 20 and took time off work to go.  Rebecca’s friend bought her a pit ticket and I called Vanessa and got her to come too.  She drove up the toll way and through the traffic by herself (and was a nervous wreck about it).  When she started seeing signs that said PAID parking, she began freaking out.  I told her to pay it and I’d give the $20 back to her when she got in.  She didn’t want to though so she drove past the parking attendants and parked farther up….still in a parking lot..er pasture, but where no cars were yet.  She then wanted me to meet her outside the gates.  I told her I couldn’t leave without paying to get in again., but if she’d stand in line and buy a ticket, I’d be waiting inside the gate.  She came in a different gate and somehow managed to get in before we got to the gate.  When I saw her, I asked what was wrong.  She said she bought a ticket from a guy for $75 and when she came to the gate, they scanned it and said it was already used.  She then began to cry and the lady told her, “It’s okay honey.  Go on in.  Just don’t do it again.”
There were plenty of tickets although no pit tickets left.  She could have gotten in for $50 instead of $75, but she didn’t want to stand in line alone.  I felt bad.  I told Robert that on the way out, I’d go by the ATM and give her half her money back.  He said, “Oh no you won’t.  You told her what to do and she didn’t do it.  This is a life lesson.  She’s got the money to spend.”  He also told her throughout the day that he hoped her car wasn’t towed since she didn’t have a parking sticker.  At the end of the night, we saw tow trucks hauling cars and she freaked…but she got lucky.  Hers was still there.

The concert was a lot of fun.  It was an all day thing.  The line up was Limp Bizkit, Three Days Grace, 30 Seconds to Mars, Deftones, Flyleaf, Switchfoot, 10 Years, Phoenix, Metric, Cage the Elephant, Violent Soho, The Crash Kings, Neon Trees, and Hole…we didn’t stay for Limp Bizkit.  Hole is Courtney Love’s band - that’s right.  Courtney Love’s Hole.  They were funny - only because the audience was yelling, “You killed Killed Kurt!”…and eventually she picked one particularly loud fellow and told him she’d come down and kick his bottom if there wouldn’t be a lawsuit…lol

Of course there was lots of smoking and drinking.  At one point we were sitting in the stands cooling off when Ethan said, “Mom, I want to go sit with those kids.”  I looked to where he was nodding and saw four boys his age passing around a pipe…and I don’t think it was legal because there were no giant bubbles coming out of the end of it.  I told him to go sit with them so I can get a picture, but he suddenly changed his mind.  Boys.  You never know what they’re going to do.  The four no-bubble boys got up and left just a few minutes before two cops came down searching the stands obviously looking for the boys…or maybe just their lost pipe…All week before the concert, Robert was telling Ethan that he was going to have him crowd surfing….and during Cage the Elephant’s performance, Ethan tapped Robert on the shoulder, took off his glasses, and said, with a serious look on his face, “Robert, I’m ready…” at which point Robert hoisted him into the air and off he went….with Vanessa right behind him….lol  They had a blast…and it only got better from there.

We picked up some over priced pizza and drinks afterward and went to sit down and watch the children devour it like the scavangers they are.  I happened to turn around and notice a line forming and people walking away with CD’s.  I grabbed Robert and made him go with me to check it out.  It was Three Days Grace.  If you bought their CD, you got to skip to the front of the line to get autographs and meet them.  They’re his favorite band.  He bought a disk and went through the line faster than I could get my camera out for pictures. =(  Later that night, he wanted to take it to a birthday party his friend was having, but I wouldn’t let him.  I knew he’d give it away as a birthday present.  He knew I was right so he left it and I framed it for him.  It looks good.

If I’d thought about it at the time, I’d have sabotaged Three Days Grace’s tour bus.  If even just one of them got killed, we could sale the cd and at least by a 3D TV, right?  *sigh*  I didn’t think about it though so instead of ninjaing my way to their bus, we went back down to the pit where 30 seconds to Mars was setting up.  We couldn’t talk Vanessa into sneaking in.  She didn’t have a pit pass, but the yellow band Robert had gotten to meet Three Days Grace was the pit band with smiley faces stamped on it.  We saw people walking in with them, but she wouldn’t even try.  She and Ethan stayed behind until later in the night when Ethan went through and handed Vanessa his wrist band back through the fence….lol

30 Seconds to Mars put on a fantastic show.  Their lead singer is very high energy and played to the crowd.  At one point, he disappeared from the stage and someone hit Robert in the back.  He turned to look and it was the singer running on his way into the stands.   They were a good band, but they were a GREAT show to watch.  When they ended, there was about a 30 minute break before 3 Days Grace.  As people moved to get drinks or whatever, we ooched up ever closer to the stage. Of course I could only see people’s heads, but Robert assured me we were going toward the stage and that we ended up about 10 feet away.  I believe him because when the band began playing, the force from the speaker system made us lean backwards until we could fight our way upright again.  Judging from the pics Robert took, he had a great view of the stage.

Three Days Grace rocked.  Period.  They sang all their hits and did a bang-em-up job.  During the set though, the drunk lady in front of me decided to feed beer to my feet repeatedly and to booty dance right into me when she wasn’t grinding on her boyfriend or flipping her hair back into me.  She was a little woman, but she apparently required 5 feet of room for drunken flirting.   At one point, her boyfriend decided to hold up his lighter…to see if she’d had enough alcohol yet or not.  Her breath didn’t catch fire, but her hair might have if the band hadn’t picked that moment to ask people to put their fist in the air rather than lighting lighters.  As I said before, she wasn’t very big so her fist didn’t go very high into the air.  She decided to make up for this by bringing her elbow back inches from my face so that her fist could get a running start and therefor get more air.  I was just thinking, “If she hits me, I’m going to punch her in the nose and then lay her boyfriend out too!” when she tried to lay a big sloppy kiss on her boyfriend and he remembered that her breath wasn’t flaming yet so he sent her for more alcohol.  Luckily, she didn’t make it back until the very end of the set.

Since the only band left was Limp Bizkit who I really didn’t care to see, we made a run for it.  It was a fun night and I was glad the whole family was there to enjoy it together. =)

The work powers that be decided it was time to remodel.  Not just the store, but the pharmacy as well.  Since times are tough, they decided to give us a mini-remodel for the pharmacy - in other words, just paint, new counter tops, carpet, etc instead of doing all the major structural redos.  First they said they could have a pharmacist come in and stay with them at night to get things done.  Then they decided they were in fact going to move us out of the pharmacy and into a temporary facility in the middle of the store….the box.  The move would take place on a Sunday ( I believe that was the first day they gave us.)  Then Friday night, it became Monday.  From Monday, it went to Wednesday…and we finally moved into the box that night.

The box consisted of metal framework, plywood sheets for the four sides, two cut out doors, and one cut out window.  They took the materials from the cut out and hinged them opening toward the inside of the building to make the doors and window.  The top was wire tacked to the sides.  We forced the crew building this place to put bigger shelving in - and even at that, we had to put double rows on each shelf to fit our inventory on them.  The phones didn’t work properly, the faxes weren’t coming in, the check out machines didn’t work, etc etc etc.  (Did I mention that the company has a work crew that does nothing but remodels - and they were in charge of all that stuff.  All we did was move the contents of the pharmacy when needed.)

We were told we would be boxed up for a week.  Then I took a prescription from one of the carpet layers working on the project and he said they’d be told they had a month to finish the job.  The week turned into eleven days.  Not as bad as it could have been, but if you’d have seen how far behind we were from all the extra work of moving and not being able to work properly out of a tiny place where nothing worked, you’d understand when I tell you it seemed like forever.  A co-worker was complaining and threatening to leave and I finally just turned around and yelled at him to either leave or shut up and actually work because standing around complaining wasn’t moving life forward for him any….I never do that.  He asked Robert to check up on me and make sure I was okay….lol  It was bad.

The day of the move back, they tried to talk us out of it because they hadn’t finished painting, doing the carpet or putting up the shelving…and my boss wouldn’t let them back out.  We moved.  If I had to have paid for the job, I’d have sued.  There were  phone wires coming out of the ceiling, ceiling tiles not laying flush, paint that was streaked and uneven, and the carpet was not in a pattern.  Apparently the installers didn’t know they were supposed to lay it a certain way so rather than having big geometrical shapes on the floor, we have weird patterns of nothing.  In addition to that, we had both registers down, the pharmacists phones were not working, several printers were not working, and the connection for the water machine used to mix prescriptions had been replaced…with the wrong one.  The repair guys weren’t fast in coming to our rescue.  After a week, one register still is not working, the water machine isn’t back up, and we had to have the phones repaired again after there was a phone line that shorted out.

I would think that a company that has a team for it’s own remodels would be able to whip in doing a wonderful job since it’s the same thing over and over.  What would I know though?  I just work here…at least that’s what I keep trying to tell the poor lost people that continue to stand in line with our 4 hour wait times only to be told their prescription isn’t ready yet because the pharmacist has been busy counseling every single costumer in order to comply with the new state law that goes into effect next month rather than working on your prescription.  For whatever reason, they choose to yell at me, the peon, rather than calling their congressman or going to another store.

…and that’s what I’ve done for the last few weeks…aside from attending a concert which I’ll tel you about in another post.  I was extremely close to just walking out on my job many times.  I asked myself why I do this to myself….and this is what I said,

“There ain’t no rest for the wicked.  Money don’t grow on trees.  I got bills to pay I got mouths to feed.  There ain’t nothin’ in this life for free.”

Dogs that is.  All the puppies are gone and Spud has gone to live with Vanessa leaving only Mia and Henley.  It’s quiet…and if our Xbox controller gets eaten again, we’ll know who did it.  Mia, since poor Henley can barely see the controller…lol  I’m finally where I wanted to be to start with, one small lap dog and on bigger watch dog (both of which are becoming more spoiled).

My sister sent me an email…all my mom and sisters generally send me are chain emails, spam, and sometimes plans to do something.  Anyway, she sent me an email that simply read,

“Women are angels and when someone breaks our wings, we continue to fly….on a broomstick.  We’re flexible like that.”

I liked it.