Dogs, mutts and names

When it comes to man's best friend what used to be a mutt is now some kind of "special, limited edition, designer" breed. I'd much prefer a good old mutt but I guess being a mutt is much too ordinary. Nobody wants to own an ordinary dog anymore. There are no longer any "accidents" that mess up long established blood lines, only "Oh my gosh" moments when a new, never before heard about breed is established. "Shephounds, Bullnauzers, Kerry Blue Danes, Pooschus, Malaweiners, Beagoundlands, JackRusselhuahas, etc, etc. are so commonplace nothing is a surprise anymore. Of course all these new breeds come with a hefty price tag too whereas a mutt was either free or very cheap. Another reason to lean towards a mutt.

Real dogs have enough strange names: Barbet, Klee Kat, Elo, Dandi Dinmont, Hawaiian Poi, Aidi, Bully Kutta, Kishu, Hovawart, Anglo-Francais de petite Venerte, Porcelaine, McNab, Beauceron, Akbash, Blackmouth Cur, Cesky Fouser, Tatra and Chippiparai are examples. I personally think there are enough strange Monika's placed on dogs without dreaming up all these other crazy handles.

A dog is a dog no matter what you call it. I've had breeds with magnificent blood lines and mutts with such messed up blood lines you weren't quite sure if they were a dog or some long believed extinct prehistoric marsupial. For that reason I'll not soon be acquiring a multi named, super snobby, heretofore unheard of animal. Just thought I'd mention that in case you were the slightest bit interested. .........................Joe

The last about the mean old grumpy guy

Busy, busy, busy. That's what this time of year is. If it's not a birthday, it's a graduation or a wedding or a new baby. A downright exciting time in history but it's been keeping me away from the blog a lot.

The old. mean guy told me the rest of his story while we were standing there and I thought I'd pass it along. All those years ago, when all the neighborhood kids thought he'd kill us if he caught us, things were not exactly as they seemed. He worked a lot and the family kept to themselves alright, but when I'd get an opportunity to talk with them they were mostly like everyone else to me. But, I was always just a touch nervous about those rumors. You know what I mean. If you hear something enough you start to wonder if there is some truth to it all. That wasn't the case though. This is what he told me the other day when I asked him if he was really that mean.

He and his kids spent so much time in the yard and house all the time because they were caring for his wife. She had terminal cancer, or rather a deadly type of leukemia. the doctors had given her all the treatment available at the time and pretty much sent her home to die. The mean old guy and his kids decided they'd do what they could to help her with whatever time she had left. For his part, the mean old guy worked an extra job to pay for some alternative treatments they learned about to make her more comfortable. They were very expensive and they had no insurance. The kids came home right after school and did the housework and cooking as well as helped her with her flowers and little lady like things she enjoyed. They did it because they loved their mom, not because they were slaves. The mean old guy planted a huge garden because he'd heard that natural foods were more healthy and had some curative qualities too. All this watching after his wife went on for a long time. The doctors had given her 6 months to live and she made it almost 25 years. Even after the kids grew up and moved away the mean old guy kept caring for her. She eventually passed away quickly and comfortably from some form of pneumonia. He said all in all they had a good life and he was still happy because of it.

Sometimes mean, old, grumpy guys have another side to them I guess. People aren't always what they appear to be at our first impression. Do you know anyone like that? I wish you a fine day................Joe

ACLU, Public Profanity and free speech

Call me old fashioned but I believe that respect for others is important in our civilized society.

The airwaves are filled with news about police in Pennsylvania ticketing people (probably mostly guys) for public profanity. The ACLU is checking in on fighting the tickets because of our right to free speech. A few years ago some guy on the Rifle River in Michigan lost his temper and yelled out a string of filthy profanities in front of a woman and her children. A police officer in the area ticketed the guy for public profanity. The courts took over and, in their wisdom decided the jerk didn't do anything wrong. I guess that in the name of freedom of speech we can verbally abuse anyone within earshot. Even if it means scaring and intimidating women and little kids. The guy on the Rifle river must be proud and his parents too.

The ACLU is supposed to protect our rights. If they feel that the right to blast away with any means of profanity we see fit at the time, I believe they are dead wrong! In my mind there is no other reason for profanity than intimidation when it comes to speaking it in front of those who are offended by it. Is free intimidation a right? I don't think so!

That's why I say that I may be thinking i an old fashioned way. Up until a short time ago it was against our core beliefs to use profanity in front of women and children as both a sign of respect and also it was against the law. Men or more accurately anyone who had any backbone at all refrained from filthy language unless they were in a select group of personal acquaintances as a sign of good manners and to avoid the wrath of the law. In the past few years I have been subjected to some of the worst language I've ever heard, more often than I care to count from women and teenage girls. My question is: Where has our sense of personal dignity gone?

Just who is winning this battle of a free society when we can't go anywhere and be free of verbal intimidation. And people wonder why our children fail to adopt normal behavior. I say to heck with the ACLU and those spineless weasels they are trying to protect. That's my opinion on this issue. There is no useful purpose in talking that way in public. (Are you picking up what I'm throwing down Mr. Biden?)..........................Joe, the old fashioned guy.

More about the mean old guy

As we meandered out the door chatting about how we were today, baseball season coming on and my grand kids he listened intently with a bright smile on his face. It was difficult to remember how he was feared by almost every kid in the neighborhood. He didn't smile back then. He worked almost constantly at two jobs and when he was home he busied himself in his garden or with the chickens or rabbits. The only time I saw him doing anything else was on Sunday morning when the whole family went to church. They arrived early at the first service of the day, which at the time was 6:30am. They also sat in the very last pew way in the back all by themselves. He didn't look mean to me sitting in church like that with his wife and kids around him. They stayed sitting after the service until most everyone else was gone and then they walked back home after usually saying something to the pastor. Then they spent most of the day in the house and garden.

His three kids went to middle school about four blocks away. Somehow the mean old guy managed to walk with them every day. Those kids seemed just like every other kid except they didn't go out for lunch or recess. They also took off a lot of sick days. And, although they were not rude and did talk a little with other kids they didn't mix with them at all after school. That added to the rumors. Some kids said they heard from another kid that the mean old guy kept those kids as slaves in the basement and only let them out to go to school and they were probably fed some kind of mind control drug to keep them from talking about being slaves. They certainly didn't act like slaves when I stopped by to collect for the paper or bring my seed catalog.

Today is a garden day for me. Replacing some plants that were frozen out and putting in some new. Fresh food from the garden is a real treat. The old mean guy seemed to know that too
..........................Joe

Food allergies,

Food allergies and sensitivities are a terrible health condition to deal with. If a person has an allergy to a specific food they can become deathly ill if they are exposed to it, accidentally or not the results are traumatic. Hundreds of thousands of young parents choose to raise their children on diets free of some of the most common allergy foods, peanuts, red meat, gluten and dairy products. Instead of finding out naturally if the children are sensitive or allergic they choose to simply avoid the possibility entirely. I wasn't raised that way. I think I was exposed to almost everything, including but not limited to dirt and a not so tasty bug or two. Limiting certain life experiences seems to be an ever increasing trend.

Listening to a program concerning health issues related to food allergies and sensitivities the other day I heard another side of the story. It seems a majority of those in the health care and research concerning these allergies have found that the upsurge in allergies is a result of growing up in such a sterile lifestyle. In other words: by not being exposed to a variety of food throughout our lives we put ourselves in jeopardy of not being able to tolerate those very foods. After thinking about that premise it sounded like simple common sense.

Many medicines and vaccines are made with small amounts of the offending germ or flu bug. We accept a tiny bit into our systems and our natural defences develop into a tolerance of sorts and we don't get sick from it. It's easy to transfer that same theory to our ability to process food.

According to much of this research, our desire to protect our kids and keep them safe from everything appears to be the cause of many of our most serious problems. They say we are protecting our kids into ill health, we are raising them to be weak and delicate instead of able to deal with life as it comes so they have to be protected all their lives. What an eye opener.

I've seen movies that portray the human experience as a form of evolution ending in a mindless, weak, sickly society that requires a caretaker for even the smallest need. I wonder how true those science fiction movies will become?..........I kinda like the dirt thing. I had a lot of fun doing it and my mom got some pretty funny pictures too.............................Joe

The old, mean guy

I happened across a guy from my old neighborhood the other day. As I looked over a shelf of sale items, deeply engrossed in the art of saving money, a hand touched my shoulder and a deep, mature voice said, "Hello Joey." Even without looking recognition was triggered by his distinctive rich, baritone, almost musical speech. The other was that only a chosen few in my life have been allowed to call me Joey. I turned and looked and sure enough, it was the mean old guy from down the street as I was growing up. He must be in his nineties by now because he was old back then. He was also considered by most neighborhood kids to be as mean as a junk yard dog. For some reason he and I got along OK while other kids thought some day he would kill me and feed me to his chickens.

His ramshackle house was located on the back edge of a gravel road alongside the railroad tracks. His wife planted flowers in the front yard around a stand up bath tub half buried in the ground with a religious statue sitting inside. The rest of the yard, except for a walkway and a fenced area with a chicken coop, was filled with vegetables, two apple trees, a plum tree and a small patch of blackberry bushes, with piles of smelly manure surrounding the roots. The mean old guy worked two full time jobs but still kept the garden growing and spent several hours a week working on repairing and improving some part of the house. He didn't speak to hardly anyone. They had three children, two sons and a daughter. The children were usually inside the house or gone, I can't remember a time when they played outside with the rest of us neighborhood kids. The rumor was that they were being kept prisoners and the mean old guy beat them and his wife every day. They didn't have a TV antenna anywhere on the house. The whole family was weird, they said. I thought they were OK. I met him and his family and talked with them once in a while because I peddled papers to them and also sold the mean old guy his garden seeds from my catalog. I helped him pick them out because he couldn't read. To be continued.

It's supposed to rain pretty good today. Should help my garden grow what I've already planted and help prepare for more planting too..........................Joe

The hermit, the cave, the smell

During my hike around Lake Michigan I met a lot of interesting people, one of which was a sort of hermit I guess you'd call him. Sometimes I wonder if he may still be living in his cave. Yes, when I came across him many years ago he had definitely set up housekeeping in a small cave overlooking a creek that flowed into Lake Michigan just a little south of the Mackinaw bridge. I ran across him while walking up the creek looking for something to eat. He had built a doorway from wooden sticks, clay and straw blocks and what appeared to be rabbit skins as a roof. Quite ingenious really, I thought. I declined his invitation to stay and visit for a few days for two reasons: number one is I had made my policy to not sleep in any structure and secondly, his cave stunk. I mean it wreaked of just what I don't know. But I can tell you that just standing in the doorway my eyes and nose hurt from the stench. At the time my goal was to complete my walk around the lake. not to visit with everyone I bumped into, no matter how interesting they were. Today is a different story. I am really curious as to why he lived in a cave, how long did he live there, why did he choose that area, what did he do to support himself, and most of all, how could he stand the odor? I can still remember and sense that awful, pungent, almost suffocating odor.

Walking through a store last week I stopped to look over a new tool displayed on a center aisle table. I like new tools. Picking up the tool, I turned it around in my hands to see how it worked and what useful functions it may have. While I was engrossed in this new multi tasking tool, imagining myself building lots of new stuff in my basement, my nose started to twitch and itch. My eyes began to tear up and sting. My mind flashed back to long ago when I first poked my head into that cave. It startled me and I looked around to find the source of that familiar yet terribly offensive smell. there were several people milling around and walking away from the tool display. I didn't see anyone that looked particularly dirty or hermit like. I also didn't notice anyone else searching for a source of any odor. No one smelling each other. In a minute or two the odor dissipated as far as I could tell. Apparently I was the only one that noticed it but then again maybe no one else wanted to acknowledge it either. After all, it was strong enough to maybe be considered as some type of biological terrorism in today's society.

It did make me wonder if that guy still lived in his cave up north, or has he moved into a store somewhere in Central Michigan that is open 24 hours?