The Adventures of Larry and Yo

Bow wow

Our family has grown by one. Larry has been wanting a dog for sometime now. As he put it "this house needs more testosterone". He wanted a lab though and I'm sorry but, labs are just a bit too rambunctious for me. I like my kitties. I like little doggies. I mentioned smaller breeds but, he just wasn't having it. So a few weeks ago he has this dream that we got a pug. Pugs are little dogs that look like they hit a brick wall doing 200 miles an hour. They are adorable but, they also have lots of health problems. That wasn't holding Larry back. He was Martin Luther King. He had a dream!

He spent the morning online searching through Rescues and Animal Adoption places. Hours later I hear a laugh and a whoop from downstairs followed by "you have to see this". He instant messaged me a link to the most adorable little guy. They had him listed as Pug/Chihuaha mix but, he looked more Pug/Boxer/Boston Terrier to me. I read his description and it said he had been rescued from the pound where he had been taken as a stray. He was about 2 years old, loved to play but, also loved to snuggle. He was good with cats and housetrained. After some thought, we filled out the online  application and hit Send. The next day, our phone rang and we had an hour long interview that ended with an appointment to meet Buster Brown at our house and see how he liked us and our kitties.

That Saturday Buster arrived full of doggie kisses and tail wags. He was accompanied by his foster mom and a Rescue worker who had to make sure our house, our cats and us were all acceptable. After about an hour they told us they wanted us to keep him overnight and see what we thought the next day. We took him for a walk, played catch in the yard. Larry tried to teach him to swim before discovering that he is not a water dog, and we wore him out. He snuggled with us on our 6ft long bean bag chair during our evening movie, then slept between us in the bed until the alarm went off. He crawled up beating us awake with his tail until one of us opened our eyes and it was all over. We were up repeating the day again with playing catch and tug of war with his doggie rope. It didn't take us long to make the phone call to tell the Rescue worker, Katrina, that Buster Brown had adopted us.

He is settling in to his new surroundings and the cats are getting more tolerant. Squeak will let him get right up to her and even sniff noses. Buster likes to follow a good nose sniff with a game of chase and Squeak goes racing to her kitty condo. This is good as she is a tad overweight. Freak turns into a hissing machine when Buster is around. They are almost silent hisses and once she starts, it is hard to shut her off. She will keep hissing even if Buster is in another county. I think her hisser button gets stuck. Baby is a scrapper. She will lurk about the house until she finds Buster then she will growl, hiss and come out boxing. Good thing she doesn't have claws. Buster will take it for so long and even allow himself to get backed into a corner before Larry or I stop it. I am waiting for the day he fights back. Maybe that is what she needs.

Our days have been so full lately what with a new, four legged child, my religion classes and job and some new work Larry picked up, which is why I have not updated this blog for awhile. With that being said here are some pics of Buster Brown. These are the ones that made us fall in love with him on the Rescue website. Larry took some new ones of him here but, we all know how quickly he gets pictures to me ;)

Say hi to Buster Brown!(click the image to see a bigger picture)

Lovey Dovey

I finally have some pics of our doves up. They started making babies sometime around April, I believe, and stopped in August. The pics we got are of the last babies and the last time mom and dad have graced our porch column. 11 babies later.

I have some awesome memories of watching mom and dad feed their kids, and one of them teaching an only child how to fly in a monsoon. That child refused to leave the top of our fence and even pecked at mom several times when she would swoop down and give some nudging. Baby fledgling lived under our  pool slide for weeks, refusing to fly much, and tried to go back into the nest that mom and dad had two new eggs in, only to be chased off by a very protective dad. I can hear it now "son, stop trying to mooch off of us. You are old enough now. Go find your own seeds".

Sucks leaving home.

The world offers help

First of all we want to say that our thoughts and prayers go out to the people who have lost loved ones and homes due to Katrina and her aftermath. The lives of each and every one of us that calls this country home has been forever touched and will never be the same.

I read this article yesterday and it made me misty eyed to see the offers of help pouring in from other countries. I sincerely hope that Bush can swallow some pride and accept.

World pledges hurricane aid to US
(AFP)

2 September 2005

PARIS - The world held out a hand to a superpower in crisis on Friday, offering hurricane disaster aid to the United States from a French offer of ships and aircraft to a 25,000-dollar donation by tsunami-pounded Sri Lanka.

Offers streamed in after the United States, the world’s biggest single aid donor, said it would be open to assistance though it was not making an appeal for foreign aid.

Scenes of chaos -- explosions and fires erupting in New Orleans, looters on the rampage, bodies in the streets, and refugees crammed into a stinking squalor in the city’s Superdome -- prompted an outpouring of shock and sympathy.

“Whatever they ask for, it will be given, from reserves of oil... to any other thing that they may need,” European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in Newport, Wales, during a meeting of the 25-nation bloc.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization chief, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said NATO stood ready to contribute.

“Whenever and wherever our NATO partner and important friend -- the United States of America -- asks (for) assistance, NATO stands ready to answer those calls,” Scheffer told a press conference during a visit to Sofia.

Among the major allies:

-- The French foreign ministry offered eight aircraft and two ships, with 600 tents and 1,000 camp beds also available at the United States’ request.

-- Prime Minister Tony Blair said he had spoken to President George W. Bush, and Britain was ready to help “in any way that we can.”

“The whole of this country feels for the people of the Gulf Coast of America who have been afflicted by what is a terrible, terrible natural tragedy,” he said in a speech in Watford, southeast England.

“We want to express our sympathy and our solidarity and give our prayers and thoughts to the people who were affected by what has happened out there on the Gulf Coast,” he said.

-- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was personally working out the details of a relief package, a government spokesman said. Berlin could provide assistance on water treatment or shelter for people left homeless, a government spokesman said.

-- Japan offered 200,000 dollars for the American Red Cross and up to 300,000 dollars worth of tents, blankets, power generators and water tanks. Toyota offered five million dollars, Nissan 500,000 dollars.

-- Australia promised 10 million Australian dollars (7.5 million US) through the American Red Cross.

“Given the extraordinary generosity of the United States when other countries are in need, and given the very close relationship between Australia and the United States, and given also the scale of the disaster, we believe it is a very valuable gesture and a mark of our concern for the scale of the human misery that has come from this disaster,” said Prime Minister John Howard.

-- Canadian Defence Minister Bill Graham said his country was preparing a package, including an offer of military assets.

-- Among others, the Netherlands, a low-lying country that depends on its system of levees, or dams, has offered to send a team of experts to help plan the reconstruction of New Orleans. Italy said it was ready to help but had not been contacted. Sweden offered medical and technical aid. Lithuania’s Red Cross started taking donations.

More poignant were offers from the needy.

Sri Lanka -- still recovering from the December 26 tsunami which devastated the island’s coastlines and killed 31,000 people -- said it had donated 25,000 dollars and asked doctors to help the relief effort.

Somalis offered sympathy.

“New Orleans looks like Mogadishu when the war started,” said bus driver Aden Mohamud in Somalia’s war-shattered capital.

He said he was troubled by television images that showed most of the some 300,000 desperate people still trapped in New Orleans were black.

“Maybe some whites are also starving but the African Americans are who I have seen,” Mohamud said. “I am sorry they are poor like us.”