Yesterday, we had an amusing incident happen. I was passing by the front desk when I heard Pat talking with a woman who had come in with her (30 year old) son to claim her dog. Pat was looking over the paperwork, saying, "Let me see if I got this right...Hmm, not sure I have this right...I work in the back, so I'm not too familiar with the paperwork...Julieann! Come see if I did this right..."

Listening, I was confused, since Pat knew exactly how to do the paperwork. She asked Julieann several times if she had done it right, each time involving her leaving the front desk, going to the back room where Julieann was entering stuff in the computer, then coming back to the desk. It was taking a lot of time, and by this time I was wondering what was going on. On the third or fourth time, Julieann came back with her to the front desk, then suggested, "Maybe they want to microchip their dog."

Pat's eyes lit up. "Do you want to microchip your dog?" she asked the woman. "It's only $10 if you do it right now." The woman agreed, and Julieann and I took the dog to our medical room to microchip it. After we shut the door behind us, Julieann finally explained Pat's strange behavior. Apparently, the son was wanted by the police, and Pat was trying to stall until they showed up. I'm assuming that when the police brought the woman's dog in, they mentioned to Pat that the son was wanted, and when Pat saw him come in with his mother, she phoned the police.

Juliann and I took our time microchipping the dog until we finally saw Pat rush by the door. We figured the police must have showed up, and finished the microchipping. Sure enough, a police officer and a detective had showed up. We handed the dog over to the mom while they took the son aside, and eventually the whole group moved outside and eventually left.

Well, I played "real" laser tag for the first time yesterday. It was a lot of fun! Our team won, but it helped that 2 of the 3 people on the other team were wearing grey shirts that glowed white under the blacklight in the arean. It was actually pretty close for a while--I remember glancing at the score-board ten minutes or so into the half-hour game and noting that the red team was ahead by a couple points. In the end, though, we ended up 15 points ahead.

Also, my latest short story (Working title: "Mockingbird") is almost done. A few more revisions, more agonizing over the beginning, reviews from a few trusted friends, then I'll send it off to Writers of the Future. I've been a finalist once, but as they say, close only counts in horsehoes and hand grenades. Once I'm done with this story, I have another one in mind ("Lost in Space"), and I still need to go back and finish up "Big Honkin' Ship" at some point. (Note that none of the titles are the real titles, which have not been decided yet.)

Yesterday, a rancher brought us "a passel o' cats," 18 to be exact. He had trapped them using a clever contraption involving chicken wire, bait food, and a long string that he used to trip a gate. I'm not sure how, but he had managed to get them all inside a giant plywood box that he had nailed shut. It took two of us to carry the crate inside, and as we tilted it on end to fit it through the door, we could hear 324 claws scrabbling around inside. Not a happy sound.

I and one of the other workers, Mark, took the crate into our "Cat Intake" room. Shutting the door, we pried out the nails holding the crate shut. I think we were both expecting the crate to spontaneiously explode, sending cats flying around the room like a shotgun full of bouncy-balls, but as the last nail was removed, the crate stayed ominously silent.

I opened the lid a crack, and saw 36 glowing eyes staring at me. Apparently they were just waiting for a sign that freedom was imminent, because they chose that moment to make their break for it.

Cats of all colors and sizes went zinging around the room, scrabbling up the walls, bouncing off the door, and ricocheting off the ceiling. Wielding our cloth pinchers, we tried to snag them mid-flight, but there were just too many! They were everywhere! All seemed lost! We were about to beat a desperate retreat when we noticed a curious phenomenon: we already had opened a few of the cages in the rooms, and the cats apparently saw them as safe places, foxholes so to speak, from which to launch new attacks. Quickly, we started slamming the full cages shut and opening new ones, which the still-loose cats also mistook for safe zones, climbing up the walls to get to them. Moments later, all the cats were ensconced in cages, and the battle was won.

Child and I went canoeing today, along with my cousin and three of my siblings. It was a lot of fun--I borrowed the van and trailer from my parents, we loaded the canoes, and drove several miles up the Canyon. There's a lot of construction on the Canyon road right now, which made things a little interesting, and we had to slid the two canoes down a steep, 30 foot gravel embankment to the railroad tracks below. From there, it was a short bushwhack to the river, and we managed to board the canoes without tipping over.

The trip down was a lot of fun, although about five minutes from the end we hit a reef and capsized. The scurvy dogs serving before the mast abandoned ship despite my threats of taking the cat o' nine tails to them, and one floated downstream while the other struck for the far shore. Eventually I got the canoe righted and dragged to shore, and eventually resumed our trip with the one able-bodied seaman who returned. The mutinous first mate who floated downstream protested that she had been recovering one of the lost sweeps, so she was spared a keel-hauling. That, and I'm getting married to her in a month and a half...

At the animal shelter we have a "shelter dog," a Golden Retreiver that we decided to keep for ourselves. His name is Rufus, and he's a great dog, still a little young (read: excitable at times), but very quick to learn and very friendly. He would play "fetch" for hours if you let him, and loves everyone.

Rufus was intrigued by a rabbit we got in. The rabbit was mildly interested in him in return, and not at all afraid.


They got along for a short while, until the rabbit decided to try an experiment and see if breaking into a run would trigger an instinctive chase-reaction from Rufus. The experiment was a total success, much to the rabbit's surprise, and it was spared a potentially-traumatizing conclusion by me tackling Rufus as he ran past the third time.

Today, a dog made it through the euthanasia chamber without dying. His three companions did, but he didn't. I think the CO tank was almost empty, and there just wasn't enough gas to kill them all. He was obviously sick, with drool dripping from his mouth, but he was sitting up and very much alive. It reminded of an almost identical case that I saw in the news a year or so ago, about a dog back East that made it through the chamber alive. Someone at the shelter rushed it to a vet, they fixed it up, and adopted it.

Ours wasn't such a happy ending. We didn't have the money before to save its life, and we didn't have the money after. We put it in the smaller cat euthanasia chamber and ran it through again. It's in a much happier place now.

But whose fault was this really? It wasn't our lack of funding or time or space--the problem started long before the dog got to our shelter. I want be accusatory and say it's the fault of owners who don't properly care for their animals, who don't get them spayed or neutered, or let them run loose, but I try to be understanding. Sometimes little Bobby opens the door and Tiger slips out, or the meter reader leaves the gate open and Spot escapes. One way or another, animals end up at the shelter.

But here's where I can make a difference. I think a lot of animals at the shelter go unclaimed simply because people don't know where to look for them, or even that the shelter exists. Our jurisdiction covers a dozen cities and towns, and 30 miles of highway. I can see how someone at one end of our jurisdiction might not know to travel to the other end to find their missing pet. The problem is that other than listing ourselves in obvious places like the Yellow Pages, we don't have the money for extensive advertising.

The trick, in my mind? Free advertising. Take advantage of newspapers and local tv stations. Create a story that is newsworthy, and they'll cover it. My idea? Collect a number of collars equal to the number of animals we euthanize every year. Last year, that was about 3000. That's a big pile of collars. Dump them somewhere public, get some attention, and reporters will flock to the story like flies. Explain the situation, the story gets out, and now a lot more people know that their animals end up at the shelter, and where the shelter is.

But why stop there? Take that carload of collars and go to other shelters in the state. Start a website. Get other groups to do it in other states. Make it a big deal. Get on CNN.

But you have to start somewhere. Earlier this evening, I emailed a handful of different pet supply companies, asking who I would talk to about donating collars for an awareness program. If I don't get any success there, I'll go in person to the local PetSmart and other stores. Failing that, I'll just start saving collars from the shelter. Hey, we get plenty.

While I'm working/waiting on that, my next step will be to start thinking about a website design. Somewhere that I could get word out about the program, get support, and possibly PayPal donations to help buy collars. It might move a little slowly since I have other important things going on in my life at the moment (e.g. getting married), but I'll keep it moving forward.

Yesterday, we had two dogs come in to the animal shelter. They were Newfoundland mixes. They weighed 225 pounds. Each.

They were huge. I could have ridden on them, easily. The funny thing was that in the kennel next to them was a miniature poodle, probably 10, 15 pounds max. It was an amusing dichotomy.

Only in Utah: I was on a bench just inside the door at Walmart, waiting for a prescription to be filled, when a guy walks in carrying a shirt. "Returning that?" the Walmart door-watcher said, reaching for her "return stickers," but the guy shook his head. "I forgot to pay for it, so I came back," he said.

Do you think you'd see that in your hometown?

Texas

Last Wednesday, Child and I went to Texas, to escort her grandmother down to Corpus Christi to see an old friend who was in the hosiptal. After we dropped her off there, Child and I drove up to New Braunfels, northeast of San Antonio, to visit her other set of grandparents.

They had recently bought a house on the Guadalupe river, and we stayed there for several days. One of the highlights was going inner-tubing on the Comal river. At one of the parks in New Braunfels, they had a "tube-chute," which was a narrow, curving channel that the water was forced through, making and exciting ride for inner-tubers. You could float all the way down the river, and get out at several stops before you left the city.



It also seemed a popular destination for beer-drinking inner-tubers, which just seems a bad idea to me. Granted, the river wasn't exactly white-water, but mixing drunkeness and water just doesn't seem smart. A couple police evidently thought the same, and were posted at the bottom of the chute checking for underage drinkers.


On Sunday, we left New Braunfels and went through San Antonio to Castroville, where my grandparents on my dad's side live. We visited with them for a couple hours, as well as some other relatives who live right by them. That was a fun visit, since I haven't seen them for about five years.

After that, we drove back to Corpus. On Monday, Child and I visited the beach on Padre Island, where the water wasn't nearly as cold as I thought it would be. I'm not a huge fan of the ocean--it's cold, salty, and wet--but the visit was actually enjoyable, to my surprise. It helped that Child was there. :)


We flew home this (Tuesday) morning.

Engagement

Wow. Got some serious catching-up to do.

First things first, I'm engaged, as of three weeks ago or so. The wedding's on July 6, reception on July 7.

To propose, I had an evening planned out. I started by taking Child three roses, and told her the best part of each day was seeing her.

We went and played some Frisbee Golf, then I gave her three more roses and told her the funnest (yes, not a word) part of each day was playing games with her. After that, we went out to eat, then I gave her three more roses. We were meeting a couple of her friends up the canyon for a bonfire that evening, so I told her we just had time to do a geocache.

(Geocaching is using a GPS unit to find a cache or treasure that someone else has hidden and posted the coordinates of on the internet.) Previously, I had hidden my own geocache up the canyon, near the park where we were meeting her friends for the bonfire.

I told Child I had already programmed the GPS coordinates in, and gave her the GPS unit to follow. We hiked up in the mountains for a few minutes, and eventually found the cache (a peanut butter jar). When she opened it, there were a collection of easter eggs, all with little slips of paper inside. On the top of the cache, there was a note that said, "You know how this works. You must choose something to take, and leave something in return." (In most geocaches, there are a handful of little trinkets, and you can take one of them and leave a trinket in exchange.)

Each of the little slips of paper had things like, "Move to Alaska," or "Become a progessional puppy-killer," things I knew she didn't like. She figured out pretty quick at that point that it was my cache, and said, "But I don't want to choose any of them." I told her I had another option, and pulled a final egg from my pocket with the ring inside.

The thing she had to leave in return was her answer, and she said Yes. :) I love Child...

I just had to post a short exchange from a Sherlock Holmes story I was reading a little while ago. The story is "A Scandal in Bohemia," where the King of Bohemia, or Crown Prince at the time of hisindiscretion, is relating to Sherlock Holmes how he might be blackmailed by a lady he had contact with previous. At first, Sherlock Holmes is doubtful that the King need worry:

Sherlock Holmes: "I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?"

King of Bohemia: "There is the writing."

SH: "Pooh, pooh! Forgery."

KB: "My private note-paper."

SH: "Stolen."

KB: "My own seal."

SH: "Imitated."

KB: "My photograph."

SH: "Bought."

KB: "We were both in the photograph."

SH: "Oh, dear!"

Ha ha! Just a classic exchange.

On a less anti-reporter-rant, I saw an interesting dichotomy at the animal shelter yesterday. A police officer from one city brought in a dog, a a brown hound. Opening the cage in the back of his pickup truck, the officer snapped his fingers and the dog jumped down. Without a leash, the dog calmly followed the officer into our intake room and stepped into a cage that the officer held open for him. Job done.

An hour later, another officer from a different city brought in a dog. This dog, a labrador retreiver, had been pepper-sprayed, tasered, and was dragged howling and fighting into the intake room with a choke pole around its neck and one of the taser barbs still embedded in its skni. Its mouth was bleeding from trying to chew the metal cable, and I wouldn't doubt that it had lost a couple teeth. Because of the pepper spray, I had to hose it off (through the bars of its cage), spraying it in the face for almost ten minutes with a mix of shampoo and water. When the pepper spray got wet, it became so strong that the other dogs in our intake room started sneezing, and we had to move them out.

So it was quite a contrast, and the question is this: what kind of dog are we? Are we dragged kicking and screaming and tasered through life, or do we accept the situation and make the best of it? Both dogs ended up reunited with their owner in the end, but I can guarentee that one dog was happier than the other, and had a much more pleasant experience.

Okay, I was going to blog today anyway, but after an email I got this morning, I'm going to blog twice.

The first blog is a rant about print media. A month or two ago I received the "Utah Animal Control Officer's Volunteer of the Year" award, for volunteer work I did at an animal shelter. The director at the animal shelter mentioned it to a couple reporters, and a couple stories in various papers came out about me. The email I received was from one of the reporters, pointing me to online links to the stories.

The problem I had is nothing new, but it is this: the reporters totally and completely made things up. Nothing serious, you understand, but enough to make me go, "Huh? Where the heck did you get THAT from?"

Example 1 from the Deseret Morning News: "...making the rounds with his earphones in, Hardin is at peace."

Sounds nice, yes, but one problem: I have never worn earphones there. And, oh wait, I never wear earphones anywhere. I don't own earphones. Worse part? I think it's patently rude to wear earphones in a work environment where you need to communicate with other people. Grrr.


Example 2 from BYU News Net. Opening line: "BYU student Ben Hardin was acknowledged recently for his work in veterinary work..."

Veterinary work? Where did that come from? I hose down cages. Help people adopt dogs. Pull cats out of the ceiling. I'm not fixing broken legs or neutering dogs on the front desk. This isn't as bad as example 1 since a lazy reporter might extrapolate veterinary work from an animal shelter, but it is still incorrect and shows that the reporter did a terrible job reporting. And it's still the opening sentence of the article.


Example 3, same source: "[Hardin] said he saw the job opportunity online and called asking for an application."

No, I didn't. I didn't see any job opportunity online, I didn't call for an application, and I certainly didn't say that I did. It doesn't even make sense. Why would I apply for a job when I only wanted to be a volunteer, and repeatedly turned down job offers after I started volunteering? The reporter can't claim she didn't know this, because three paragraphs before, the article says: "[The shelter director] would love to hire him, but [Hardin] won't take a job."

But who knows. Maybe the reporter is just trying to make me look good. After all, she also extrapolated a yearly tradition for my last nine years of college of working with the Special Olympics, from my comment that I helped out one year. Maybe I shouldn't complain. But I'm going to anyway.

A couple months ago I won a citronella animal repellant. Like pepper spray to animals, but harmless to humans. Just this morning I got around to reading the front of the package:

Ideal for Joggers, Cyclists, Families, and Nuisance Animals

I was fine up until that last one. Is this ideal to use ON joggers, cyclists, families and nuisance animals? "Honey, grab the citronella pepper spray! We got joggers digging through the trash again!" Or maybe, "Dear, that cyclist just growled at me. Better get the citronella spray ready."

An even scarier interpretation is that it's ideal to by used BY joggers, cyclists, families, and nuisance animals. Just picture armies of squirrels armed with citronella spray. Now that's a frightening thought.

I guess it wouldn't be so bad since it doesn't really affect humans, but you better not leave your dog chained in the backyard. You'd have raccoons macing your dog then carting his food off while your dog staggers in circles swearing up a storm and clutching at his nose.

Well, it's been busy, and it will keep being busy. Last weekend Child and I went to Las Vegas. We stayed at her aunt and uncle's house in Henderson, and let me tell you, I didn't want to come home. Going down, we passed through several snow flurries in Utah, but in Nevada, the temperature was 65 - 70 degrees in the afternoon.

While down there, we rode the three rides atop the Stratosphere. The rides themselves weren't anything particularly amazing...but put them up at 1100 ft, and now you're talking. The seatbelt on your seat becomes much more fascinating when there's 1100 feet of nothing between the soles of your feet and the traffic below.

Well, the geocaching trip was a nice little stroll in the nearby hills, but we were unuccessful finding the cache. The directions told you right up front that the coordinates weren't exact and you had to hunt for it, but we failed miserably. Granted, we were a little short of time (foiled by a haircut appointment!) but next time...the next geocache won't know what hit it!

As I was sitting alone in the laundry room last night watching my clothes spin in the dryer, I reflected that there is nothing more lonely than sitting alone in a laundry room on Valentine's Day watching your clothes spin in the dryer.

Fortunately, it was only until Child got off work, then she came over and we made dinner together and read a love story ("Max and Me and the Time Machine"). Can I just say that I love Child? She is the most amazing thing ever. And it's not just because she brought me pizza and chocolate and a balloon for lunch (I didn't eat the balloon). :) She's going to Disneyland this weekend while I go canyoneering, and I'm going to miss her...

While leaving the flower store yesterday, I saw a guy carrying two bundles of flowers. "A real player, huh?" I commented. "TWO girlfriends!"

Turns out he was just picking up one for his dad to give to his mom. Sigh. Sometimes our heros fall so fast...

"The problem with red roses is that they...can imply committment or love."

Child pointed this out to me in the local school newspaper. That can be a real problem, alright. Heaven forbid you might actually INTEND roses to imply committment or love! (Things like that are the reason she no longer reads the school newspaper.)

On a different note, we are going to attempt geocaching for the first time. We printed a few spots off geocaching.com, and I'll post how it goes later...

Now that I finally got around to blogging, I can't think of what I wanted to blog about. I've gotta start scratching reminders on my arm with a pen so I can remember.

Of course, classes has started...my last semester! (Although I still have a couple semesters' worth of thesis writing left...) I'm unofficially taking a writing class, with Brandon Sanderson as the teacher (of Elantris and Mystborn fame, neither of which I have read). It looks like it'll be a great class though, and I'm excited for an outside motivation to write.

When Brandon divided the class into groups, one of the groups he titled the "Uber" group. Since I consider myself a halfway decent writer and am looking for some quality critiquing, I attached myself to that group. The four people in our group (including a student editor of a school magazine) exchanged email addresses, so we could send each other the usernames for a LiveJournal account we were required to set up for the class.

The email from one of my fellow students had no capitalization, he used "you're" when he should have used "your," and he actually used the word "guys's." Aiee. I can see we have a long semester ahead of us...

Curses. I know I had something to in particular to blog about...wait! I just remembered!

Snow Camping

Over the weekend, I went on a snowshoeing/snowcaving trip. Now, I won't blame everything that happened on Bob (names have been changed), but let me tell you the story. As Patrick McManus would have put it, "in terms of misery, it was very fine."

We were supposed to leave around three PM on Friday, which would put us at the trailhead with just enough light to see where we were going. 3:00 rolled around, 3:30, 4:00...still no Bob. Finally, about 4:15, he calls me. "Sorry I'm late, I just finished a school project. I'll be home in 10 minutes...then I'll start packing."

I head over to his place and we finally leave. He left his sleeping bag in Idaho so he's just taking a couple army blankets, and he has no food. Rather than lose even more time stopping at the store, I tell him I have enough for both of us (I do--better safe than sorry on a snow-camping trip).

I've already told people back home what trailhead we'd be starting from, but by the time we get to the general area, it's snowing, and too dark to see anything. We drive back and forth several times, and finally give up, settling on the first pull-off we can find that doesn't say "no camping." Strapping snowshoes to our feet, we start hiking.

The hike was actually very pleasant. We were bundled up warm, and the exertion kept us warm as well. Our plan was to hike for a while, then find a good place sheltered from the wind in the trees, and dig a snowcave. We quickly realized we had a problem: there were no trees. At least, there were no trees as far as we could see, which was admittedly not far, with the blowing snow and darkness.

We kept hiking, and eventually spotted a dark patch on the hillside we were hiking beside. Leaving the trail, we started uphill, sinking knee deep in fresh, powdery snow (WITH snowshoes on*).

By the time we reached the hilltop and started down the other side, we were tired enough that we stopped at the first likely-looking patch of trees and threw our packs down. We then went immediately to our next problem: the snow was so fine and powdery that a half-hour of digging with our snowshoes produced a pile of snow that barely would have made a decent snowcave for a midget, and that only if he was missing the lower half of his body.

Abandoning that idea, we decided to make a lean-to, leaning sticks against fallen tree that was several feet off the ground. Once we had a nice framework of sticks, we laid a tarp I had brought over the top, then started covering it with snow for insulation. It took another 45 minutes to do that, but when it was completed, it was high enough to not-quite sit upright in, rickety enough that a cooling sprinkle of snow would rain down anytime we moved, and it had a gaping front door to allow any cold that got in to easily escape.

We both slid into our sleeping accoutrements, me more or less on top of Bob due to the small dimensions and bowl-shape floor plan, and I cooked us up some Cup O' Soups. After, I snacked on a few cheese crackers, while Bob disappeared completely under his blanket in an attempt to get warm.

"I'm getting cracker crumbs in my sleeping bag," I observed casually.

"Ha ha! The wolves will go for you," he laughed.

I glanced out at the dark night. It was doubtful there were wolves in our immediate vicinity...but you never knew. Carefully, I crushed a couple crackers between my finger and sprinkled them quietly onto Bob's blanket.

As it turned out, the wolves didn't have time to find us. Ears tuned to any unusual noise, I woke about 2:3o in the morning to hear Bob's voice, "Are you awake?"

"I am now," I muttered.

"Good, because I'm freezing. Let's go home," he said.

Since he had the car keys and was already climbing out of the shelter, it was a persuasive argument. Besides, now that I was awake, I knew it'd take me forever to fall back asleep, especially since the foot warmers that Child had sent with me had lost their heat.
We packed up, tore down our snow shelter to retrieve my tarp (a quick tap with the foot sent it crashing down), and hit the trail at 3 AM. We got back to the car about 4:30, and were relaxing with hot chocolate in Bob's house at 6 AM.

In retrospect, the trip was good. Not only was it a fine, character-building misery, but it reminded me why I only went snow camping once a year. It takes me that long to forget why I swear every year I'll never do it again. But of course, next year I'll have forgotten, and will set off on yet another adventure. And maybe next time we'll actually stay long enough for the wolves to show up...

No Mexico today.

Instead, I'll tell you how I almost died.

We had a boxer (dog) that was leaving a little streak of blood every time his wagging tail would hit the wall. I tried to look at it but he wouldn't sit still long enough for me to hold his tail, much less inspect it. "I know," I thought. "I'll take him outside to run around, and after he gets his energy out, he'll sit still so I can look at his tail."

Little did I know this would lead perilously close to my demise.

Once we reached the fenced-in backyard, I shut the gate and let him off the leash. Then, I hung the leash around my own neck, as I normally do. "Hmm," I thought. "It's getting cold. I should zip up my coat." The next thing I knew, I was strangling, and I quickly realized what happened. The boxer, excited to be outside, saw the dangling end of the leash and decided to play "Tug-of-war"!

This was a "noose" collar and it quickly tightened. "Stop!" I tried to shout, but it came out more like "Squrglmf!" Delighted at my frantic antics, the boxer really got into the game, tugging for all he was worth. Anytime I tried to move towards him to get some slack in the leash, he would back off, pulling as hard as he could. It was all I could do to keep a couple fingers' worth of gap between the rope and my trachea.

Everything started to go dim (being under my coat, the taut leash was making the coat ride up over my face). Finally, when the boxer let go briefly to get a better grip, and I jerked the leash free. Air! Precious air! The boxer leaped for the leash again and I quickly took it off. The moral of the story: dogs are stupid.

No, okay, I'm sure there's a better moral, but until I figure it out, I'm just going to avoid wearing leashes around my neck.

So I promised Padre Jaime's house.


It was about the size of a mobile home, but without all the luxuriousness and ameneties, such as a bathroom door, and heat. There were eight of us, and seven beds. You do the math, then take a wild guess who slept on the park bench in the hall. I had an overwhelming urge to use newspapers as blankets, but since Tijuana was nowhere NEAR as warm as Mexico should have been, I abandoned the humorously appropriate covering for a more practical cloth one.

Since there was no shower and Child mentioned in passing that I smelled like a "sweating pig eating garlic and sunbathing on a hot day in a garbage dump," (not her exact words, but the essence of her statement) I had my hair washed over the sink with a pan of lukewarm water heated on the propane-powered stove. The only trick was keeping an eye on the bucket under the sink and emptying it before the leaky pipes caused it to overflow.

Our whole trip wasn't ALL such decadent high-living and comfort, but once we moved into an abandoned hospital, I at least got to upgrade my sleeping arrangements from the park bench to a box-spring mattress. Not only that, but most of the bathrooms had doors. The one bathroom that didn't led to the unfortunate but amusing incident of mom getting locked into one of the bedrooms.

Since the bathroom had no door, the plan was to simply lock the door of the room containing the bathroom. As soon became apparent, the handle mechanism on the bedroom door was faulty, and the door refused to open to let her out.

This was no sheetboard and aluminum foil door, it was a stern, heavy-duty wood door that knew its business and was evidently built to withstand determined Mexican banditos with a desperate need to use "el bano." Even the doorknob proved intransigent, and we had at least a half-dozen highly trained people working over it.


It wouldn't have been so bad but it was after we had gotten "home" from a long day of heavy work, and everyone was tired. The bedroom of her imprisonment was the one I had stolen my box-spring bed from so we couldn't just leave mom alone to spend the night there, even if she had let us. Fortunately, if circumstances turned out that she had to spend an extended period of time in the room, she had a baththroom, like, right there.

Complicating things, we were on the second story of the hospital, with a low neighboring shed blocking access to anything beneath the window in her room. Putting our heads together (a tired and hungry mom can produce remarkable levels of inspiration), we came up with the idea of tying a hammer to the end of an extension cord, then swinging it from a neighboring room's window to mom's window. The hammer, combined with a screw bit slipped under the door, allowed her to pound out the pins of the door's hinges. A final shoulder check from dad sent the door flying in (and causing the previously-removed and discarded doorknob to become amusingly embedded in the door when it landed on the floor).

Tune in next time for...roads and dogs.

After Christmas and a week in Tijuana, Mexico, I'm going to try getting slowly caught up in my blog.

First things first, today. I went in to the animal shelter for the first time since getting home from Mexico--they have new hours. 9 - 6 every day, instead of their funky 11-7 M & Th, 9:30-5:30 Tu, W, & F schedule.

Our donkey had her feet trimmed, which was interesting to watch. Her hooves were so overgrown that she was starting to walk way back on her heels, which had to be uncomfortable. It'll still take her a while to start walking normally again, but she will eventually. We get animals into the shelter in about every condition, but these were the worst feet I've seen.

On a funnier note, we were having a BBQ lunch to celebrate one of the inmates being released, and we were talking about pets we had and have. The inmate in question was already in a good mood because of his imminent release, and the general mood at the table was jovial, so the stage was set for one of the ladies reminiscing to be mis-interpreted. She started talking.

"I had a little chihuahua once. I lived in an apartment with no yard or fence, so I usually kept it inside." She took a bite of potato salad. "I decided to take it out for a walk one day, but when I walked outside, the wind was so strong..."

She couldn't finish. The whole table burst into laughter at the immediate mental image we each got of a chihuahua bouncing down the road in a strong breeze, with the inmate practically falling off his chair he was laughing so hard.

Course, it turned out that she had been about to say that the wind was so strong her chihuahua got scared and ran off and got hit by a car, but it was too late, our own mental completion of her story was just too funny and we chose to go with that. For the rest of the day, whenever this lady was doing something or looking for something, the inmate would suggest, "Maybe the wind blew it away," then crack up laughing again.

The shelter director also called me into his office right before I left. Turns out he wants me to attend some conference down in the southern part of the state, somewhere around January 17 or 18. Something to do with animal control and shelter management. Sounds intrigiuing.

Mexico
So my plan is/was to slowly put up reminisces of Mexico as I have time, but we'll see how good my memory is. First off, we (me, Child, my family, and a few other random people) went down to Mexico as a part of "Charities Anywhere" to work on various service projects: digging trenches, pouring cement, and lots of dry-walling.

The one incident that comes to mind first was attending New Year's Mass in a small Catholic church. A lot of our service had been directed by the local Catholic Padre, since he knew who needed help, so we thought it would be nice if we attended one of his services on Sunday. It was a tiny, quaint church, decked out with Christmas lights and various statues and pictures, with the large double doors open to the cool night air the entire service.

The opening song was Jingle Bells (in Spanish of course), which I thought was rather funny. It's not what I usually consider a church hymn, but they had a guitar player leading the way and belting it out. During the service, a cat wandered through, enjoying the warmth, and a dog took up a position under one of the pews. It really was a lot of fun. I wish OUR church had dogs walking through it...

The Gully

The Gully was one of the poorest area I've ever seen. The houses were built out of scraps of plywood, pallets, and pieces of billboard, with old tires doing everything from serving as stairs to shoring up the almost vertical hillside.

The Trench de Muerte

When we weren't working in the gully, we were working on one of Padre Jaime's projects, in this case, digging a trench (de muerte) for power lines. It was back-breaking work with picks and shovels. It was hard, especially when we started getting close to the required three-foot depth. Hard to lift the dirt out, hard to get leverage to dig any dirt up. And I don't think the soil had seen any rain in years.

Tune in next time for...Padre Jaime's house