LIFE AND TIMES WITH OUR CRITTERS

My wife Kathy and I have an abundance of critters or should I say they have us because as everyone who has pets know we do belong to them not the other way around. We have 2 dogs Buddy and Nanalu, 2 cats Roman and Carlos and 2 birds Mojo and Lasko. We also have an outside feral cat we named Lucy. This home of ours is never boring that is for sure. Buddy and Nanalu keep us very entertained. Roman and Carlos are bit older so they pretty much sleep, purr and eat alot. Mojo and Lasko our keets do alot of chirping and playing so it is nice to watch them interact.  Each one of our critters has their own personalities and I am going to share a little of that with you.

Let's begin with our keets Mojo and Lasko. Mojo is a beautiful shade of green and some yellow with black tail feathers and wings. Lasko is bright yellow with white tail feathers and wings. I named Mojo because I felt a certain allure to him and he seemed very active when we got him. Kathy named Lasko because the name contains hard  Consonants. We have had Mojo a bit longer than Lasko. Once we got Lasko our little Keet family was complete. They seem to have a certain chemistry these two. They chirp to eachother alot or they just chirp together. Lasko is the acrobat that is for sure. He spins around on every single perch that they have in their cage. It is so funny to watch. Also we have what we call the blue cave. It is a soft hand muffle looking thing that is in the corner top of the cage. That is where Lasko spends some of the cold nights sleeping. No other keet has ever been in it. Both keets gather up the liter pellets that we have at the bottom of their cage and put it in their drinking water. Lasko is the one that started that and Mojo just followed right in. Most of the time the two keets Mojo and Lasko sleep together on the blue and white swing that we have in the cage. Once we cover it they go right up to the swing together and there they are when we uncover them in the morning. It is so cute to see them together playing and chirping together.

Now let's talk about the other boys our cats Roman and Carlos. We call them our big yellow boys because that is what they are big and yellow and boys. These two are liter mates and they're 13 years old. Like I said above they mostly eat, purr and sleep atleast now that is what they do but when they were younger they did alot of playing together. I remember when I bought them one of those round circle shaped plastic toys that had cat nip cardboard in the center of it that you put on the floor with a little white ping pong type ball that went round and round the circle. Ramon loved that thing. He use to take his paw and make the ball go round and round and try to catch it with his mouth but the ball would not come out. It was fun to watch. Now Carlos would mostly just sit and watch Ramon make a fool of himself atleast that is what it looked like Carlos was thinking as he sat there. Then Carlos would get bored and walk away while Ramon was still playing. I remember when Kathy first brought them over here when we were moving in together..Ramon would sit in the bathroom sink and watch as we moved stuff in. I finally built a cat run off the small bedroom window out back so that the cats could go outside and get some fresh air and be safe at the same time. Carlos is the only one that goes out there. We had to get a doggie door because our cats are too big for a regular cat door. It was fun teaching them to go in and out of the cat-dog door. I used treats to train them and Carlos was all about it but not so much Ramon. Ramon has been out there a few times just not as much as Carlos. Carlos has a perch with a dog bed on top that he lays on outside of the window of the cat run. He will stay there for hours and watch the outside world from that perch. Ramon has become a loud meower here lately. He walks around the whole house with his loud meow which usually means that he is hungry. Carlos has taken to sitting up on the kitchen table looking out at the birds on the feeders. He makes this little grunting noise as he watches them. Carlos and Buddy have this playful thing that they do now where Buddy will nudge Carlos with his nose on his side and Carlos will swipe Buddy with his paw and no claws. It is funny to watch. Both cats will spoon on Mutti's bed sometimes while they sleep. Both of them love eachother very much. Brothers til the end. Carlos is on the left and Ramon is on the right. The cat run is underneath.

Now this brings us to our doggies Buddy and Nanalu. Buddy and Nanalu both are rescues. Buddy came to us on Christmas morning 2 years ago. I saw him hanging around the neighborhood so I decided that I would make a bed for him on our sheltered front porch and I gave him food and water. Christmas morning we came out on the porch and there he was laying in the bed and shivering.  I gradually made my way over to him and offered him some more food. Then he slowly licked my hand then Kathy came over and the same thing happened. That is when we took him in and our lives have been blessed every since. Our vet said he looked like he was six months old at the time so we had him clipped and chipped. Boy was it rocky in the beginning. It seems that our new friend Buddy was a hunter. When he would go outside sometimes he would kill birds and the field mice which I didn't mind the field mice as much as I did the birds. We had a nest of baby wren's on our back porch under the overhang. Buddy got into the nest and killed the little wren's. I was furious with him. Also there was the time that Buddy killed a rabbit that wondered into our fenced in backyard. I was livid so Kathy had to take Buddy to our friends Ann and Kathy's house for a while until I calmed down. It took me some time before I realized that with him being on his own for so long that is how he got his food. I am a processor and sometimes it takes some time to process things even the simplest of things and of course Kathy helped me to see things differently also.  He is a playing and running fool. We use to take him to the dog park but he started to get a bit aggressive with the other dogs so we stopped taking him. It's a good thing that we have a fenced in backyard for him to run in. We also have a neighbor that when he lets his dog out both of them run down the fence together she on the outside and Buddy on the inside barking and running. There are times that Kathy or I will play what we call stomp and run with Buddy. This is where we stomp on the ground and Buddy will run all around the yard and then return to us and we stomp again and it all starts over and over again. Kathy made the mistake of allowing the Budster to sleep on our bed with us and that is what he does every night right between us and he hogs the bed. Every morning when I wake up I am almost off the bed seriously this is so true. In the mornings and afternoons Budster will go upstairs to the bonus room and nap on the couch or hangout with Kathy while she writes or watches movies. It was Kathy's study and her space it still is just not as much.  We now call it the Boy Cave because he spends alot of his days up there. Buddy pretty much is the "man" of the house and our protector. He knows where everyone is at every moment and he does keep tabs on us he also keeps tabs on what is going on outside. Alot of the time he looks out the window upstairs in the bonus room it is his tower where he can look and see everything going on in our neighborhood. He will come running down from upstairs if he sees or hears anything then out the doggie door he goes barking and running. Buddy came to us about a year before we put Lucky Lu down. She was our old girl of 14 years. She became really sick and it was time to let her go. It was rough but you just have to do whats best for them from a loving place in your heart and that is what we did. We then just had Buddy and Torrie our other old girl. They both played together until Torrie got to be to old to play. The top photo is Lucky Lu the bottom photo is Torrie.

Enter Nanalu. She came to us from our next door neighbors. Our neighbor rescued Nanalu from her cousin who was abusing her. She was about 7 weeks old at the time we got her. We now have had her about 8 weeks. Shortly after getting Nanalu we put our Torrie girl down. She became really sick and she was snapping at Nanalu we were worried that she would hurt her. When we took Torrie to the vet he said that with her snapping at the puppy it means that she is not feeling good. Because Torrie was always good with other dogs and people we had the feeling that the end was near. She was the most gentle dog that I ever knew or that I had ever had. We already knew that she had cancer for a while now and the vet said that she was in the beginning stages of kidney failure. She could barely stand up on her hind legs. Once again it took me overnight to process and to become at peace with this decision. Now Lucky lu and Torrie are together at Rainbow Bridge running, jumping, playing and barking together. Just as our home is full of playing, running, barking, snarling and laughter from us when we watch Buddy and Nanalu together.   Nanalu is following Buddy's lead about the ins and outs of how things work around here. It is fun to watch these two interact with eachother. Nanalu is staking her place in this family that is for sure. I bought some stairs one day at the store and placed them at the foot of our bed and wouldn't you know it Nanalu learned how to climb up them and onto our bed so now we have two dogs in our bed at night. Buddy still sleeps between us and Nanalu sleeps at the foot of our bed. It was fun to watch Buddy teach her how to go out the doggie door. She would watch him go out and then watch him  come back in. Finally she did the same thing. Of course the doggie door was a bit of a lift up for her but she managed it and has been managing ever since. Nanalu makes funny grunting noises when she sleeps or if you move her when she is on the couch sleeping. The same is true when she yawns she lets out a big ole yelp. It really does amuse us. She does have her own personality. She and our cat Ramon have a game that they play together just as Buddy and Carlos do only with Nanalu and Ramon it is a playful jaw open around Ramon's neck by Nanalu and he loves it...I think it confuses Nanalu. It is fun to watch Nanalu and Buddy play tug of war with a piece of cloth that we give them. Of course Nanalu usually sneaks in and takes one of my socks out of the bathroom. She does this while I am in the shower. When I get out of the shower I notice my sock missing and the door slight ajar. Then I find her up on the bed with my sock or outside in the backyard with my sock playing tug of war with the Budster. Sometimes I even try to nab her with the sock as she is making an escape through the doggie door. There are times when she will come into the bathroom after I get out of the shower and she licks the water off my legs. Hahaha..Kathy tells me she does the same thing with her. It is really funny when both Buddy and Nanalu do it...These critters of ours. Everytime Kathy opens the dishwasher Nanalu comes a running. We call her our prewash girl. She licks off the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Buddy use to do it then he handed it off to Nanalu. Sometimes both of them will prewash them together. There was a time when Nanalu was having a hard time getting up the stairs to the bonus room. But once again she figured it out and now she and Buddy will come running down the stairs and it sounds like thunder and then out the doggie door they go usually Nanalu follows Buddy out the door. When we first got Nanalu we had to take her outside to potty train her and the Budster would follow us out there and stand guard by the back door while she did her potty. I actually liked that he did that it gave me a sense of security. Oh our home is full of love and laughter along with snarling and playing. 

A fairly new addition is our outside feral cat we call Lucy. She is a pretty cat with a obviously cut off tail. Kathy is the cat expert in our house so she is sure that she is a female cat. Kathy named her Lucy I wanted to name her Calico or Callie or well Lucy works. I found out yesterday the history of Lucy by one of our neighbors up the street. He said that Lucy was abandoned by one of our neighbors that lived 2 doors up from us. It seems they left in the middle of the night and didn't take Lucy or her buddy another cat with them. The other cat died and the man called the SPCA to come get it and when they got here Lucy took off and has been on her own since then that was 2 years ago. I find it peculiar that I haven't seen her around until just a few months ago when I began feeding her outside. We have taken it nice and easy me and Lucy. She is getting use to me now. She is beginning to allow me to come close to her when feeding her. I haven't been able to pet her yet but atleast she doesn't run from me anymore when I approach her to feed and water her. Now I have put a cat bed on our sheltered front porch and she has been coming up there and laying in it. I also moved her food and water dishes up there for her. She has laid up on our porch before on a seat cushion but with this cold weather I wanted her to be warmer and feel safer. I am glad that it seems to be working out for us both.

One thing is for sure there is never a dull moment with all of our critters around. Our home is always busy. We are blessed to have the array of critters that we have. We are all truly blessed to have found eachother and live in harmony together. Kathy, Buddy, Me and Nanalu. You can hardly see her in my arms.

These are my thoughts and feelings from Jillsville.