Eleven words of wisdom

Thinking quick on my feet

My eleven-year-old daughter stopped me dead in my tracks earlier this week with an interesting question. "Mom, what's 'lust'?"

She was genuinely interested. True to my habit of being forthright with information when asked, I knew I had to come up with an answer. But sheesh, how do you explain lust to an eleven-year-old who has never attended public school and who doesn't watch television?

I had one of those rare, brilliant moments and came up with the following answer:

"Lust is what the bull feels for the cow when she's in heat. He doesn't love her; he simply wants to mate her."

My farm-bred daughter accepted this with nonchalance. But my curiosity got the better of me. "Where did you hear the term 'lust'?" I asked her, since that word is not in our daily vocabulary.

It turns out she had come across a list of the Seven Deadly Sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride). Ah, enlightenment.

Puppy news and puppy pix

Lydia, our new Great Pyrenees puppy, spent her first full day with us looking cute and peeing. (Outside. Most of the time. I trotted her outside every fifteen minutes on the fifteen minutes starting at 4:30 am. I'll leave you to do the math for how many trips this makes since I'm too tired to think straight.)



Naturally everybody in the neighborhood and beyond inquired about her. I got a call from our neighbors. Our pastor. Some friends in town. My parents. We had visitors galore, all eager to see the new face.



At one point we had no fewer than seven kids fawning over her...




With predictable results:




Lydia is fourteen weeks old and about 25 lbs. She came to us courtesy of two of the nicest people I've ever met, Carol and Jim from Agape Ranch. These people extended the most unbelievable kindness to us after losing Gypsy. I won't go into details about our transaction, but I will say that these people are Christians in the true and humbling sense of the word.



Carol and Jim, thank you for bringing this little bundle of mischief into our lives. We anticipate a whole lotta fun with her! Especially after she learns shoes are off limits!

We found a puppy!

After an exhaustive search, we've found a Great Pyrenees puppy through the unbelievable kindness of some people whose names I'll mention after I get their permission.

Is this too incredibly cute or WHAT?


Unless my kids or husband can come up with something better, her name will be Lydia. We pick her up on Sunday 8/16.

A few random photos

Looks dire, doesn't it? Living in the West, smoke equals fire equals terror and danger.

But not here. This is just field burning. In this localized area, farmers are permitted to burn off their crop residues.

And here's today's loot: Mozzarella cheese, butter, and canned corn.

A tribute to Gypsy

In October of 2003, some lowlife scumbag took a litter of five-week-old puppies and dumped them in an isolated forest in the mountains of Utah.

Fortunately someone found the bewildered, terrified pups and brought them in to a shelter, where kind souls fostered the dogs and listed them on Petfinder.com as Great Pyrenees / Lab crosses. The exact lineage, of course, was unknown.


About this time, I was looking for a dog. I’ve always had a fondness for large dogs – the bigger and hairier, the better. When we were ready to get another pet, I wanted to find a Great Pyrenees / Golden Retriever cross. A friend had such a cross, and he was terrific.

In searching online and through regional shelters, I couldn’t locate such a mix. That’s when I turned my search wider and found this litter of puppies waaaay down in Utah. There was one female left to adopt. That’s the dog I wanted.

The foster-mother and I emailed back and forth, trying to figure out how to get the puppy to our place in north Idaho. But since it was November and the weather was dicey, and since her place in Utah was something on the order of a fifteen-hour drive away, I decided it wasn't worth the driving risk or expense just to get a puppy. With reluctance, I abandoned the thought of this particular animal. I emailed the foster-mother and thanked her for her efforts.

Out of the blue, the foster-mother called a couple of weeks later. Seems a man who lived in Montana was traveling down to get some other dogs from her. If I could meet him on the Idaho-Montana border, he'd be happy to bring this puppy for me. Delighted, I agreed at once. I met the fellow, paid him gas money, and met Gypsy. The first thing – the very first thing! – this little puppy did was to crouch down and untie my shoelace with remarkable precision.


Well, at eight weeks she was exactly the size of our cat.




She grew.



And she grew.


And grew.



And grew....


Et cetera...








One time I brought her with me when I went to the city on an errand at PetSmart. I leashed her up and walked her through the aisles, looking for the items I needed. A PetSmart employee poked his head around the corner. “Twenty-four weeks old?” he asked. I shook my head. “Twelve weeks,” I replied. His eyes grew very wide.

Since we didn’t know exactly when she was born, of course, we assigned a birthday of September 1 – probably accurate within a week or so.

Gypsy continued to grow and got very leggy, much leggier than a Lab and certainly more than a Great Pyrenees. Still, we continued to call her a Great Pyrenees / Lab cross – why not?


One day a friend who had never seen Gypsy before came to visit. She took one look and said, "She's not Lab, she’s Irish Wolfhound!" In researching Irish Wolfhounds, I became convinced my friend was right. Gypsy had a tendency to arch her back like a cat when stretching, and a way of sitting that looks exactly like an Irish Wolfhound. Her head and fur were Pyrenees, and her body seemed to be Wolfhound.

Perhaps because of her early abandonment, Gypsy was wonderfully affectionate. She loved to “burrow” – shoving her head into your lap, burrowing deep, looking for “skitches” (our term for scratches and affection). She was a gentle soul and even made friends with a deer whose fawn had died.


She was very playful and (we learned) very protective of our children.




For six years, Gypsy graced our lives with love and laughter.










About two months ago, neighbors noticed she seemed very thin. I realized they were right. Probably needed a good worming, right? I took her to the vet and got the medicines to worm her. “If she doesn’t start gaining weight, bring her back in and we’ll do blood tests,” the vet said.

After several weeks her thinness became skeletal, and the blood tests revealed lymphoma. No hope for our dearly loved pet.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I held Gypsy’s thin body one last time as she burrowed her head into my lap, getting “skitches.” The girls did the same. Then we lifted her into the truck and Don brought her to the vet. With her head on his lap, she drifted peacefully away.

We buried her near the orchard.


Gypsy: Sept 1, 2003 – August 12, 2009. What a beloved dog.