Breaking service dog news

Amelia's service dog is Bobo!


We'll all get to meet him on December 1st.

Doggy Bloggy Update

MEA asked about Amelia's service dog. We're slated for the December training class. But if anybody in the September class can't make it, we'll be the first to get bumped to that one. We won't find out anything about the dog until a week before training. At that point, Amelia will get a letter from her dog, with a photo. Then it's off to sunny Xenia, Ohio for 10 days. We'll be sure to post more info when we get closer.

In the meantime, we just wait....

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DONE

I hereby declare this blog a Cynicism Free Zone
for the rest of this calendar year.

4 Paws for Amelia
Fundraiser

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Craziness all around, and my first ever poll...

Right. So we made the brilliant move of starting a big fundraising project on the day after a major hurricane and the day before a major stock market meltdown. Thank you very much to all who contributed, or even considered it. I'm hoping to do some fun stuff both locally and online. More on that below.

We had the odd experience of hurricane force winds in Ohio, as the remnants of Ike joined forces with a big cold front. We apparently had sustained winds of 50+ mph and gusts up to 75 mph. Lots of places around the state have been without power for days, and some places actually have gas shortages because so many gas stations have no power. We were lucky to have only brief outages, and no real damage.

Amelia had a blast sitting out in the wind, giggling like a maniac as her hair streamed out behind her. For some reason, I didn't take any pictures.

I'm really worried that we may have to get rid of the cow. I seem to be developing carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. The cow thing has just been very frustrating in ways that nobody could have foreseen. I'm not giving up yet. Just venting. It doesn't help that the tractor died in her pasture, and she's been mercilessly trying to eat every cable and wire. She pulled the ends off two spark plug wires and pulled out two or three smaller wires (some several times). And every time I try to work on it, she starts eating my clothing, licking me and/or my tools, and just generally being a pest. I tried putting a tarp over the whole thing, but she just dragged it out of the way. So now I have a temporary fence made of cattle panels surrounding the tractor.

My attempts at taking advantage of getting to know my neighbors isn't going very well. The guy who helps me fix my tractor from time to time isn't returning my calls. He works night shift I think. The other guy who was going to cut our hay and bring us some loaner cows and a loaner bull and all sorts of other good stuff has also disappeared from the face of the earth. He did cut our hay once, but it got rained on about a half dozen times before it was baled. And it's pretty stemmy and weedy stuff anyway. Meadow won't touch it at this point.

Other than that, everything is under control.

Okay, not really. But let's just move on anyway.

Back to the service dog thing... I'll probably mostly post about this stuff on the 4paws4amelia blog, but it doesn't have much regular traffic yet, so I'm going to subject you to my fundraising brainstorming session:



Thanks for your input!

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A humble request

Greetings, imaginary friends...

I call you imaginary because I talk to you a lot, and yet I can't see or hear any of you. I hear voices in my head too, but they are not my friends... You are.

Over the two-and-a-half years I've been writing here, I've brought you an odd mix of farm follies, bad jokes, scary predictions, crazy schemes, kooky projects, and pure, unadulterated silliness.

And a lot of fragmentary sentences. And a lot of sentences (and quite a few paragraphs) beginning with conjunctions. I know this is wrong, but I do it anyway, at least here on the blog. Here, I like to think of punctuation and paragraph breaks the way a composer uses rests within a piece of music, rather than by the actual rules of English grammar. I want to establish the right cadence in the reader's mind. And it's my blog, so I'm allowed.

And now I've totally lost the thread of this post. Where was I?

Right... So a fair bit of my writing here is about my family. They are what this is really all about. Okay, maybe not the bad jokes, but most everything else, is either directly or indirectly about my family.

In particular, our daughter Amelia is a rich source of material, from the joyful to the cheesy to the downright whiny:

• Agent of Chaos
• Amelia's Best Day Ever
• Living with Amelia
• Little Miss Sunshine

Now, we have an opportunity to do something very special for Amelia. And I'm asking for your help. Your help could come in different forms or at different times, and we'll appreciate any you feel is appropriate. We're just getting started, but we hope to get creative with this endeavor as time goes on.

So finally, after too many irrelevant and poorly constructed paragraphs, I arrive at my request...

Please visit this web site:
http://4paws4amelia.blogspot.com
Feel free to follow along as we start what should be a very interesting journey.

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