Michele Lee

There’s a proper haunted mansion not far from here that’s been an item of fascination of mine for a while. After  tax company lost ownership of it to, amusingly, to back taxes it sat empty and deteriorating for a while. When one of its walls started coming down the city stepped in. They stabilized it and sold to to a guy for $1 because he promised to restore the place. But he was unable to secure loans so it sat again empty and falling apart. Finally the city sold it again for $1 and this time I’m happy to say that it’s being worked on!

More history and earlier pictures are available here and here.

I can’t wait to see what it becomes!

We lost another dog today. Dizzy was our first family dog. Jason and I had both had other dogs before, but Dizzy was our dog.

He showed up one day, right around the time we were thinking of looking for a dog. He was underweight, intact and made a home in our very tiny backyard. It wasn’t fenced, he had no reason to stay. But he drank out of a puddle for three days until we gave in and accepted that he was ours. And Mister named him “Dizzy-Dog”.

We’ve been through a lot with him. Being crappy pet owners who couldn’t keep him up to date on anything but the absolute basics to keep him legal, trying to teach him not to pull (which in the end just taught him to follow me around the house.) Three different houses, Mini’s birth and a number of puppies now.

Lots of people say they have the best dog in the world. Dizzy was the kind of dog that other people said was the best dog in the world. Nearly everyone who met him fell in love with him. A number of people said they hoped to have a dog like him at some point in their lives. Until the last two years, when he started dropping weight I couldn’t walk him down the street without getting requests to breed him.

He was rock solid, dependable, calm, cheerful, protective in all the right ways.

Today I took him into work to get an exam because he was losing weight and eating dirt. We found that he’d lost over ten pounds and his stomach was filled with rocks and sticks and a penny (we could see Lincoln’s head on the coin). I expected to go in, run some bloodwork and put him on a higher calorie food. Instead he started to bloat around lunch time.

We don’t know how old he was when he showed up in our yard, but we had him for about thirteen years. I am told this is amazing, that even the vet didn’t manage to keep her rotties past ten.

But it isn’t long enough.

It kind of feels like I’m burying a child.

So here’s my goodbye to the best dog ever. I hope you find a place where you’re always allowed on the bed, someone is always there to blow bubbles for you, kids learn to read to you and every night is bacon and peanut butter night. And I hope you wait for the rest of us.

I went shooting for the first time ever a few weeks ago. I had never fired a gun before so I was all kinds of nervous about it. Like when I was learning to drive. I expected there to be some sort of cartoony magnetic attraction from “weapon in hand” to “bad shit happening”. (I still expect my car to be magically drawn to the cars parked along the side of a crowded road.)

I didn’t do too bad! And I didn’t shoot anyone one or make a fool of myself at the range.

Like all good hunters I brought my trophy back to hang on the wall too.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to turn into an expensive hobby.