R.I.P.

My neighbor Adele called me today to say that Matty was lying dead in her bushes. She had been up, sleepless, last night, having a cup of tea at her kitchen table when she heard snarling and yowling in her back yard. She turned on the lights and ran outside to see a dog running away, and Matty, dead of his wounds.
My son Tom buried him in Adele's backyard.
I'll miss our newborn friendship. He had just begun to let me pet him, and would close his eyes while I stroked his rough fur and rubbed his scarred ears.

Proud as a....

In Glasgow, there is a stunner of a statue of a stout man near the entrance to a shopping center. He stands in what seems to be self-satisfied glory. He wears a slight smirk, and his head is turned to catch a glimpse of admiring stares. His hands are held chest-high, one across the other, and behind him, sitting at his heels, is a peacock, feathers folded. My friend Joan did some research and discovered that it's by a sculptor, Shona Kinloch, born in 1962, who has other equally enigmatic works scattered around the city. Its title: "Proud as a..."
Body image is perhaps an over-discussed topic, but this statue gives its opinion silently.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie??

Blogging has been such a frustration that I'm tempted to say to hell with it and trash the whole thing. But that sounds like quitting, so I'll give it one last chance to work for me. I think I may be on to something. Microsoft Explorer seems to work better for me than AOL.
Which brings me to consider a more pressing issue: medication. Both the pharmacy and I have failed at trying to get a substitute prescription from my doctor, once it was discovered that the medicine originally prescribed is not on my "preferred" pharmacology list. The pharmacist, an older man, is frustrated by the multiple new drug plans, all with differing lists of approved medicines. And if that's not bad enough, each plan is allowed to change its list as frequently as it chooses, so there is absolutely no way for a doctor or a pharmacist to keep up with what's okay on each of the dozens and dozens of plans.
I'm wondering if it's frustration that's keeping my doctor from calling in a new prescription. In the meantime, do I try again? I've called, and I've taken a letter out to the clinic. The pharmacist has called three times, and it's been over a week now. Or do I risk being bitten if I wake the dog? I may get myself labelled as an annoying, demanding patient. Or if I choose to find a new doctor, she or he may not be the sympathetic, concerned doctor I thought I was seeing.

Good Fences, Part II

And so it begins. After due reflection and a lot of advice, I instructed Richard the Renovator Guy to build a fence about 6 inches inside my property, parallel to the surveyor's line. And Richard instructed my son Tom to dig the first post hole. Two days later, after first renting a power drill so that Tom could break up the huge stump that lay just underground at the site of the first post hole, which made not a whit of difference, and then having a big, expensive chisel specially welded to a pole, which promptly broke, ("$100," said Richard mournfully) the hole was relocated and now lies JUST inside the property line.

Good fences make good neighbors

My next-door neighbors recently had eleven trees, all old pines, removed from their yard. Until they started their landscaping project, the back yard fence that runs between my property and theirs was mercifully concealed by a thick growth of azaleas, gardenias, and just plain vines and briars on both sides. Now the fence is exposed and shows its makeshift nature. It's part rotting lattice, part chicken wire, part hardware cloth, and a real eyesore. I realized I would have to replace the fence, called the Renovator Guy I've grown so close to, to have him tell me that I'd need to have the line surveyed. That took some doing. I thought I knew where the line was, but now there's an orange stake showing how wrong I was. I own about ten more feet of land than I thought I did. In fact, I could almost charge rent for the neighbors' mailbox! (In the picture, you can barely make out the stake behind their mailbox---that's my house to the right.) So NOW what do I do? Build the fence along the line? One of the reasons my neighbors took out trees was to allow access to their back yard. Turns out it was MY tree that came down to allow that to happen. But if I build the fence where I THOUGHT the line was, they'll have to maintain part of my land--or I'll have to maintain a strip on their side of the fence. And if I build it on the line, they won't be able to get into their back yard with a truck. Dilemma! And I can't just think about them, because they may not always own the property. Or I may not always own this place. What to do, what to do?