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Or if you're frugality- and security-conscious, send a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, as shown at the very bottom of the screen.
Anyway February just about has to be better than January, right? So far this month I've collected $75. For dinner yesterday I splurged and had both rice and beans. It was too cold to wait for anything to cook outside in the barrel. I set a metal candleholder in a big saucepan, set a small saucepan above the level of the candle allowing about a half-inch for air circulation, added a packet of rice, a can of beans, a can of chicken, and a splash of water, and in about an hour I had a meal humans, cats, and dog could share.
I love rice that can be cooked at a simmer.
For a dog? Yes, a dog.
I had charitably assumed that the person who abandoned the pack of cute little beagle-mix dogs near the Cat Sanctuary had "frozen out" and gone home without rounding them up; they looked like spring puppies. But then, more recently, once again someone drove up past the Cat Sanctuary around midnight. Once again I heard dogs yelping in the back of a truck, although it was about zero degrees Fahrenheit and Samantha and I were already wrapped up in the warm room (me in three knitted blankets, Samantha in her fur in a small cage I've named the Samantha-box; she has a tiny crocheted blanket in there, and seems to feel safe and calm inside). Once again the truck coasted very quietly back down the road, leaving tracks that showed, in the morning, that the truck had gone up the road with dogs and back down the road without dogs. The dogs were still stravaging pitifully up and down the road. I had to face the fact--somebody wanted these dogs to die of exposure. The dogs knew that. If they'd ever been pets, they were nobody's pets by that morning.
At least I had some food they could eat, rather than trying to eat cats or Chihuahuas. Not the right food and not enough of it, but something. And of course every county has an official dogcatcher...and of course our dogcatcher's very favorite thing to do is hike around on back roads deliberately maintained to destroy ATV's, when the ground is either icy or muddy, chasing large unfriendly dogs that won't even eat while a human can see them. Not. He does, in contrast, like taking unwanted dogs out of cages in people's trucks.
So who dumped these dogs, and why? Why does this fool and coward hate dogs so? Why is he so afraid of the dogcatcher? These were tough, strong, fast dogs--I say "were" because I found one of them dead this morning--and the big, bold one who let me get a good look at it, while living, was a fine-looking animal, and may still be one. Anyone who took the trouble to feed and train it could probably have turned a profit on the money they spent.
Maybe someone still will. The weather's not so bitter this week. There is still a Dog Sanctuary near here, and though I would have preferred to direct the dog's unwilling caretaker straight to the front door, that dog could easily have found it by now. But somebody still helped us eat up that pot of rice and beans last night...
Anyway, you know how it goes, with beans...eat them too late in the day and you wake up too early, feeling, well, full of beans. So I woke up bright and early this morning and, it being too cold and dark to do much of anything else, began writing a book review.
The book I was reviewing mentioned a book written in early-medieval Latin by somebody whose fans called him Johannes Climacus, or John of the Ladder, because his book was about the practice of virtuous behavior as "steps" or a "ladder" or "stairway" to Heaven. The author got snarky about J. Climacus. Few solid documents about anybody in the seventh century are still around; one thing that is known about seventh century authors is that, as "clergy," they were supposed to be living on a small stipend from the church and receiving no profit from their writing, so they often used pseudonyms. At least old Climacus didn't claim to be his favorite saint, which seems to have been a common early-medieval practice. The author whose book I was reading presumed that he was "bogus" and that he and his book must have been an elaborate dirty joke perpetrated by Tantric Buddhists, who sometimes talked about "ladders to paradise" when they had different things in mind.
Bosh, I said, and also twaddle...oh well, the book review will show up here in due time. I actually find it a valuable book, though definitely not for just any kind of reader, but I accuse the writer of bias and of using bunk to debunk her target writers' bunk.
So then I came online and found this in the blog feed:
http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2018/02/bits-of-inspiration-stairs.html
First I thought of John Climacus; but I've never actually read his book. Then, this being Black History Month, I thought of Langston Hughes.
Life's no crystal stair:
mine has many broken rungs
but some people's are icy
and they are paraplegics
without a wheelchair.
Because, I mean to say...somebody had a fine hunting dog, guard dog, or companion dog, and he just about had to have abused it until it bit him. Why else would anybody have wanted the dog I've been feeding to freeze?
A Cat Sanctuary accepts unwanted cats, yes. And unwanted dogs. And unwanted chickens, possums, ponies, once a goat...but "accepts" does not mean you just unload them near the place where you see a well fed free-range cat! It means you tell me what you want to unload, and why, and I can then tell you whether to bring it to my home or take it to someone else's, after obtaining that person's consent.
That dog that is such a burden to me, now? Oogesti would have enjoyed training it, while he was alive; Lisiwayu or the Young Grouch might be willing to feed and train it now--if it had been unloaded in a big fenced yard with some food and even a token shelter from that wind, that night. Plenty of people would be proud to walk beside it. If anyone is ever able to get close to it again.
Its buddy had not been hit by a vehicle; someone had tied it up in something--not a proper leash or chain, more like the cord out of a cheap bathrobe--and, by the look of the body, tied that to a vehicle and dragged the "coy-dog." Granted coyotes are vermin and "coy-dogs" are ugly and neither has ever been known to make a good pet, and people don't always have guns or knives suitable for killing an unwanted dog in a trap, but is it possible to drag a dog behind a vehicle and not be able to take it into town and have it killed humanely? Well, maybe, if you were a bleary-eyed early morning commuter who didn't realize the wretched animal had crawled under a warm car and got the rag tied around it caught on something...but that does not explain how a rag came to be tied around the dog in the first place.
Maybe the dog that looks like a hound-retriever crossbreed is half coyote too, and will never be a pet--but I doubt it, and even if that were the case, somebody could have explained that to the dogcatcher.
However discouraging our lives may be, Gentle Readers, they could be worse. We could have all of our present problems and also be scumbags. In November we give thanks that we're not turkeys, and after a Big Freeze we give thanks that we're not like the not-fully-human who dumped out those dogs.
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