Sweet Tuesdays

and everyone else too! We’re coming up on April 22 and you know what that means - Earth Day.  I am lucky to have people in my life, like my husband and my aunt, who are good examples of what a single person can do to be a good steward to our planet.  The one person I’d like to celebrate though, is one who has had the most impact on my life in general: my mother.

Recycling. It’s one of the three “R”s.  Something everyone can do to keep more trash out of landfills. In my own personal experience, Oklahoma is not the most recycling friendly place in larger cities, let alone small towns. But guess what my mom did… just that. In little old small town Oklahoma, she started a recycling program at her elementary school. Because of her efforts, almost everyone has gotten on board and started collecting their recyclable materials. Can you imagine how much recycling, especially paper, that a school can generate? She even sometimes spends over hour going around and collecting the recycling from the classrooms to put outside in the bins - unless she can talk some second graders into helping her.  And it’s obvious that the fruits of her labor aren’t going unnoticed: one day at snack time someone brought cookies in plastic packaging and it was thrown into the trash, which prompted one kindergartner to be very concerned and ask “shouldn’t we recycle that?”.  It’s not like she just “talks the talk” either, she recycles at home too. I think it’s a great example of what one person can do to make a change in their community. Just think if every elementary school had one person who started recycling….

So here’s to you mom!  

Well, obviously Tuesday wasn’t too super yesterday. I’ll admit, I’m just pooped when I get home and would rather watch SVU than update. Luckily, I didn’t have to dissect an eyeball and scooted home to watch. Man, it was intense!

So today we’ll have looking forward to… Wednesday. As most of you know, I am the lady who treats her pets like children. They do actually act like toddlers most of the time and I am almost convinced I don’t need any human children.  I’m constantly breaking up play fights that get too rowdy, have to pet proof everything, cleaning up barf, and even been urinated on in the middle of the night. Twice.    

And yet, I couldn’t live without them.

Boo is my little cat dog. We adopted her as a companion for Tuesday about two months ago from the city animal shelter. I almost always end up calling my pets baby names, so I needed a name that would lend itself to that. Inspired by a great story, Boo Radley was born (even though she is a girl). Looking back, we should have named her “cat” or “ke-ke”, as those are the names we call her. And Blake sometimes likes to call her “boosephus”. Oh well. 
She is such a little rascal, always getting into things - especially the trash.  Boo is full of personality too, meowing until someone answers her back and perpetually sticking her tongue out.

Then there is Tuesday.

Tuesday’s story is a little longer - almost four years ago my little brother begged my mom to let him get a dog from some friends who had a farm dog with puppies. Being a big softy she let him get the smallest one. To my chagrin he named her Tuesday after a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.  “Tuesdays Gone”-great name for a beagle.  He wanted a dog that would follow him around and automatically do what he wanted it to do. Not the story with puppies. Tuesday chewed through many things, including the telephone cord and my high school yearbooks, so she wound up living outside. Let it be known that I love my brother more than anything, but he is an awful pet owner.  He had to be reminded to feed her, hardly paid attention to her at all, and I wanted to beat the stuffing out of him when I found her crate filled with urine soaked towels. 
No one really wanted to pay attention to her because she was so hyper.  I vowed that when I got out of school and didn’t live in the dorms that I would take her. Blake really didn’t know he was getting a package deal when he married me.
So after we got back from our honeymoon and moved into our apartment, Tuesday came to live with us. We started taking her to obedience classes, which was really a lot of fun for us to do together. After I started working & Blake went back to school, we videotaped her and found out she was howling for hours while we were gone. Trying all of the training techniques to no avail, the vet put her on anti-anxiety medicine. She has almost as many neuroses as her mother! She also has to take half a tablet of pepcid ac because she was throwing up every morning. Tuesday is my little baby dog, who sleeps with her head on the pillow and sigh dramatically at you just like a person. She is also very smart, waiting until we go to bed to try and sneak some poop out of the cat box. She knows to growl at me instead of Blake because I will make him take her outside to use the bathroom.  I know I sound like a loon, but she is such a good companion. I love her dearly and am just as unhealthily attached to her as she is to me.

Finally getting to the looking forward to… I found this cute website of a dog bakery in Boston. Look out Polka Dog, here we come!

Oh, and another thing, Blake and I have survived married life ten months today! I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the next ten.

Well folks, it’s ASPCA day. Check out the history of how the ASPCA started here. For me personally, it’s a day to remember my furry friends and the ones less fortunate than they are.

Truth be told, I’m feeling quite yucky today - I had planned on a post with the stories of all my special animals, but for now I’ll leave you with a picture of my two favorites:

Well, once again I am home late and exhausted from work and class……

Tonight I was fortunate enough to not have to dissect the brain of a sheep. The option of studying the plastic human brain models was given and I was ever so glad to take it. I understand the premise of performing dissections and that viewing an actual organ is completely different than the plastic model, but I just couldn’t help thinking of the sheep those brains came out of.
Did you know that sheep have the ability to remember a large number of faces, including humans, for years? And they can recognize different facial expressions? (I learned this in a facinating article from National Geographic about Animal Minds)

This got me thinking about a number of things….

Warning: Rant Ahead

I have loved animals my entire life. Really and truly loved.  Many of my favorite and least favorite memories as a child have to do with our friends in the animal kingdom. My all time favorite was a gift from my aunt, a gray whale sponsored in my name. She was called Crystal and I got monthly newsletter letting me know her whereabouts and what she was up to. I hesitate to think of what her life is like now…..
Some of the worst were seeing animals in tiny cages in roadside zoos, stories of abuse from stupid high school boys, and the one that everyone usually teases me about: In elementary school we went on a field trip to the circus. I was horrified to see that when the elephants were brought out to perform that they had smiley faces painted on their rear ends. Even as sweet- little elementary school-winnie the pooh loving-Bonnie, I was indignant. I just thought it was so demeaning to the elephants (and after reading about them in the aforementioned article, I think they would be insulted). I hate the circus. Well, I guess I really just hate the way the animals are treated. Bears are not meant to ride bicycles. Laugh if you will, but I vowed that day that I wouldn’t ever go to the circus again. I haven’t. And I won’t.

Speaking of the treatment of animals, I have a friend who recently decided to go vegan, and the wheels were turning when I looked at some websites she mentioned. Many people, knowing how I feel about animals, have asked me why I am not a vegetarian. The truth is, if I thought about it very much I would be. I think that it is fairly well known that the treatment of “ food” animals is quite atrocious. I will admit to crying a little when seeing chickens stuffed every which way into cages on a semi or being eye to eye with a cow in a trailer off to slaughter. 
Blake and I are almost vegetarian most of the time anyway. We eat meat maybe two or three times a week and we only buy turkey products. After some discussion we’ve decided to gradually go veggie, starting with cutting out meat at home. Our first goal is to eat more healthily. Ideally, we would like to eat mainly organic or locally grown foods, including things like eggs from free range chickens (of course on our budget we will probably be eating only top ramen), so we haven’t gone vegan. Am I totally vegetarian? Not yet. Will I shun those meat eaters around me? Of course not! I do love a pepperoni pizza or turkey meatloaf!

My my my…. give me a blog and I will write on it!

I’m sure some of you will be thinking this and I’d just like to sum the whole thing up: People have insinuated that I care more about animals than I do about humans, which is certainly not the case.  This is what I believe - Our humanity lies in the way we treat those around us. To be truly human is to act humanely.