Bender and Francine and Dee-Dee are sleeping at my feet now; Choo is in the next room snuggled up in a blanket. It's a bit cool up here where I do my work. It's been a long, long morning of genealogy research and we're all ready to go back downstairs to the land of the living (i.e., land of the refrigerator, the T.V., and warm socks).I've been away from my blog for months and months now . . . but we've had a lot going on. We've been working on a cabin we purchased next door to us, and then recently had family who wanted to rent it, which required more last-minute prep, clean out and clean-up. As with most
As you can see in the photo below, Francine (Princess Pants) and Joe (Joe Boe) were looking in the window at me as I worked. I think I must have been cleaning windows that day. They love going in that cabin and walking around with me. I suppose it is cool and shady and they like that. It also has a huge wraparound porch that gives them a view of the road and the houses all around. They like that, too.
And then I have other reasons for my absence . . . my unfaltering addiction to family genealogy which has caused me to create not one, not two, but THREE family websites. Exhausting work for someone who isn't all that great with HTML--yet!
I'm learning as I go and I suppose that is the best way, although it is exhausting for a pea brain like me, but it does take me away from my creative writing here on this blog. Describing the history of an ancestor's life, documenting his successes and occasional failures, is interesting and somewhat fun, but takes more concentration than the simple free-flowing creative thought that I've used on this blog in the past.
I've also stayed away from my blog since it was becoming not much more than a teary memorial to pets loved, but now gone. Since we lost another dog, Joe, our Fox Hound mix, in November, I just didn't feel up to posting and writing about all the sadness that experience entailed, buts Joe deserves that at the very least. He was a wonderful, loving dog.
I originally found Joe the winter after my Dad died (1997) and it was the coldest night of the year. I remember WVU and Marshall were playing basketball that night, but we were missing the game and driving home from my Mom's house. We were on the awful back road between my Mom's house and Corridor G, when I spotted Joe. He was just a shivering little pup, scampering along the shoulder of the road. I thought I saw another dog, which looked like she could be the puppy's mother.
I was immediately concerned and pleaded with P to go back and get him, and after "discussing" it for a few more miles, we did just that. We couldn't find the mother--and oh, did we look--but we did find Joe. Quickly stashed him in the car and drove around, getting out in the freezing weather and knocking on doors and asking if he belonged to anyone. Everyone claimed to have never set eyes on him before.
So, that was that. We had some sick dogs at the time and didn't think bringing in a new puppy would be the best thing for them, so I prevailed on my kind and loving mother to take Joe for awhile. She had him for nearly seven years! He had a fenced yard with a big dog house and all the food he dared to eat. Still, it wasn't the best life I could imagine for him, but I could hardly complain. It was beyond her abilities to do much more for him at that time.
He did some pretty crazy stuff and some of it was typical dog stuff, but done in a high octane kind of way. He would dig for hours in the fenced lot, leaving big craters that left the hillside looking like the surface of the moon and sometimes when the winter took the cover of grass away, it looked a lot like some war had taken place there in his yard.
If digging like a demon wasn't enough, Joe followed that up by throwing himself with great force on the ground, barking and howling. He looked to me like a crazed Sumo wrestler. Amazingly enough, this behavior could go on for days until he would grow so weary he would finally eat and sleep. Then the cycle would start all over again. He showed no interest in engaging with anything in the outside world--except strange things like lawn ornaments or decorative flags on the house. Once they caught his interest, that glazed look would come over him and the mad barking intently at them would begin. He seemed not to understand their place in his world.
That's the kind of thing he did often. He would pick totally random, crazy stuff to focus on. At first I thought it was just a case of him not being trained well or not getting enough exercise, but I quickly learned you could not distract him once he got started. He seemed to have a pretty rich life going on in his head and he wanted no part of being distracted from a single moment of it.
When my Mom came down with a pretty serious illness that left her in a sort of delicate condition, we grew afraid that Joe might knock her down when she was feeding him and so P and I decided he should come and live with us. When we came to that decision, my Mom was still in the hospital, so I wasn't really in a place to take Joe home at that exact moment. So, we boarded him for a week at a friend's boarding facility where he soon developed explosive diarrhea, and my friend was forced to call us on Christmas Eve to come and get Joe to take him to the vet.
The vet on duty at the Emergency Clinic suggested that "there was something really wrong" with him and confided to me that he made her nervous. No kidding. He was throwing his entire body weight at the door of her office at that very moment.
Our regular vet kept him kenneled for another few days until we could make arrangements for him in our home. During that time he observed that Joe was a little different, too.
Joe didn't know it, but his life was about to change in a Big Way.
We finally figured out that Joe was sort of an autistic dog--best described as a dog that suffered with the sort of problems you'd notice in people who suffer from Asperger's Syndrome. I asked Dr. Mason once about whether this was possible--could a dog really be autistic? She indicated that probably every sort of brain abnormality that a person could suffer from, dogs could also be equally affected. She figured a lot of things just haven't been studied as widely in dogs as in humans.
So, that is what Joe had going on. Since our vet has observed his special brand of strangeness, he agreed to treat him with a daily dose of 90 mg. of Prozac, which helped Joe function in our household at a higher level than he had in his sequestered dog lot. If that seems a high dosage to you, let me say that we tried other, inexpensive things which didn't help a bit. We tried lower dosages and they didn't work either. If we skipped a dose, the effects were immediate. He needed that 90 mg. to be somewhat normal. That dosage kept him calm and he didn't engage in disturbing and repetitive actions, well, not much, anyway. He didn't like to interact much with our other pets, but was wide awake and got a lot of loving from us. He was fed well and had a large yard to roam in and very occasionally was able to escape and run up our hill for an hour or so until I could capture him and bring him home. I think he was as happy on those escape days as he could possibly ever be.
In all that time, he only had one really destructive episode. I was out for the day and discovered when I arrived home that he had spent the afternoon trying to get to a squirrel that had come through our pet door and and hidden itself behind our couch. The only way Joe figured he could get to it was to chew his way through to the squirrel. As it turned out, he didn't get the critter, but one arm of the couch was pretty well gone. It wasn't pretty, but somehow it struck me as funny. P wasn't feeling it so much.
It isn't like I got a new couch out of that episode, either, so I can't really say why I thought it was so funny. It was just something about seeing an illustration of Joe's brain at work made me smile.
In recent years, Joe had not been quite so active as he been suffering with kidney failure and severe arthritis, which we had managed with diet and Adequan. He was a big dog and I knew he might not live much longer.
This fall, I could tell Joe had been feeling worse than usual, but after a few trips to the vet, I couldn't see what else we could do for him. So we gave him lots of love and tried to make what time he had as good as it could be for a dog like Joe.
One night after a hearty dinner (why is it they always have a good dinner and then get sick?), I heard him thumping around against our bedroom closet door. When I came to check on him, I realized he couldn't stand. When I helped him to a sitting position, he was panting loudly and in obvious pain and shaking all over. I watched him for a minute, then called to my husband to sit with him while I put my "day clothes" back on to take him to the Emergency Vet.
I wish I could see the vet in my pajamas with untidy hair. Life would be simpler, you know?
Then I had a thought . . . why not try to call our mobile vet and see where she was. Even though it was after 6:30 p.m. when I called her, as with so many of our pets in the recent past, Dr. Mason was close by and was available to us within short order. It seemed meant to be. I was so relieved to have her on hand for this situation. She is great with my dogs and talks straight to me, which I deeply appreciate.
After examining Joe, she told me he had ruptured several discs in his back and she thought another one had ruptured even before that night. He was in a tremendous amount of pain when she examined him. She didn't think he would get any better and at the very least, would need me to assist him by carrying him in and out of the house for his necessary business. Even though he weighed about 65 pounds, I didn't mind that prospect, except in Joe's case, his unique personality left him unable to let people pick him up or handle him much. The captures I mentioned before were always full of high drama. He liked to be petted and talked to, but whenever you held him or carried him, he acted like a wild dog and would threaten to bite whoever had him, even me. I could not see how we would get far if that was to be our future.
After talking more with the vet, she suggested that in light of his kidney failure and problems with his arthritis, and the issues with his back, perhaps it was more cruel to keep him going only to die in a short time, despite our efforts.
P and I agreed.
I held my last big dog, Joe, in my arms, and while it took two sedative shots to get him calmed--no surprise to those of us who knew him well--he finally relaxed and seemed in no pain. As Dr. Mason gave him the final injection, he just drifted away, as if dozing in the summer sun, dreams of fields full of rabbits dancing in his head. I've rarely seen such a peaceful ending for man or beast.
While I miss his big dog head coming around my side of the bed in the morning to get some pats and rubs and kisses and his sorta goofy stumbling and stamping through the house--he had a very distinctive gait--I know that letting Joe go on when I did was absolutely the right thing. And as with all my dogs, I never feel our parting is permanent. I will see them all once again, of that I am certain and it gives me hope, even though I miss them all in the here and now.
So, having genealogy as a distraction has been kind of a rescue for me. Whenever I get a little blue thinking of all those I've lost, I just head back to my research and get lost in it for awhile. And it's paid off.
I've been working on my family tree since 1997, but didn't get a family tree program until about three years ago, and didn't put anything in it until about two years ago. Since then, I've added about 19,000 names to my main family tree and I can't tell you how many to all the little lines I am working on. When I tell someone I've added that many names, they're just sure I downloaded someone's family tree from Ancestry (a genealogy collector we call those sort of folks), but that's not so. Most of it was researched with a lot of time and hard work. A small portion of it has been gleaned from other trees, but I'm careful to always indicate that to be the case in those situations. I normally use that strategy when I'm struggling for the next branch and want a theory to work from. More often than not, I'm able to flesh out those trees far more than the original posters. Sometimes I find that it was all wrong and have to scrap it and start all over. But it's been fun--and most importantly--DISTRACTING!
I think the two things I've learned of late from my genealogy work is that we're probably all related and that a lot of people die on or near their birthdays.
There is some kind of theory about that I heard about first when I had my bout with cancer. I read that it is important to set long-term goals for our life, to project our dreams well into the future and to not set limits for ourselves regarding how many years we might live or how we might die. We should remain consistently positive about our future.
People who do not stay positive often die the sort of deaths they had absent-mindedly foreseen and at an age they might have thought was old. Thus, if someone grew up thinking, "Oh, I'll probably live until I'm about 75," could really die on their 75th birthday. I kid you not. Is that chance or the power of negative thinking? You decide. As for me, I'm planning already on my 100th birthday party.
I love working on my tree, but I don't post my tree on Ancestry.com for the whole world. The main reason is that I don't want them to own anything that I've worked so hard on, but I also have an issue with privacy. People never give a thought to downloading everything about themselves to the Internet, but I've got that rare desire not to let it all hang out. And I don't want Ancestry to own my photos, my research, my stories, etc., after I am no longer their customer. I've heard some real horror stories of submitters learning the hard way that genealogy companies can change hands and someone you've never heard of end up with rights to all their good stuff. And even if you quit them, they still get to keep your "stuff."
It used to be that you could keep your trees private, but now Ancestry has kind of gotten around that by keeping detailed research from the public (if you ask them to), but still allowing searchers to see a name of your ancestor and a date-- giving you, the submitter, as a contact if someone wants to find out more.
Can you tell I don't like that? No, I really don't. So with most games I don't like to play, I just sit that one out.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm happy to share with my kinfolk and that's what my website is all about. Finding family and sharing my research and photos with them is one of the real passions of my life. It's something that brings me a lot of joy and I think in this one way, I am very much like my Dad. He loved people, talking to people, and learning about people and he just loved to visit his family. I think this hobby of mine would have consumed him, as it does me. In my own, small way, I can honor my Dad with keeping his legacy alive.
One of the things I don't like about my new website, which is set up through Myfamily.com (another Ancestry.com subsidiary), is that I cannot upload my family tree gedcom (that's a file extension name) except going through Ancestry and posting it there and then downloading it back to my site. That is just crazy! The original version of my website--a very basic version--allowed me to upload gedcom files directly from my computer. But that is a thing of the past. As crazy as it sounds, I had to open a new website on Tribal Pages.com just to add my family tree. But since I'm working on at least five or six different lines at the same time (McDormans of Virginia, McDormans of NC to Ohio to the wild West, McDermets of Pennsylvania to Ohio, Garrisons, Lemaster, DeBarr (projects for friends), it doesn't quite get it for me. I've got to find a better solution that gives me control of my tree!
My theme for this winter is CONTROL. More on that and my diet in the next blog post.
Joe and Blanca in happier days
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