Sleeping With the Fishes

Since we were little kids my sister and I have wanted our own pool.  We always lived on Post and could always go to the officers club pool, but it isn't like being able to open your back door and flop into your very own pool.  So when I moved here and began sharing a house with my sister and niece we invested into our first pool.

OK, picture this...an "aero" blow up pool, it looked like a pea green/yellow giant lasagna pan.  We would fill it up on Saturday and we could hang out and if we were lucky by Sunday afternoon before we dumped it out pre-slimey water time hits, Bug might put her little face in the water.

Following years we got a small round pool with a little pump and could spend more than Saturday and Sunday in water in our backyard, we are big girls now!! The next year a little larger round and deeper, we are cooking now!

Finally my sister took the giant step and bought an above ground pool.  A real live pool that could hold more than the three of us. And is the scene of this particular story.

Shortly after the new pool was installed and the solar panels warmed the water enough to get in comfortably the adventure begins.  My sister was out for a meeting so it was just Bug and I on the maiden voyage into the big girl pool.  I step up onto the ladder, step one, step two, step three and the platform before going in.  Left foot on the platform, right foot catches on the platform and I pitch forward and face plant into the pool.  Chlorinated water rushes past my face and deep into my sinus cavities without permission I might add.  I come out of the water to see Bug.  Her face is tilted like a dog hearing a odd sound and she says "What was that?" Trying to be cool (which I'm so not) I just shrugged as if I meant to do it and swam away.  She wasn't fooled by this, but out of respect just let it be.  She got in and we played and goofed off for well over an hour before my sister got home.  Sitting at the table on the patio closest to the pool I was hanging on the side of the pool just chatting and realized the water was cooling off and it was time to get out.  So I let Bug go first.  Up, over and out and wrapped in her towel.  My turn.  Up...up...ok, up...ummmm.  Let's try this again.  Up! My body responded with a resounding NOPE!  I look at my sister who hasn't quite figured out what I already know and that is I'm stuck and can't get out the pool.  With a deer in the headlight look I inform her in a smallish whisper. "I'm stuck, I can't pull myself out of here"  I don't know if it was really funny, hysteria or just my warped sense of humor but I crack up.   The family joins in and my sister keeps saying, "I'm sorry I'm laughing, but you're laughing"  Bug is laughing, but I don't really thinks she was 100% clear as to what was funny.

In a moment of complete brilliance, I decide if I back up about four feet from the side I can take a run and throw my leg over and haul my ass out.  OK, have you ever tried to run and pick up speed in five feet of water?  Give you a tip, can't be done.  Now the laughter is beginning to erupt louder as the gravity of the situation is hitting us.  I can't get out of this pool, I don't have the upper body strength to do it.  What the hell do we do?  Exhausted from trying to get out and laughing I've now flopped over the side of the pool that overlooks our Koi pond and announce "I'm going to be sleeping with the fishes, aren't I?"  Laughter continues with a slight change of funny to oh hell and we spot the step stool.  I said, "OK, get me two Frisbees to put under the stools legs so we don't poke a hole in the bottom plastic of the pool and I'll climb it and get over to the ladder and out I'll come."  Congratulating myself on my brilliant idea we scour the yard for the Frisbees while the step stool is hoisted over into the pool.  I park the plastic disks of freedom under the legs and now eye my escape route to warm, dry sanctuary.

So with renewed hope I climb up the step stool and eye the ladder that has thwarted my exit for the last hour and step over to the top rung with my right foot.  I swing my left foot over the top and to the other top rung outside the pool and am now straddling this ladder from hell and realize I'm a little tired.  So in a brief moment of insanity I think sitting down in this position was the most viable option.  With a horrified look on her face my sister yells "For God sakes Shiela, don't sit down!!"  Too late!  Exhausted laughter begins again and I realize that if I'm to get out of this mess I need to keep mosing.  I take the last of my strength and stand up and swing over the right leg and maneuver myself down to my escape.

While still drying off I began writing this whole thing in my head. But once again I made my lemonade from my soggy waterlogged lemons!

What the Hell...

I think one of the things that women don't talk about very well is, getting older.  I don't mean going from 19 to 20, I’m talking things sprouting and noises that I never heard before outside of a scary Halloween movie.  That being said, I think it’s important for us women to stick together and be honest with each other.  And for you men, we know you have things going on too!  But anyway, I’ll go first.  I have had things appear that I thought to myself "wow, no one ever said to look out for that" and some things I think as women we owe each other to warn each other about.  I mean after all, we are all in this growing older thing together aren't we?

So after making a decision that I would write out my thoughts, experiences and other embarrassing things I sat down at my computer and froze!  What will people think?  What do I think?  Can I do this? And I heard a quote on the radio that said if you write for whoever is reading it you won’t write an honest book/story.  That gave me the guts to continue.  I wrote this over a year ago, but the life lesson still applies.  Grab your lemonade and let’s go!

“What the hell... was that smell?”

Rolling over in the morning and hearing an escape from my backside that woke the dog and made the cat leave the room in a hurry prompted me to say, “What the hell was that?”   Once I woke up completely, calm the dog and located the cat three rooms away I backtracked my routine, which hadn’t changed since I was four years old.  Except today that build up of gas no longer escaped like a dainty lady like poof of air.  Today it sounded like an air horn of a passing eighteen wheeler we use to pray for as kids in the back seat of our parents Buick and it came out of my own butt.   Horrified, I try to retrace all dietary intakes resulted in nothing unusual to have caused such a ruckus.  Chalking this up to just a random act of gas I went on with my day knowing in my heart of heart this was a fluke. 

Next morning knowing I’m going to concentrate hard on all bodily activity I’m awakened by thunder outside.  The dog is now off the bed, cat is gone, and my parrot is voicing his displeasure.  I say out loud, “Sorry gang, not my fault! Everyone settle down.”  I look out the window to see the storm that is rolling in.  Hmm no clouds, no wind, no rain.  What the hell was that sound?  I sit back and am horrified to think that clap of thunder might have been me and my betraying butt again.   Looking at my dog I say, “That wasn't me” as if somehow Jiggs is going to nod reassuringly and back me up on this.  Ok, that didn't help, so I call the cat, which by the way is named Stinky, unfortunate, but I didn't name him and tried to get another vote in my corner that the thunder wasn't from my own down under.  Stinky, sitting at the back door now, upset that for the second morning in a row his slumber has been disturbed by my body betraying me and he wants nothing more to do with me, it's abundantly clear. I give up trying to obtain his vote and I open the door and announce he’s a trader. His tail swishes and he pads out the door to find some much needed peace and quiet and what I can only imagine with his sensitive nose, fresh air.

I wander in disbelief back to my room, sit on the side of the bed in a dead stare and try and figure out how to go on.  Wondering is this just the start of things to come?  The answer to that is a resounding YES!  But for now we will start here.  And I'll share more later!

Remembering the funny times!

A year ago today I woke up to find my eleven year old English Bulldog had passed away in his sleep on his side of the bed.  I might note here that he slept on a sleep number bed and his sleep number was 65, anything above or below he would whine.  Anyway, in thinking about this loss today I had my lemonade moment of do I post only about the loss of my puppy or do I share what living with an English Bulldog is really like.

I've had English Bulldogs a good portion of my life, I teethed with one in my playpen and had one or two around all through my teenage years.   I got this one and things would never be the same again. From the time Jiggs was a puppy his favorite playtime was for my sister to spank his butt with an empty water bottle and he would run all over the house and come back for more.  Such a simple game I thought if this is all he's got he's going to be a breeze.  Oh was I wrong, so so wrong!

Jiggs first summer was nearing and my sister thought it would be fun for him to have a pool to  play in to keep cool while we were at work.  So she finagled a kiddie pool into her car and came home proudly showing what a good puppy Auntie she was.  We set the little blue pool up, filled it with water and then introduced him to his new refreshment oasis.  I picked him up and set him down into the water, where he promptly began to drink the cool water.  So far so good right?  So in honor of the cute moment we were experiencing we went into the house to go get the camera to capture this Kodak moment.  Coming out the back door and clearing the patio we looked over to see the last piece of the pool being shredded in a mud puddle and Jiggs looked up with the pool piece in his mouth with a look of "what?" on his face.  I looked at my sister and we just shook our heads, cleaned up the 400 pieces of muddy pool fragments, she called him a name and that was that.

I wish I could tell you that was his only Bulldog infraction, but it was just the beginning of his illustrious career.

Another highlight was numerous escapes that resulted in his being jailed twice at the Humane Society and costing me many hundreds of dollars.  Then we would try again to foil his attempts to go be social alone (aka escape again).  At one point he got bored and began chewing up our wood fence.  I wasn't really all that concerned since it backed another wood wall of our neighbors shed I figured he would get bored or tired before I needed to worry about anything.  Yes I know, what was I thinking.  So one afternoon I got home from work and within 10-15 minutes a knock on the front door and the sound of familiar bulldog sounds on the other side.  I opened the door with our next door neighbor standing there grinning with Jiggs on a leash.  I opened the door and let him through as he promptly went to my room and crashed and found out that when the neighbor got home she walked in and heard snoring.  She went to her living room and laying on his back on her leather sofa sound asleep was Jiggs.  We had to back track his movement to discover he had eaten through our fence, the wall of her shed, partial contents of her shed and through the door.  Sauntered past her dog run of dogs and through the doggy door into her house for a nap.  How do you even begin to apologize for that?  Thank goodness she had a good sense of humor about it all.

After that we chain link fenced the yard, that will keep him!  Again, we couldn't have been more wrong.  But his next major accomplishment wasn't peeling the chain link, that came later but it was when we bought a 50 gallon sheep tank to keep filled with fresh water for the dogs to make sure they always had water.  We parked it against the fence with the spigot facing so we could attach a hose and leave it on a trickle to keep a good flow of water in the tank.  At least we thought it was a good idea.  After getting it all set up, my sister and I were sitting on the patio enjoying the fruits of our labor and discussing that this tank would weigh in the neighborhood of 415 pounds of water that even Jiggs couldn't do anything about that.  Yes again we are slow and have to be shown the error of our ways.   While we sat drinking our lemonade, I watched as Jiggs using only his head and strength pushed that sheep tank away from the fence far enough to get to the hose and chew it off before we could get across the yard to stop him.  It took both of us to move it back into place while he watched.  This dog was created by Satan, he has to have been!

Along with many other incidents that may come in later posts was the final one that we laugh about even now.  One night we heard a fuss out in the back yard.  The other dog was just a mess and his crying and fussing was over Jiggs had gone missing again.  Me and Bug got in my car going one direction, my sister got in her SUV and went another direction to begin the fugitive hunt against time and incarceration.  We hadn't been away from the driveway 5 minutes and my phone rang.  "I've got him" was the only words spoken as I dropped the phone, turned around in a driveway and headed back home.  I pulled into the drive way and see my sister nearing the driveway shaking her head.  As I stood at her door she opened it and said something about 'the little asshole' and pointed to him asleep on her passenger seat.  He had made it all the way down six houses and was sitting in the driveway waiting for his ride home.  When she got there, opened her door and called him he just looked at her.   She had to get out, pick him up, carry him to the car and put him in where he flopped over and snored before she got the car into drive.  I had to go around to the passenger side, open the door and carry his highness into the house. Poor dude was exhausted from the 2 block walk.

Not knowing it was his final two years at the time, Jiggs discovered our pool and a yellow ball (get the irony that it was the color and size of a lemon) made for some very happy times for us.  He waited all day to get to his time to play with his ball in the pool.  I took this video a couple of years ago and it reminds me of better days with the puppy known as Jiggs, Little Man of Eaton's Clan.

For those of you who knew Jiggs, please feel free to leave a comment on your favorite Jiggs moment to share with the rest!  I only touched one a few I know.

Cheers my puppy!!  

Guess I have to begin somewhere!

When I made the comment I was thinking of starting a blog I got a lot of encouragement, but no one encouraged me more than my niece Bug.  She thought it was a great idea of me to write out my thoughts, ideas, fears, hopes and dreams.  So it's with her particular encouragement that I'm sitting here now.  

I have to say the year 2013 was not one of my most favorite I've ever lived through, for many reasons I'm not going to get into at this time, but I will at some point.  I've tried to find my humor and my lessons in what's been going on.  Some days are better than others, I just have to remember a few things:

• I'm not alone
• Why me?  Why not me?
• I have an amazing family
• My humor will get me through anything
• This too shall pass
• When life hands you lemons...well you know

All of those are easy to remember in the light of day.  It's the 2:00AM terrors when my negative mind takes over, fear creeps and every insecurity takes over.  For that time I'm paralyzed in fear and can't see out past the fear, can sleep, can't think, can't even breathe. Then morning comes, the house comes alive with family getting ready for their day, animals being fed and the world making ready for the day.  Having survived another night of terror, I begin again.  

My niece, Bug as you will learn is a very wise young person.  Way more wise than I was at 14 and I'm thankful for her every day.  Not to long ago I texted her someone I thought was profound about not giving up and she responded with this and it knocked my socks off.  Something she saw on Pinterest that stuck with her was "Fall down 15 times, get up 16".  That has become my mantra of late.  I may not do everything right, but the fact that I try means I'm successful.

The bottom line in my life right now is keep trying, never give up, love my family and be thankful for everyday that my feet hit the floor I have a chance to making my day better than yesterday.