I saved some turtles (or messed up their love life) 🐢

Sep 28, 2024

Happy Saturday friends!

The Polar Bear had another ear infection and had to go to the vet this week and she was the picture of perfection there too. Just look at her perfect crossed paws ❤️ Such a good girl. If you're debating between a floppy-eared dog and a satellite-dish-eared dog like I Love Lucy and you live in a humid area—just go for the huge ears. You won't regret it! I'm assuming a piece of the puzzle is the fact that she lives out with the goats for part of her life.

This was the second picture, she was already tired of me. That slight side eye 😂:

Here we are, another week, another hurricane on its way. This has been quite the season, even though we are so far inland. As I'm writing this on Thursday evening, we just got the call from the school system canceling school tomorrow. Yay! We all get to sleep in on Friday!

This week I saw one of our maple trees with its leaves upside down in the wind and I knew it was going to rain soon. Have you ever noticed this phenomenon? I first saw it decades ago when we lived in North Carolina before, but there was no Google back then. I looked it up recently and found that it really is a thing! It looks like this:

It's different than just a windy day—when it's going to rain, the leaves flip upside down. It turns out that there is even an old saying:

When leaves show their undersides, be very sure rain betides.

(Betides isn't a word I've ever heard. It's obvious what it means here but I looked it up and found the synonyms: happen, occur, come about, transpire.)

According to Farmer's Almanac: The leaves of deciduous trees, like maples and poplars, do often turn upside down before heavy rain. The leaves are actually reacting to the sudden increase in humidity that usually precedes a storm. Leaves with soft stems can become limp in response to abrupt changes in humidity, allowing the wind to flip them over.

Cool! I love stuff like that.

•••

I'm going to let you in on a little mowing secret! If you're not a super sensitive person or you don't have acres to mow, this won't matter to you but for the rest of us, the secret is:

Onion Goggles 😂

Seriously.

You're going to look like a crazy person (my poor neighbors) but it's worth it to keep all the dust, dirt, grass bits, and bugs from flying into your eyes. I tried sunglasses first but it wasn't enough protection. So now I wear these ridiculous pink goggles, an N95 face mask because I'm allergic to all the things, and noise canceling over the ear headphones to both protect me from the noise and so I can listen to audio books. Most recently I finished Michelle Obama's older book Becoming and have moved on to Barack Obama's book A Promised Land. I was a republican (independent now) when they were in office and didn't appreciate them darn it. Their books are fabulous!

•••

Remember when I promised to take you along on my journey into the land of late diagnosed autism? And then promptly wrote one more blog post and never another one? I thought I'd share something I've been learning about lately because my friend Mary brought it up in relation to dogs. We've both often thought our Border Collies are neurodivergent and it turns out, others have been talking about this too! You can watch the YouTube video here. In this video they talk about creating a "sensory diet" which sounds like something to do with food but it isn't. I've been learning about sensory diets for a while now and it just means you do the things that feel good and help you regulate. It's different for everyone. A few of my sensory diet things includes wearing Loop earplugs in most stores, noise canceling earbuds or headphones when I need to concentrate at home or if I'm overwhelmed. I started saying, "Ok, I'm going under!" meaning, "I'm done wording thanks, earphones on, see ya later." and now we all use that to say we need silent alone time.

For sensitive dogs, one of the things that needs to be in their sensory diet is allowing them to sniff things. Sometimes I'm too busy to allow Lucy to sniff all the things and hurry her along so the past few days I've slowed down and gone at her pace. We were in the forest one morning this week after a good rain and I was stopping to take pretty pictures and then back to following her nose. She led us down to the wet weather creek and then back up to the clearing where she pointed this out to me:

Oh my! I assumed they were having some fun but he also looked like he was going to flip upside down...I knelt down next to them with Lucy lying right next to me, watching intently. After scooching them around a bit I realized they weren't attached by anything other than his nails in her shell. Was this part of the normal mating process? Was he holding on so he didn't flip upside down? How long had he been like that? Is the dark grey at the ends of his legs/feet the color it's supposed to be or did they lose all blood flow? I didn't know the answer to any of these so I decided to separate them. It took some messing around to get them apart, it seemed his claws were stuck under her shell. Again, maybe all that is normal! But I did find this guy who had his turtle demonstrate that it could right itself along with a bunch of people on Reddit that said their turtle was broken and couldn't right itself. So, I don't know if I saved him or just totally ruined his day 😂

•••

A sweet memory of the first few weeks of having Rayn and playing clicker training games with her back in 2012, you can see her practicing a silly trick here! Someone commented that they didn't realized that horses could be clicker trained like dogs:

I did teach her to "touch it" next and that turned into a useful tool over the years. She quickly learned that I was going to occasionally introduce her to new things and that they would always be safe for her. (My girl was wicked smaaht :-)) So, even when she got spooked by something, I could tell her, "That's ok, let's go look at it." and she would willingly follow me to check it out, knowing it wouldn't hurt her. She was such an amazing being.

I had this incredible dream about her last night. I was standing in a hilly pasture in the wind and she appeared over a hill. She saw me and came trotting right up to me like she often would. It was winter and she was wearing her thick fur coat. For some reason I knelt in front of her and reached up into the fur of her lower neck and just held on. She stood there and let me hug her while she looked over the pasture land, the wind ruffling her mane. I woke up crying.

I miss her so much.

•••

Text from me to B-Rad. I kept smelling dog poop and assumed I stepped in it:

Sigh. Bad news. The poop isn't from my boots. It's inside my phone. I was emptying the red feed bucket at the upper pasture and my phone was balanced on a post. Just as I was pouring out a gallon of yucky old rainwater, my phone slipped off and into the mucky water on the ground. I don't know if there was poop there or if the muck smelled like poop but even after washing it stinks so it must have gotten into the holes in the bottom of the phone :-(.
Update: It finally dissipated after a few days!

•••

Women's Circle info! We are wrapping up this 6 week session next week and will start a new 6 week Wednesday night group on October 23rd, from 6-9pm. The cost is $210 for the 6 weeks. Wondering what it's all about? You can read a few posts about it here:

The power of compassionate listening

Creating a vision card deck in the Women's Circle

Fair weather women's circle, outside with the animals when it's nice, inside when it's not!

Would love to have you! Click here to send me a text or an email, (or call) if you have questions or are ready to sign up!

If you are still hoping for another night or online, I'd love to make that happen! Help me get the word out and forward this email to all your friends ❤️

•••

Mushroom roundup and other interesting things in the forest: