Haahahahaa! Karen this is SO funny. I'm bursting into laughter reading these posts again, and remembering writing and reading them at the time. Well done! And my favourite part about Martha Stewart dropping in with her dish towel parachute!!! WAY too funny!

bumblebeez - that's why we take off our shoes at the door. Thanks guys for defending me. Rilie - I wouldn't hose DD off with disinfectant, she already washes her hands when she comes home (as we all do). If she's dirty (I mean really dirty), she takes off her clothes when she takes off her shoes. DH gets so filthy sometimes he takes off his clothes in the garage and puts them in a hamper out there - I'm washing his clothes right now, one pair of jeans was so caked with mud that I had to rinse them off in the utility sink before putting them in the washer (on double rinse). I've even mentioned thinking of getting another W/D hookup in the basement and moving the old pair down there so we can wash the "farm" clothes in separate machine than the "school" and "office" clothes. I don't like finding bits of hay in my bath towels. Of course DH doesn't like finding DD's hair on his clothes or my hair in his food either. I don't get *quite* as filthy as DH, but there are plenty of times that I strip down in the mudroom and run upstairs in my skivvies to take a shower (shoulda had a shower put in the mudroom - have to see if we can put one in basement as originally planned). We also have to check each other for ticks. Sorry if TMI, but that's just a fact of living on acreage. So I wouldn't be able to get a dog until we got a dog bath LOL if it got as dirty as DH! But with the coyote(s), I don't think a dog is a good idea anyway. Now, back to folding whites (washed in bleach and hot water to kill germs LOL)!

Okay, I'll say this and duck and cover: We have been looking at Cavalier King Charles Spaniels to adopt from rescue because DH has just about melted anytime he sees one, and behaviorally, they are the dog for us. We are now being considered to adopt one I found at Petfinder that lives locally. So I spent last night going to different sites to learn more about the breed. I knew some of their health problems - heart murmurs (38% seriously when young, 100% by age 10) that can develop into valve disease and require heart surgery, luxating patellas (20 - 30%), hip dysplasia (11%). Heck - I've got all that myself! What I didn't know is that their cute, round little skulls are too small for their brains and they can develop a horridly painful condition that requires brain surgery - and the surgery does not always work. About HALF of CKCS have this! - although not usually to the extreme end. Then there is the problem where the dog will suddenly have paralysis of its hind legs from running or playing too hard. It goes away fairly quickly and the dog resumes its activity (usually). Luckily, this does not seem to be a life-threatening problem very often. They think it is a metabolic muscle problem, but they are not sure. It is unique to Cavs. The list goes on, and the hilarious thing is that I share a good number of the same problems! Like thyroiditis, stenotic nares, cataracts (30% have one eye disorder or another), white blood cell problems (50%). I guess I should be glad that I never reproduced! Then there are the ones I don't have: mucous plugs in the middle ear that are very painful and require surgery; Cushing's disease (prevalent), Diabetes (susceptible); dry eye syndrome (many); epilepsy (prevalent); curly or rough coat syndrome where the dog suffers very painful skin disease and dry eyes that are so bad that many think that the poor dogs should be killed at birth rather than suffer horribly it's whole life (half of all puppies born in Iceland in one recent two-year period had it, prevalence elsewhere is unknown); epilepsy (prevalent), eyelashes that scratch the cornea(very common), inward rolling eyelids (relatively high incidence) fly-catcher's syndrome (prevalent), congenital and progressive deafness...the list goes on. All of these are hereditary diseases - inherited. I just gotta say it - so which one is the Designer Dog? The purebred CKCS or some body's backyard mix? CKCS were created in the 1920s by getting the undesirable longer-nose puppies from the litters of the English Toy Spaniel. The English Toy was the surviving breed that was pictured in a lot of old paintings as a beautiful lapdog. Back when the paintings were done, the breed was not a pug-nosed dog like the English Toy Spaniel is today, though. So some people who wanted to recreate the look of the the dogs in the paintings bought and bred the unwanted longer-nosed English Toys and created a whole new breed and named it the Cavalier (from the name of one of the paintings) King Charles (King Charles II bred and loved the dogs) Spaniel. So, since someone did this in the past, it is now a "breed". I imagine that the dogs were so inbred in order to establish the breed that the genetic disorders just got more and more concentrated. The English Toy Spaniels are known to have a few of these disorders, but not in the same numbers as the Cavaliers do. Interesting factoid: the English Toy was created by MIXING the little spaniels of the paintings with Chinese dogs to get the pug face. Designer Dog, anyone? If it happened a hundred years ago, it is okay, but we can't do it anymore today? Because....why? Think about it. The smushy-faced English Toys that bred true (and consequently had a good mix of genes with the Chinese dogs) have FEWER genetic defects than the CKCS, that was created by breeding only the THROWBACK longer-nosed English Toys that did not meet the English Toy Spaniel's new breed standard. Does that not best explain how dog breeding works? Create a specific breed with a few original parent dogs and end up with concentrations of genetic malformations that seem to come with almost every dog! Look at the breeding chart in the link below. Only the A+ dogs are free of the three main genetic diseases. Yet it is okay to breed them with all but the worst dogs! You can still breed a CKCS who had a dam and sire that may or may not have had a heart valve murmur, who has a little bit of the horrible brain problem, and a skull that is too small with a perfectly healthy dog. Why? Obviously because there are not enough perfectly healthy dogs to use to breed healthy CKCS! Why, o why didn't somebody mix a little Brittany or English Springer Spaniel in there 50 years ago! So, that is my thinking on purebred genetics. It is fine if you are breeding a relatively healthy breed like the Brittany, but when you end up with what the poor CKCS have to endure, is it really worth it?

As a little boy, my DH lived in China, and one day, while in his grandmother's care, they visited a 'soothsayer.' She was a woman from their rural village, who was supposedly gifted with visions of the future. She told DH's grandmother that DH would move far from China, and travel across a great ocean, before he was an adult. He would marry a 'ghost lady,' (that is what they called a Caucasian female) and have 3 children. She said he would have a boy, then a girl, then a boy. DH's grandmother was also told that DH's 2 sons would look like 'ghost fellows' but his daughter would look just like her great grandmother. This all seemed very far fetched, as no one in DH's family, having always lived in their remote village in China, had ever crossed a 'great ocean' before, and DH said he'd never even seen a Caucasian before, (until after he left China.) Well, 6 years later, DH and another family member escaped from Communist China, to Macau. Then 7 years later, he ended up moving here at age 16, to attend a boarding school, so he could learn English, and then get his college education here. So in fact, he did move far from China, by crossing a great ocean, before he was an adult. We met in our 20's and married. We had 3 kids, boy, girl, boy. Sure enough, I gave birth to sons who somehow exclusively inherited my (Irish) looks. Only our daughter looks Asian, but she doesn't resemble DH. She is however, the spitting image of DH's grandmother. It makes the skeptic in me concede, that perhaps some people actually are clairvoyant.