Julie Tennis

I was sharing the cat videos below with my neice, Ariel, and she introduced me to Potter Puppet Pals.  I highly recommend that you watch “The Mysterious Ticking Noise.”  Very funny.  Ha ha.

I’ve had an eventful couple of weeks, where cats are concerned.  The morning that I received the video in the previous post, I was attacked by a neighbor’s cat.  You can read about it at my MySpace page:  “How to Get Mauled by a Housecat.”  A couple of days later, my cat woke me by grabbing my scalp with her teeth and pulling my hair.  Another neighbor cat got angry when I walked away without spending the right amount of time petting her, and she slashed at my ankle, drawing blood.

I was telling my friends Phil and Charlotte about these incidents and they suggested watching the video, “How to Wash a Cat.”  Neither said it at the time, but I see now that this is my one legal way of getting back at the cats in my life.  Now, where did I leave the kitty bubbles?

Check out this cat video at YouTube!

Wow.  I was so excited to receive my first-ever post, only to discover it was spam.  And I seem to be getting hit several times a day with it.  I wonder if it is some sort of automated system to leave people’s advertisements in responses to blogs.  If you are a human hoping to leave an advertisement, don’t bother.  I delete them immediately.

 I love this time of year!  Wow!  Autumn storms are incredibly sensual - the roiling dark blue and grey clouds provide a visual feast while the ears are filled with the deep rumblings of ancient gods.  The aroma of fallen leaves and sharp tang of freshly exposed sap and heartwood mingle to fill the nostrils.  Dry, storm-front winds swirl and caress and tease long hair skyward.  And the eyes, if quick enough, are filled with the brilliance of that elemental force, electricity, sending tingles of recognition through our own circuitry.

 This is an excellent time of year to curl up with a good book and a nice cup of chammomile tea!  Being the bibliophile that I am, the books keep pouring in. (Thank the gods for my day job!)  I have found another kindred spirit in Margaret Lobenstine.  Margaret wrote The Renaissance Soul.  Basically, it’s a guidebook for people like me who have a multitude of interests and can’t or won’t settle on just one thing.  The opening chapters clearly define my personality traits in the descriptions of other people Margaret has worked with in her profession as a life coach.  Her writing style is relaxed and I feel a sense of comraderie in reading her words.  A big THANK YOU to Margaret for writing this book!  And now, I’m off to read! 

Ug.  What else can I say?  I’m frustrated with myself for not moving forward as quickly as I’d like with my on-line endeavors.  The ideas are there, but when it’s time to put rubber to the road I back up and start checking the oil and spark plugs.  Or I park it and start looking at a tree.  Anyway, I’d like to see myself get more focused, stay on task, and at least see “Ask a Naturalist” through to it’s emergence onto the internet superhighway.  Right now I’m lost on the back roads.

I’m bit like a pit bull when there’s a book I’m trying to track down, I simply can’t let it go until I’ve conquered the challenge!  My recent challenger was Your Own Best Secret Place by Byrd Baylor.  It’s an excellent little children’s book about secret places, and it’s one of those pieces of literature that helps to define who you become as an adult.

I was recently reminded of the title while reading Questing, Clark and Glazer, and began a two-week saga of tracking it down for a reasonable price.  For reasons still unknown to me, most of Baylor’s other books sell at a reasonable four or five dollars used.  But there were listings for this book of over thirty dollars!  I want what I want but not thirty dollars for a five-minute read!

So I searched deeper into the depths of Google and finally found sites that listed the book at its original retail value.  Hopefully it’ll be here in time for me to use in developing a Questing program with the local school district.

The side benefit to all this “running around” from one on-line store to another was that I ended up picking up a couple of her other books.  I already have Everybody Needs a Rock and am looking forward to more of Baylor’s almost spiritual handling of a child’s connection with her natural world.

A big thank you to Byrd for her excellent works!

(p.s. Peaches’ tooth is fine.  Apparently she just wanted to savor her chew toy for the whole day.)

Hello and welcome to my world!  I enjoy working on multiple projects at once, and now that I’ve discovered Blogging, I’m at a whole new level of multi-tasking.  The problem with this is that none of the projects gets the specific attention it needs to really bloom.

Anyway, I’m at home today because the 90-degree dry weather that blew like a furnace blast down the river yesterday burned out a few circuits and I’m sick.  So I’m playing on the internet instead of trying to be pleasant and productive at work.

My hands are covered with scratches that just won’t seem to heal.  Cats and birds are the culprits.  And one from a dog.  It’s all good, but I worry about my slow recovery time.  I used to heal so quickly.  So I’ve added researching skin-enhancing herbs and supplements to my list of things to do.

The chew treat I gave our black lab this morning is still intact, so I’ve made a doctor appointment for her.  If you’ve never known a black lab, then I guess you wouldn’t know that eating is their #1 reason for existence.  (Number 2 is to be hyper.)  So, when Peaches doesn’t eat, I know something is wrong.  I think it’s a rotten tooth, and I feel for her if that is the case, ’cause she’ll have to stay the night at the hospital (away from her family) and the recovery will be a bear too.

Well, back to work on another site.  Bye for now!