Elvis Presley in Suspicious Minds:

Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I say?

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds

Ameloblast and Roxy in our kitchen after a messy training session. Actually it was painful (for me) more than messy because I was trying to teach Roxy how to take treats gently:

Roxy is a 2 year old mixed dog that we rescued from the Toronto Humane Society a couple of weeks ago. The teenager who surrendered her to the shelter because he could not afford food for her said that she’s an Azores Cattle Dog. If she does have some of the Azores islands in her those genes are quite diluted. She hardly resembles a purebred ACD.

She has a docked tail and poorly cropped ears. A lip injury along with some scabs along one thigh were suggestive that she had been in a fight just prior to being surrendered.

She and Ameloblast are slowly becoming tolerant of each other and some day soon I’m sure they will become good friends.

Adopting a dog from the SPCA is not as easy as it used to be. If you have never adopted a dog from a shelter it’s definitely not as easy as you might think. The interview that potential adopters are put through can be quite stressful. An extensive questionnaire must be completed and then a meet and greet is set up between you and the dog. If everything goes well there, anyone else who is going to be in close contact with the dog at home must be brought to the shelter as well. This includes other dogs.

Shaz, a professional dog trainer, was our interviewer at the shelter. Thanks to him we were made aware of potential issues between Roxy and Ameloblast and once we brought her home we were able to watch and react to problems before they became issues.

As with any animal that you rescue, you don’t know what sort of life they really have had and you probably do not want to know. All that you do need to know is that a dog like Roxy just wants to have a home that they can call theirs, they want to be loved, to be fed, and to be entertained. Given all of this, they will become your forever friend and you will have saved one soul from a sad ending.

None of us ever asked to be born to this world. Once here, though, we just want to live a life that is happy, positive, and fulfilling. Dogs feel no differently. Anyone who has owned a four-legged pet knows this.

As of today, our windows are still intact along with our lives and the rest of the house. Much has happened over the months since that night with Y on the front porch. Y and B’s house went up for sale shortly after all of this. It is still for sale, much to B’s frustration but not to Y’s. Y loves living in the area and their girls have a well-established social life here now.

Often when The Girl was out walking, B just happened to be either driving by in her car or sitting in wait. B would then resort to either flooring the accelerator past The Girl, or following her slowly a short distance behind — all intimidation tactics. We debated reporting her activity to the police, but didn’t know if B’s behavior was illegal. We decided to play things by ear a little longer. Most of Y and B’s neighbours have commented at one time or another about her strange behavior with her driving her car up and down the street pointlessly. They also wonder why she stops at the top of our street for a minute or two at a time and just looks to the end of it — looks to our house. Through our windows we would often see her zipping around in front of our house checking our property out.

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My wife did manage to calm down before the night was through. Although thoughts of murder and vandalism ran through her head, she overcame and tried to put the whole incident behind her. We agreed that we would have nothing to do with Y and B in the future.

It was around lunch time a couple of days later that my wife remembered that B had wanted all of us to get together to discuss the situation and for her to call to set that up. My wife had calmed down enough to feel that she could have a rational, intelligible conversation at this point.

She dialed their number.

Y answered, “Hello?”

“Can I speak to B?”

B came on the phone, “Hello?”

“This is The Girl…”

“Yes, I’m ready to talk to you now,” B said. “I…”

“No! You’re done talking. You’re gonna listen now!”

“You…”

“Shut up and listen! Who the fuck do you think you are? How dare you come over to my place and I find you alone with my husband and you’re the one accusing me of cheating with yours. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Forget where we live, who we are, that we were ever friends!” My wife hung up.

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http://www.hydroponicsdictionary.com/images/insects/full_greenlacewings.jpg

Years later we’ve finally gotten most of the parasites on our houseplants under control. To refresh your memory, our houseplants have suffered from a combination of scale insects, mealybugs, and spider mites. All of these pests were introduced from infected plants that were either donated to us, or bought from stores (Home Depot).

Control of the pests has consisted of sprays (Ender’s EndAll) and biologic methods. The spray helps to rapidly reduce a large active population, but doesn’t kill eggs. Weeks later, recurrent infestations occur. Ideally, the spray should be used on a regular basis for some time after bugs are no long noticeable. This helps to erradicate newly hatched pests that we can’t visualize — that are hidden in between leaves and stems — before they lay more eggs.

Unfortunately we have too many plants and too many sensitive animals in the house to use pesticide spray that often. So in the past we resorted to killing off the spider mites with spider mite predators.

Biologic control of pests by using other predatory insects is a costly venture — much more expensive than pesticide spray. Yet if the temperature and humidity are proper for the predators to thrive it is orders of magnitude more effective. I had to order and re-order the spider mite killers through the winter that we used them because conditions were not ideal for them. Yet over time, recurrent spider mite flareups became a thing of the past.

Now, we’re dealing with exploding mealybug and scale insect populations as our houseplants go a bit more dormant for the winter. Enter Green Lacewings.

Our Lacewings were shipped as eggs. The larvae of these Green Lacewings are hungry little suckers and once hatched seek out any other insect they can find to feed off of. If they can’t find other insects, they’ll go after one another. This is bad news for scale insects, mealybugs, spider mites, aphids, and lots of other plant-sucking pests. It’s good news for us.

Bananaleafland