An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into it.

The title is a quote from Eric Hoffer.

So after spending a lot of time online in forums and message boards here is a partial compilation of the STUPID things people have told me.

• Dogs and cats shouldn't be spayed or neutered because it's unnatural.
• My answer: What's unnatural is the way humans have bred dogs to meet their needs. Trying to get specific traits, we've bred horrible disease into many of these breeds. We're the ones who turned them info house pets so now we have to care for them. Unless everyone in the US wants to adopt 4 dogs and 8 cats and not let any of them make babies, we HAVE to spay/neuter!

• To keep your female dog from going into heat you should place 5 old pennies in her water bowl.
• My answer: This is a GREAT idea! You dog can't go into heat if it's DEAD! After 1942, all pennies contain zinc which is HIGHLY toxic to dogs. Coins made prior to 1892 only contained 5% zinc so one probably wouldn't kill your dog, but 5 might. After 1892 all pennies are 97.5% zinc with a thin copper plating. Just one of these post 1892 pennies can kill your dog! Prior to 1864 pennies were 100% copper, but they are worth a lot of money and still pose a choking risk.

• Anyone asking more than $20 as an adoption fee is a horrible person trying to make money on their dog.
• My answer: There are a lot of terrible people out there to pick up cheap or free dogs and then resell them to labs for testing. These "free to good home" dogs are also used as bait for dog fighting. For pure bred dogs, you also have to worry about puppy mills which have no problem paying even $200 if you are willing to give them the AKC papers. Asking $100-$150 will allow you to spay/neuter before adopting out the dog and prevent it being used for resale or bait, but you should NEVER allow the AKC papers to go with your purebred dog.

• Flea collars and cheap flea drops/sprays are safe to use on my pet because they're sold in a pet store.
• My Answer: Any vet will tell you that these products are not good for your pet. Many of them carry warning labels against using them with greyhounds (or sighthounds) which is because these breeds are more sensitive to these chemicals, but all dogs are at risk. Just because they sell cigarettes at the grocery store doesn't make them safe for your 5 year old does it? Ask your vet before using any "medication" on your pet.

• Declawing my cat is not a big deal, it's a routine surgery!
• My Answer: Declawing is the amputation of a cat's finger at the last knuckle. It cuts through bone, tendons, and soft tissue. Just like in a human, there are a lot of nerve endings in that area so it is very painful. In many countries it is illegal because it is considered animal cruelty and in most other countries (outside the U.S.) it is a very rare procedure used in very rare situations with very few vets willing to do the surgery at all. Better alternatives include scratching posts, clipping the cats nails just like we do with dogs, or a product called Soft Claws which are vinyl nail caps applied similarly to "fake nails."

• Microchipping dogs is a bad idea. People can use their microchips to find you via GPS system. Also, the big needle used to insert them is too painful!
• My Answer: The microchips used for dogs can not be traced by GPS. They emit a very week radio signal that can only be read from an inch or two away. The needle is big and it does hurt, but no worse than getting your belly button pierced and the pain is gone within a minute or two. If you choose to have your pet microchipped at the same time they are being spayed/neutered they won't experience any pain at all!

• Putting banana peals in the corners of the rooms in your house will keep fleas out of your house and off your pets.
• My Answer: Do I really need to say anything here? Rotting plant matter smells bad and attracts bugs. It will mold and if your pet eats a moldy banana peel it could get sick. Just buy some Frontline OK?

Oh the stupid people in the world! Anyhow, I'm sure there will be a 2nd installment of this pos

The sick, sad, horrible, everyday truth....

From the Columbus Dispatch Online- a video on Euthanasia and the Capital Area Humane Society.

This video shows the sad, horrible truth. People tell themselves that spay/neuter is unnatural, or that the animal should be able to have 1 litter first, or that their children need to see the miracle of birth. Unfortunately most of the kittens that come because of all those excuses will probably be euthanised. There are many shelters in Columbus that take cats, but only until they hit capacity. They are “no-kill” shelters. Unfortunately there are thousands of more cats that those groups can’t take in. If they’re left on the streets they spread disease and multiply at an alarming rate making the problem even worse! CAHS manages to save 19% of those cats, but 81% have to die so the others can live.

~PLEASE~ spay or neuter your pet. Don't let more innocent animals die.

In a perfect world, every dog would have a home and every home would have a dog.

My friend Elana and her husband just got their first dog! I'm way to excited and I get to take some of the credit since I found the dog for them! He's an adorable Great Dane/Boxer mix puppy. He was found as a stray in a rural county about an hour from Columbus. The poor thing was staying at a very poor shelter where all the dogs were kept outside in pens and they don't have any vet care or anything. I came over just as soon as they brought it home to give it a bath... we ended up giving him TWO baths since he was SOoooo stinky! The flies were all over him, it was really terrible.

After we got the bath all taken care of he smelled better and seemed to be in a bit of a better mood. He settled right in! Curled up on the couch with a chew toy and just waggin that tail. The shelter named him Caesar, but they changed it to Maximus. He's gonna be a big puppy and he's got a great new home!

HSUS MySpace Page | Stop Puppy Mills Website

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

The title is a quote by my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien.




I have decided that I am in love with the Whole Foods store.

So many other countries have this part right, but in the U.S. we have it all wrong! Fresh food is a BILLION times better than the standard grocery store junk most of us eat. As you probably know by now, I haven't been able to eat much lately. (I've lost 35-40lbs!!!) Since I'm not buying much to eat, I've taken to spending the extra $$ and getting myself the good stuff! Tonight I went and got some fresh tilapia fillets. Mmmmmm.... It tastes NOTHING like the nasty frozen stuff at the grocery store. It melted in my mouth! I also had steamed broccoli and sourdough bread. Very low fat and low calorie, but soooo good for you and very tasty!

I don't know that I have much of a point. Maybe just that I wish there was a market down the street so I could buy fresh food every day or every week!

Kids these days!!! Arggg!!

OK, I know I'm only 22 but I'm about to sound like an old lady to some.

What in the world is the matter with kids these days? You know what, that's not even the right question. What's the matter with ADULTS these days? I see twelve-teen year old girls in mini skirts SO SHORT that I can see their nether bits walking around all over the place. Boys have their tighty-whiteys hanging out of their pants which are about to fall off at any given moment... How do their parents justify letting them walk around like that? I have no idea. What does it lead to? Poor Kapper's gotta deal with trying to teach when these college girls are sitting with their legs wide open for all the world to see THEIR nether bits.

It's not just their parents that are the problem either. Adults in general are tolerating way too much CRAP from these kids! They're running around in packs like rabid dogs and no one will say or do anything to stop them. Perfect example of this:

Last night my husband and I went to the 7:40 showing of "Balls of Fury." I should have known better since that's prime time for these kids to be out in their packs causing trouble. While we're watching the previews they're all talking and goofing off, but who cares cause the movie's not on yet and they'll stop then right? Wrong. They weren't even just talking- they had their cell phones going off, crawling over seats, throwing stuff, etc. etc. At one point a group of them started making bird calls! You'd think there would be people yelling at them and telling them to shut up, but nope- not a peep. When I was their age that wouldn't have been tolerated. The projectionist would have called an usher and those kids would have been GONE.

Like I said, I feel like a little old lady complaining about those young whipper-snappers, but seriously WTF is going on? I have no problem with their music, dancing, hanging out at the mall, even most of their clothing choices (aside from seeing way to much pre-teen crotch and bare ass these days.) It just seems like they don't understand what being polite is and people in the general public are what? To embarrassed to stand up for themselves? I don't get it. They're not your kids, but you can still tell them to shut the heck up when they're ruining your night out!

Aside from the pack of rabid teenagers, the movie was hilarious!

I'm melting! I'm melting!

Title is a quote from the Wicked Witch of the West as she dies in Wizard of Oz.

So here I am being all jealous of Kapper's new MacBook.... and I promptly break my iBook. Cracked the LCD... It's still usable for the moment but as you probably (hopefully) know, the Liquid Crystal will cause more issues as time goes on now that it's loose and free to go where it wills. There's a long crack that goes from the top right corner to the bottom left corner, and 2 small cracks up in the top right corner. You can see the impact point up in the corner.

I called Apple. It's going to be like $850 to replace the screen. At that point why not just buy a new computer? Oh well. In the mean time, I'm pissed!

Yay Olestra!

All this time I've been sick, miserable, and unable to eat anything tasty! I completely forgot about "Olean" or Olestra, the fake fat used in what was originally called the WOW! brand. Now it's used in all sorts of stuff, but mostly snack food. Basically the molecule is too large for the small intestine to absorb, so it just passes right through. I did some research and found out that Olestra (unlike real fats) doesn't stimulate the gall bladder either so it won't make me sick!

It does have it's own side effects though. The FDA makes them put a small label on the packaging warning that it makes fat-soluble vitamins harder to absorb and it can cause "loose stool." The old joke was that it causes "anal leakage" but that's not so much the truth. Studies show it can just cause a very slight increase in stool production. Sorry if that's too much information =) I'm not too worried about the second part, but I'll need to make sure I don't eat too much and interfere with my vitamins. I'm already having a hard enough time getting the nutrients I need!

I'm just excited because I got to buy tortilla chips tonight! Since salsa is naturally fat free, I got to have a very tasty snack for the first time in MONTHS! I also took a stroll through the health food section and found a few extremely low-fat things to try. A lot of them use tofu or soy protein since most meats have quite a bit of fat in them. I did find a few frozen dinners by Kashi that have chicken or fish in them, but they're still very low fat.

Next time you're at the store, look at the stuff marked "low fat" and see how many grams of fat are actually in 1 serving. With my gall bladder acting up, I have to stay around 7 grams of fat or less. If I'm having a REALLY good day, sometimes I can get away with 10-15 grams before I get too sick. Most of the time I have to weigh the pros and cons and decide how much pain it's worth to eat. And that's not 10-15 grams per meal, it's more like per day. It seems that my gall bladder is rather sluggish and it reacts sometimes hours after I eat so 2 meals can seem like 1 to it. Just some perspective for you.

My God. We've had cloning in the South for years. It's called cousins.

The title is a quote from Robin Williams.

Another little note for tonight:

Every once in a while people look at me funny when I introduce them to my dog, Toby. The truth is I had never even HEARD of the show "Roots" until after I had named the dog. My mother was the first one to point out the "correlation" to me openly, and since then it's come up quite a few times. I even know one person who openly refers to him as my "little negro dog." I've had another person comment that I should have named him Kunta Kinte.

That being said, it came to me in the car, with my dogs on my lap, that we are headed north with our black dog named Toby to stay at the Plantation.... How is it possible not to have a racial thought in this situation? At least we weren't headed South.

For the record, I don't believe myself to be a racist. I have no problems with anyone of any skin type, gender, sexual preference, etc. I'm simply commenting on the number of people who are putting WAY too much thought into my dog's name!

Some parents really bring their children up; others let them down

The title is an quote by an unknown author.

Most people that know me also know that I do NOT have a good relationship with my family. More specifically my mother is public enemy #1 in my life. My sister is annoying and judgmental at times, but she lives in Tampa, FL 3/4 of the year and 2.5 hours away in Sandusky the other 1/4. My dad is a pretty good guy, but he refuses to stand up to my mother. Lately I've heard my mother complaining a LOT about him, and him complaining a little about him. I think the best thing that could happen to both of them is a divorce... but that's a different story.

I'll start with a very short history of my family's dysfunction, mostly as it relates to my life. The first thing to note is that my sister is the definition of the direct opposite of me. I think I commented on that in a previous post so I'll leave it at that. Well, starting in about 6th grade I actually started to make a few friends through the band. They were all a year older than me and my mom hated that. She made that VERY clear as she often does with things that are none of her business. Using my math grades as an excuse (I got a C omigod call the cavalry,) she grounded me and said I would not be ungrounded until I got a B in math. I was grounded for about a year and a half, which effectively made me a complete outcast. Going into HS, I think I might have had 1 friend left- thanks mom! The funny thing is that after I made some new friends, I was suddenly ungrounded but I was still pulling C's and D's in math.

In HS things got REALLY interesting. I was no longer allowed to go to sleep-over parties with my female friends. No boys there, parents in the other room, still not allowed. My parents were SO overprotective that I was not even allowed to go out after homecoming my senior year in HS! The story was completely different with my younger sister though. She was allowed to stay out after homecoming when she was a sophomore I believe. She also threw house parties when my parents were out of time, drank, smoked pot.... but she was the preppy blond cheerleader which my mother LOVED so she got away with it. My mother (and sister) are obsessed with public opinion, rumor mills, and archaic ideas about social "rules." In other words, your behavior didn't matter in my household as long as you were thin, had cute hair, wore makeup, dressed to the popular norm, etc. etc.

Things got downright ugly in college. When my now husband proposed to me I called my mom to tell her the news. Her response? Something like "Oh... are you sure you want to do that? You haven't dated many boys." Just what every little girl dreams her mother will say at one of the most meaningful moments in her life. A few months before my wedding, after most of the planning was already done, my mother actually suggested that I call the wedding off. She made if very clear that she didn't like Eric because she thought he was selfish and rude. (Years earlier he had told my mother that he could NOT drive 15 minutes into town to pick up my sister from cheerleading practice. Mind you she never asked, she assumed he would just do it.) Now that things are official and she thinks that it is her duty to be the good mother-in-law she acts like she LOVES Eric and that he's SOOOO wonderful.

And all that to get to the most recent bullshit. A week or two ago we realized that we had a long weekend coming up (Eric never gets weekends off) so we decided to go home so Eric could visit his family (Sept. 1 is his birthday) and so we could visit my grandma. We usually stay at my parents' house because they have a double bed in the guest bedroom (my old room) and Eric's old room only has a single bed. I called my parents to tell them we were coming up and they said they were going to be out of town anyway so we could have the place to ourselves. Then I thought hmmm.... I bed my parents are going to take their dog Bear to the kennel (he's had a couple strokes and has a lot of "accidents.) I called and confirmed this with my dad and told him that was awesome because we won't have to board our dogs, which gets expensive. Because Bear is so old and a little crazy so he gets spooked real easy and our young dogs really scare him so we never bring them with us. We usually bring Brodie with us though and my mom has never had any problem with this.

Well, a couple days ago my mom calls and leaves a voicemail which very rudely said something like "I don't understand how you don't get it, but I don't want your dogs in my house so you need to make other arrangements. CLICK" If she had EVER said ANYTHING about not wanting my dogs in her house this would have been a different story, but she hadn't! I don't understand this at all because her dog has already ruined their carpet and she plans to replace it as soon as he dies anyway. My dogs could not possible do any damage, but it's her house so whatever. I left her a voicemail saying all of that and adding that if she insists on being stubborn and rude, that she can explain to my elderly grandmother why I have to cancel this visit. The next day I get a message not from her, but from my father saying that my mother has offered to allow us keep our dogs in the garage. Mind you their garage has no insulation, no windows, etc. etc. and my dogs have never slept in their crates let alone outside.

At this point I'm FURIOUS with my mother and sent her a pretty nasty e-mail, but they apparently did not get it before they left town. She has single handedly ruined Eric's birthday and our entire weekend. How are we supposed to find a dog-sitter with less than 2 days notice before a holiday weekend? I started checking hotels, but even the pet-friendly ones usually limit it to 1 pet, and we have 3. I finally found one with an open room that would take all 5 of us, but they wanted $150/night+tax since it's tourist season in Sandusky. (Like I always say- if it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?) We don't have that kind of money in our budget.

Next, we call Eric's folks to see if we can maybe crate the dogs in their detached garage (since it's completely finished with insulation, windows, even heat) and maybe let little baby Zipp sleep upstairs with us. His mom didn't think we would be comfortable so she found us a small local hotel that would let us bring all 3 dogs and only wanted $88/night+tax and offered to pay half the bill!

I have to say, I love my in-laws. They are wonderful, loving, caring people and they all treat me like one of their own. I dare say I love them more than my own family! (Except my grandma who is the most wonderful person I've ever met)

So here we are now at the Plantation Hotel in Huron, OH! It's a pretty small room, but it's clean and it has a king-size bed. No complaints here! We're only going to stay the one night, but at least Eric will get to see his folks for his birthday. When my parents get back we'll see how things go, but this has definitely not helped the already very shaky relationship I have with them. Eric wishes I would just cut them out of our lives since they usually cause nothing but heartache for me. Maybe I'm just naive but I keep hoping that things will change. I keep giving my mom another chance, but every time it's just a harder let down.