I find myself looking for her in the morning so she can go outside and run laps around the pasture. I have yet to remove her food bowl from the corner of the living room where she ate. This morning when I was getting ready to go into town and had Juno in my arms- I called out “Come on Journey, let’s go.” Then I realized my error and fell silent.

I was looking at the photos of her when she first arrived and comparing them with later photos and I can really see that yes, she did do an amazing turnaround. She was white and grizzly looking on the first day here- super skinny, her coat so coarse that when you pet her, the hairs just fell to the ground. She weighed 39 pounds when we picked her up and when she passed, she weighed 51 pounds. She was not here for two months, we got her in October, so she had four months with us and she was happy for the most part until this last week.

Before she passed, I caught her doing something that I thought was quite odd and it should have clued me that the end was near. She would normally wolf down all her food, but when I fed her the day before her stroke, she picked up her bowl still filled with food and placed it inside her cage that was also in the living room. She did not eat a bite. then she went over to the carpet, started to rub her ears on the roughness and flipped over on her back. On her back, she continued to rub her ears- flipping her head from side to side as if she had a really deep itch and was trying to relieve it. After that, she lay in one spot on the carpet with Juno by her side. Journey barely moved.

I miss her like crazy but I am glad we were able to take her out of the pound and give her at least some semblance of a normal life. I feel blessed that I knew her even if it was for just a short time.

We also have answers now about Mike and all those heart tests they have been running. My  husband has congestive heart failure with two abnormal vents on the left side of his heart. Because of his obesity combined with the diabetes, they are reluctant to do anything because as one specialist told me: “What we see on the graphs of the contrast study is concerning. It is not alarming.” I guess that was supposed to make me feel better. (It did not).

So I will keep him on the strict heart health diet. They basically said that if he went and ate a large bag of Fritos, fluid would accumulate around his heart and he would suffer irreversible heart damage. So salt and salty food are not his friends anymore and he loves salty foods. Oh my- no fried foods- no ground beef-fish and chicken only- no bacon etc… He told me later, he wanted to just go to Hidden Lake and drift the lake fishing and forget all else. Hidden Lake is really the place of our first date over 36 years ago when I flew from California to Alaska to meet this man. We wrote to each other for four years first…

I guess I am  just feeling a bit emotional right now and trying to sort through all my thoughts by sharing this so forgive me for regressing a bit. Things have been a bit unnerving here lately. We are getting hit by thieves. They tried to get into the front door but when they couldn’t get through the security door we have- they kicked a hole in the bottom screen. They have stolen mail, packages on our porch, our gas keeps getting siphoned out of our tank. They took the cover of our generator? Go figure on that one- I asked the deputy the other night when he was here, why anybody would steal from us when we have nothing to steal? He said that the other week, they had a home invasion in town and the people had literally hocked every valuable they owned so they could pay rent on their home and stay there. The thieves broke in- took a look around- found nothing of value, so they took a case of soda! A case of soda! Geez! The deputy is now coming and parking in our driveway at night when he can and working on notes of the day and they are doing added patrols around the place. We have lived here 21 years and NEVER had issues of theft until now. Really upsetting.

Tomorrow, BossMan and Janna will be going to their new home leaving us with only five kittens who will soon need to be neutered and re-homed. I wish we had the funds to get all the kittens done right now, but at least out of the five there is only one female the rest are males.

We got a call from an elderly woman last night. Her family is taking her out of her home and putting her into a nursing home. She feeds 35 cats and wants us to take all of them. I told her, I was so sorry but there was no way I could help her in that way- the best I could do, I told her was come to her farm and feed the cats until the family makes other plans for them. She started crying and hung up on me. I feel bad but we can’t save them all. We do save some and for that, I am grateful.