Out Loud

1982

Christmas was peering out from its normally forgotten room. Dottie sighed with despair. She wasn’t looking forward to this particular Christmas. Her friends and family were scattered from California to Illinois to New York. Dottie had nobody to share Christmas with.

Still she had outdone herself. A four foot Christmas tree stood in the highest place of honor she could bestow upon it: the living room table. No matter where in the room she sat, the little Christmas tree twinkled it’s happy lights. Shiny garlands draped every doorway. Christmas ornaments hung from chandeliers and windows. Lights twinkled throughout the apartment framing every available opening. Though it was beautiful to look at there was no meaning to be found in the glitter. An empty feeling crept into her heart. Dottie felt very alone.

Always with a ready smile and a Merry Christmas, to the world Dottie appeared to be jolly with the spirit of Christmas. Santa Claus pins, candy cane earrings and little ringing bells adorned her. Outwardly she exuded a happy face but inwardly, the loneliness was overwhelming. Dottie never told a soul how lonely it felt to face the holidays by herself. She put on a happy Christmas face and hid her sadness.

At work they normally drew straws to see who’d be stuck working Christmas Day. She knew that the other two bartenders, Jessie and Polly, had places to go and families to share the holidays with.

Jessie had pulled the short straw the year before and had worked while her husband and son visited family in another state. That had been a miserable Christmas for Jessie. Dottie couldn’t bear to see her friends suffer that way so she offered to work a double shift Christmas Day. Jessie and Polly could be with their families and Dottie would be better off out of the house on Christmas Day.

Dottie spent Christmas Eve opening the presents sent from her far away family as she watched Miracle on 34th Street with her cat. Loneliness engulfed her.

Christmas morning dawned and Dottie pulled herself wearily out of bed. Depression touched every corner of her soul and getting ready for work was a supreme effort of will. She dressed in green pants, a white blouse and tied a red ribbon around her neck. The ribbon felt like a noose.

Dottie couldn’t help but imagine what the rest of the world was doing. Visions tormented her of families sitting cross-legged around the Christmas tree laughing and sharing hugs and kisses and love. Her eyes filled with tears.

She prayed that a few lonely souls would somehow find their way into her bar. She knew that her hopes were empty ones. It was going to be a long twelve hours of trying to look cheery for what she knew would be her only customer: Pat, the dining room waitress. All the hotel guests were back home and the only customers would be families eating Christmas dinner out.

Jessie, one of the bartenders who Dottie was working for, had previously instructed Dottie that there was a present locked in the cupboard for Pat, who’s name Jessie had drawn from the hat.

In the cupboard stood a tiny Christmas tree next to a box full of presents, all gift-wrapped with colorful paper and ribbons and bows. Jessie sure had gone all out for Pat. Dottie took the tree and the presents out of the cupboard and found to her greatest surprise that the tree had her name on it! The tree was a foot tall, twinkling with lights and sporting a yellow star on top.

She took a closer look at the box full of presents. The first one had Pat’s name on it but all the rest were for Dottie! Awe and wonder danced across her face. For her? They’d done all this for her?

Tears filled Dottie’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She put the tree on the bar and arranged all the presents around it. Jessie and Polly had been so grateful that she’d volunteered to work that they’d engineered a surprise visit from Santa.

That little tree became huge in Dottie’s eyes. It became the symbol of the true Spirit of Christmas. Dottie could feel their warmth and their love embracing her as she sat spellbound watching the lights blinking on the tree. Tears of despair turned into tears of joy. This is what Christmas was all about: the warmth, the caring, the thoughtfulness, the sharing between people, not of presents, but of themselves. It was a piece of Jessie’s heart and Polly’s heart warming the bar all around the tree, chasing Dottie’s loneliness away.

Suddenly Dottie didn’t feel so alone. Their friendship had reached out into the lonely bar and lit it up with joy. This was the real Christmas, the Christmas that gets lost amid the hustle and bustle of parties, the mountains of presents, the hoards of food and the glitter of tinsel.

It touched Dottie deeply that they’d thought of her there all alone and she realized that she wasn’t really alone after all. Jessie and Polly had filled her Christmas with their outpouring of love. For years after, whenever she put up the little Christmas tree, Dottie remembered her friends at work who had given her the most wonderful gift of all
– The Spirit of Christmas.

To Jessie and Polly wherever you are, almost thirty years later I still remember what you did for me, and it still makes me cry. Thank you!

Can a dog change his spots?

There are many reasons for a dog’s skin color to change. An aging dog’s nose may start turning pink. In cold weather, some dogs get Winter Nose or Snow Nose, causing their nose to turn pink. There’s a long list of nasty dog diseases that cause changes in skin color from mange to thyroid problems to cancer. Dogs can get vitiligo, the disease that causes people to lose skin pigmentation. Another dog disease is called Black Skin Disease. Pomeranians are particularly prone to Black Skin Disease but any dog can get it. A dog’s coat can become dull with a low quality food. Even for a dog, you are what you eat. A dog with a plastic water bowl will sometimes have discoloration of their nose due to an allergic reaction. But none of these explanations fit Dakota.

For our Australian Cattle Dog/Husky mix (also known as an Ausky), it was pure genetics. Several dog breeds such as the Australian Cattle Dog, the Husky, Dalmatians and other breeds are born white or near white and develop their coloring over time. Nobody tells you exactly by what age they stop changing. What follows is the pictorial tale of one dog’s changing skin color AFTER the age you would have expected it to stop changing.

Dakota was a year and a half old in June 2008. You can see the wide path of pink across the bridge of her nose.

Dakota was well past two when a black dot appeared on her nose. The black dot appeared in early 2009. It was the size of a pencil point. I watched in amazement as the dot grew bigger and bigger, evolving into a small, black island with a second dot appearing next to it. In addition, the black areas above and below the dots started expanding, growing toward each other as you can see from the photos. Look how much the black dots grew in a single month from April to May.

When the first pencil point dot appeared, I pointed it out to my husband and nephew but neither seemed overly interested in a dot on a dog’s nose. I was fascinated. At two year’s old I did not expect our dog to be changing colors. At two and a half years old the dots were still growing and the black areas were still expanding.

By September 2009, one of the dots had become part of the main black area, connecting the upper and lower black areas like a bridge. Dakota turned three years old on December 1, 2009 and her coloring was still changing.

I kept a photo diary of the changing colors on our dog’s nose which continued to change even as she turned three years old. By December 2009, both black dots were fully connected to the other black areas. Most of the pink on her nose was now black.

Dakota is considered a red merle. Not being a full blooded Aussie dog, I’m presuming that means her Aussie parent was a red merle. Color changes in merle colored dogs often continue thru adulthood causing the dog to become darker in color, particularly where the light merle areas are. Blue merles end up looking like black tricolors. Red merles who’ve darkened may be mistaken for red tricolors. Red merle dogs can lighten to blonde when they’re in the sun much like a human sun bleached blonde. Sun bleached color changes are not permanent. New hair growth will be the original coat color.

Of what use is this information? Unlike my dog training articles, probably not much. But any dog nerd would surely see the fascination in watching the dot on a dog’s nose grow bigger. Will it ever stop growing? I don’t know. Dakota just turned three on December 1, 2009 and her nose is still changing. Maybe a leopard can’t change it’s spots but Dakota is living proof that a dog can!

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Only in Georgia do you find every manner of bizarre and nasty bug imaginable and our one acre seemed to house the worst of them. We’d found two inch long dung beetles, scorpions, black widows, Cow Killer wasps, fire ants, Arrowhead spiders, and other assorted bugs that bite, sting or are just interesting. This time it was a brightly colored caterpillar.

The caterpillar was breathtaking with his vivid lime green blanket and well defined brown saddle ringed with white. The edges of the blanket had tufts of tan colored hairs or spines tipped with black. His horns were spiny, too, and he had two horns on both the front and back.

His rear end offered the perfect camouflage with two great big lime green eyes. Only they weren’t eyes, they were green spots designed to make his rear end look like his head to confuse predators. His rear end even had a mouth, making his fake face complete.

Having discovered that the wonders of my own backyard made great blog entries, I ran for the camera. Our little Sony Cybershot took great photos and even movies with sound. The green and brown Saddleback Caterpillar did not disappoint except that I failed to get the movie I wanted.

As we watched his head, he puffed out what we thought was his throat and out popped a turd. We had witnessed a caterpillar pooping! And we realized that this was his rearend, not his head. Try as I might to get a movie of the Saddleback Caterpillar pooping, he didn’t do it for me again. I did, however, get several photos of his posterior in various stages before and after pooping. It was truly mesmerizing.

Saddleback Caterpillar getting ready to poop.

Here comes the turd.

He wasn’t hard to find on the internet. My very first try was to type in Saddleback Caterpillar and I hit paydirt. Our caterpillar, scientifically known as Sibine stimulea or Acharia stimulea, would go on to become a plain brown moth with tiny white spots someday. But today he was of the family of slug caterpillars that are found in Eastern North America from Massachusetts down into Mexico and west to Missouri and Texas from June to August in the cooler climates and almost all year in the warmer climates such as Georgia. He was feeding on a thornless blackberry bush in September.

Saddleback Caterpillars feed on a wide variety of plants and trees. People have found them on trees such as cherry, oak, elm, plum, apple, poplar, chestnut, maple, redbud, crepe myrtles, dogwood, rose of sharon, banana trees and palms. Plants include corn, blackberries, blueberries, tomatoes, green beans, hydrangeas, azaleas, elephant ears, ivy, holly, amaryllis, irises, gladiolas and peonies. In other words you can find them on just about anything. More often than not they are found on the underside of leaves where you can brush up against them and be stung before you’ve even spotted them. Other common names include Packsaddle Caterpillar and Stinging Hair Caterpillar.

In my quest to make him poop for the camera I came very close to touching him. Thank God I didn’t because the hairs are venomous and pack a nasty punch. Each hair has a poison sac at its base and the sting is reputed to be much like a wasp sting. The pain and swelling can last for days and is often accompanied by a rash, nausea, cold chills, sweating, headache, dizziness, tingling and numbness. One person described the pain as “burning like fire” and some folks experience heart palpitations.

Use cellophane tape to remove the stinging hairs. Ice packs help reduce pain and swelling and swimming in a chlorine pool helps to diffuse the venom. Any bee sting remedy such as Benadryl, Camphophenique or other treatments for bee and wasp stings may help but be prepared to suffer for days from the sting of this colorful brown and green caterpillar.

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Our dog Dakota came into the house stinking like a dead thing. She’d only been outdoors a few minutes for potty and in that short time she’d gotten into something so foul smelling that you could smell her from several feet away. The whole room reeked of the smell of death and all I could think of was that our dog had found a dead animal and rolled in it.

They say dogs roll on dead things to mask their own scent for when they’re hunting, that rolling on dead animals is a throwback to their wild dog ancestry. When dogs hunt animals for food it helps if the prey doesn’t smell them coming. Dakota definitely liked to roll on dead things. Even a dead bug would send her into a frenzy of orgasmic rolling.

Click the arrows to play the movie of our dog Dakota rolling on some godawful thing.

You can see how thoroughly a dog can get covered in whatever stinky thing they find. Dakota is a house dog. She sleeps in the bedroom with us and spends most of her time indoors. Whatever she gets into outdoors she joyfully brings in to share it with us. Lovelies such as poison ivy and even the turtle she brought in one day are a few of the joys of sharing your home with an indoor dog.

The stench was horrible and poor Dakota couldn’t understand why we were avoiding her. She smelled like a dead, rotting animal and I assumed if she’d rolled on a dead animal she’d be covered with nasty germs and bacteria. In a few short minutes outdoors our dog had become a pariah dog. Untouchable.

It was too late for a real dog bath and I was pretty desperate. I gave Dakota a whore bath with a wet washcloth and a dab of rubbing alcohol on it. You just can’t have an indoor dog smelling like a rotting carcass. I don’t know how safe my method was knowing that whatever you put on a dog, they will lick it off, but whatever nasty germs might have been attached to the rotting carcass could be harmful to all of us so surely it was the lesser of two evils.

I rubbed her vigorously all over with the washcloth concentrating on her back, shoulders, flanks and scruff. Apparently I got most of it because there was just the tiniest whiff of a smell when I finished. The next morning I went in search of the dead thing in hopes of deleting it before she rolled in it again but I couldn’t find it. I found what appeared to be a stinky, rotting mushroom that looked like old dog poo but that was about it.

The next day a thorough dog bath washed the bad smell away and Dakota was touchable again. Two days later I had a flash of inspiration as to the source of Dakota’s smell. Rotting dead bodies weren’t the only stinky things she could have rolled on. I’d been researching mushrooms for the adventure game and remembered reading about a mushroom called a Stinkhorn. I knew it was a longshot but worth a look and discovered an amazing mushroom in the process. The scientific name for one variety of Stinkhorns is Phallus Impudicus and for good reason. They emerge from the ground looking a lot like that male sexual organ. So much so that in the 1800s, Charles Darwin’s daughter Henrietta “Etty” Darwin embarked on a mission to rid the world of the immoral Stinkhorn mushroom. Unlike her father in his quest to expose evolution, Etty preferred to burn the seedier aspects of it and set out on her own version of the Stinkhorn witch hunts.

According to her niece Gwen in a memoire called Period Piece, Aunt Etty claimed to be the inventor of a sport to eradicate a toadstool called The Stinkhorn, whose scent was so powerful that you could hunt it by smell alone. Armed with a basket and pointed stick, Etty would hunt down Stinkhorns and using her pointed stick, “poke his putrid carcase into her basket”, later burning the toadstools “in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids”.

Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (New York: Ann Arbor Paperbacks,1976)

There are several varieties of Stinkhorns including the Octopus Stinkhorn, Devil’s Fingers Stinkhorn, Chambered Stinkhorn, Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn, Columned Stinkhorn, Basket Fungus, Bamboo Fungus, Veiled Stinkhorn, Netted Stinkhorn, Common Stinkhorn and Dog Stinkhorn and one of their claims to fame is that yes, they stink. You can actually smell them from quite a distance and depending on the variety, they smell like either a pile of dog poop, raw sewage or a dead animal. The Netted or Veiled Stinkhorns are encased in a delicate, lacy net as a bride on her wedding day awaiting her groom.

Stinkhorns erupt from the ground as an egg shaped mushroom and can grow several inches in a matter of hours. In the egg stage they are actually edible and some folks consider them quite a delicacy. All varieties share this innocent beginning but from that point they diversify into entities resembling starfish, octopus, sex organs, Wiffle balls or pretzels.

No matter what alien they emulate sooner or later they will do what they do best: they will STINK. These mushrooms will emit a smell so overpowering that you might think you are smelling raw sewage, dog poop or a very large dead animal. You could clear a room with a single Stinkhorn mushroom. That’s how a Stinkhorn propogates. It emits a slimy, foul-smelling substance designed to attract flies. What self deserving fly wouldn’t zero in on a dead carcass or dog poop? The flies come sniffing around, the Stinkhorn spores stick to their feet, the flies carry the spores off to multiply elsewhere. A pretty ingenious mushroom!

The universe does provide and it leads you along interesting paths if you let it. We found a dead beetle. It was gigantic so it was potential fodder for the blog. It was in pristine condition for photos so I took a bunch and set them aside for a rainy blog day. It was interesting but not as eye catching as the tree blobs or giant Amazonian ant.

A few days later I was outside with our dog Dakota. She’s always up for a good blog entry and today didn’t disappoint. Research into her latest antics uncovered bizarre South American creation myths and why the Ancient Egyptians believed that mummies would rise again.

We adopted Dakota at seven months old and she was malnourished. Outdoors she spends a lot of time foraging for food. I suspect that she developed that habit during her hunger months. Even after two years of regular meals with us, she still forages.

I’d never been able to identify what she’s actually eating (except for the toad incident) and it worried me because many things are poisonous to dogs. The grass was damp from an early rain and the sun was shining high in the sky. Dakota had found a tidbit to eat and I was determined to see it.

She’d discovered a pile of little dung pellets, smaller than a dime and rounded. Apparently dung pellets are a delicacy for dogs because she found them quite tasty. I was attempting to train myself that such things are a photo op but didn’t think of it until we’d gone back indoors. I hadn’t marked the spot. It took an hour of searching to find the pellets again and there were only two left.

So began the search for the identity of the turds and my first guess was turtle remembering our recent turtle escapade so I typed “turtle dung” and “turtle turds” into Google and found that no, Dakota’s tasty treats were not the product of turtles. I tried “rabbit turds” and “rabbit dung” and sure enough the turds were a perfect match.

But more interesting was what else turned up in a Google image search for “rabbit dung”. Beetle photos appeared which perfectly matched our beetle.

It turned out to be a Minotaur Beetle aka Minotaur Dung Beetle, scientifically known as Typhaeus typhoeus and you guessed it, this big black beetle feeds on dung, rabbit dung and sheep dung being of particular interest.

Dung beetles burrow into the earth where they lay their eggs and store the dung turds. Each turd has its own chamber off the tunnel. A single egg is laid into each dung turd which becomes food for the larva when it hatches.

There are three categories of dung beetle: tunnellers, dwellers and rollers. Most dung beetles hold the dung with their front legs and drag it backwards toward their nest. Minotaur Beetles do not drag the turd, they roll the dung pellets with their back legs putting them into the Roller Beetle category. Some species of dung roller beetles can roll turds up to 50 times their own weight. The males collect the dung and the females dig the burrows which can be more than three feet deep.

The male Minotaur Beetle is most distinctive for its horns. Three horns protrude from its thorax which are used to battle other male Minotaurs. The females do not possess the horns.

Dung Beetles serve a very useful purpose in the world. They eliminate dung. There are dung beetle species for every type of dung known to man, including human dung. Most dung beetles can live three to five years and a single dung beetle can bury 250 times its own weight in one night making the dung beetle one of the world’s most useful insects. Up to 16,000 dung beetles have been counted on one heap of elephant dung. They are indeed nature’s garbage collectors.

One of the largest and most common species of dung beetle is the Dor Beetle which often has a colony of mites living on its underbelly giving it the nickname Lousy Watchman. It is very similar in appearance to the Minotaur Beetle but lacks the horns.

The Ancient Egyptians revered dung beetles which they called Scarab Beetles. The Scarab Beetle was so revered in Egypt that it became a religious symbol. The Egyptian scarab dung beetle Kheper aegyptiorum was a brightly colored species of metallic pink, green or black and is now quite rare. Another revered dung beetle in Egypt is the more common black Scarabaeus sacer.

The male dung beetle creates a ball of dung from which a new Scarab Beetle emerges. Since only the males collect the dung and form it into balls, the Ancient Egyptians believed they did not need a female to make babies, only dung.

The Ancient Egyptians compared the movement of the sun across the sky from dawn to dusk as being like the Scarab Beetle rolling dung until it disappeared down into his burrow (the sunset, or death of the sun every night). The rising of the sun in the morning was a rebirth similar to the emergence of a newly hatched dung beetle. Therefore if the sun and the Scarab Beetle could be reborn then why couldn’t humans?

Some scholars believe that the Egyptian mummy was an imitation of the pupa of a dung beetle. The pupa protects the body of the dung beetle while it transforms for the rebirth, so logic would dictate that if the human body could be thus protected, it would undergo transformations that would allow it to resurrect and be brand new again. The Ancient Egyptians connected the old beetle who sinks down into the ground and the young beetle which later emerges, believing the new beetle to be a direct resurrection of the old beetle.

The Scarab Beetle was also linked to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ by one of the four original bishops of the church, Saint Ambrose of Milan circa 300 A.D. The earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint, which includes several books not found in the Hebrew Bible commonly known as the Apocrypha, has the only biblical reference to beetles in the passage Habakkuk 2:11.

Saint Ambrose compared the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to Habakkuk’s beetle five different times as did St. Augustine and St. Cyril of Alexandria. The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s also compared Jesus Christ and his resurrection to the Scarab Beetle.

South American Indian tribes revered the dung beetle which played a big role in their creation myths, sometimes as The Creator himself. One creation myth has a Scarab Beetle named Aksak creating man and woman from clay. Imagine thinking of a dung beetle as the creator of man!

You don’t have to go to the Amazon jungle to find strange and bizarre creatures. They might be living in your own backyard. The state of Georgia has an abundance of giant bugs, creepy bugs, nasty bugs and cool bugs. This particular bug was all of the above.

At first I thought it was an Amazonian ant colony swarming over the driveway in search of new nesting grounds. But these weren’t like any ants I’d ever seen. They were huge and brightly colored like something you’d find in the Amazon rainforests. Almost an inch long with bright red stripes and fuzzy like a bumblebee, they were scurrying toward my favorite garden bed up near the front door. Bright red is a scary color when it comes to bugs. Red usually means painful stings or bites. And these scary gigantic ants were looking to make a home where I’m always sticking my fingers. Chills ran down my spine at the thought of pulling weeds next to a nest of these bad boys.

I caught one in a jar and brought it into the house. It did strange things in the jar, scary things. It stretched its body longer and several stripes appeared. This picture shows one about halfway stretched out. You can see that the end is now pointy instead of rounded, and there are extra stripes. Mine was quite agitated and its backend was arching. Was it attempting to sting the jar? Surely it couldn’t chew through the plastic? Termites and carpenter ants can chew through wood. God only knew what this Amazonian bug could do.

Google is an amazing search engine. I typed “fuzzy black and red ant” into its magical box and sure enough my giant Amazonian ant appeared. The facts were scarier than the imagination.

It’s common name was fitting: Red Velvet Ant. But what filled me with dread was its other common name: Cow Killer. That didn’t sound good. Cow Killer. And we had a whole swarm of them attempting to nest!

My bug turned out to be Dasymutilla occidentalis, or Cow Killer Wasp. It wasn’t an ant at all! The females are wingless and covered with thick hair. Males have wings and cannot sting. The sting of the female is reputed to be so painful that it could kill a cow. Like any good wasp, the Cow Killer Wasp could sting multiple times and is said to be a ferocious fighter when provoked. The outer shell is hard enough to repel the stings of many other bees and wasps, a good trait to have when your food source is the offspring of other bees.

Female Cow Killers crawl around the ground looking for the holes of other bugs such as ground-nesting bees. They crawl down into the nest, find a bee cocoon, eat a hole in the cocoon, deposit an egg, and when it hatches it feeds on the bee larva. Cow Killers are born as white, legless grubs and go through many stages before metamorphing into fuzzy Red Velvet Ants.

Apparently they are found from Connecticut to Florida, then west to Missouri and Texas. In all my years and all my travels I had never seen anything quite like it before. The Cow Killer Wasp is known to squeak, chirp or hum when handled, not that I could imagine anyone brave enough to handle one. In a forum post someone claimed they’d heard one scream when they poked it with a stick. Just the thing you’d want to do, poke at a wasp with a sting so painful it could kill a cow.

Treatment for a Cow Killer Wasp sting is the same as for any other bee sting. Clean and disinfect it, remove the stinger, and use ice packs and pain killers as necessary. Watch for signs of an allergic reaction and go to emergency if you have difficulty breathing or develop a rash. Contrary to its name, one sting from this wasp cannot kill a cow.

Bright orange many-tentacled creatures covered the tree like ornaments on a Christmas tree. They looked just like sea anemones you find in the ocean but these were growing all over our cedar tree.

We’d never seen anything like it and we watched our cedar tree for days as the orange tentacled blobs sat unmoving on the branches. Were they fungi? Were they animal? Did they come from outer space? No sixties hippie acid trip could have envisioned such an out-of-this-world entity.

Eventually they dried up and disappeared and we were left to search the internet for “bright orange tentacled fungus” and “orange tree fungus” and other variants before we hit upon photos that matched our own. We’d taken several photos of our tree blobs before they’d disintegrated.

The culprit turned out to be a tree rust called Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae, a rust fungus known commonly as Cedar-Apple Rust. A parasitic entity appearing throughout eastern North America in the spring, Cedar-Apple Rust attacks cedar trees and apple trees. The scientific name translates into “naked spore-bearer of the Eastern Juniper Tree”.

It’s a complicated parasite needing two different hosts to complete its life cycle, spending its inconspicuous stage on the apple tree appearing as bright orange or yellow spots on the leaves, then migrating to the cedar tree for the big show. The tentacled fruiting body then produces spore horns (the tentacles) which send spores back to the apple tree to start the cycle again. Dried up galls are left on the cedar tree to overwinter awaiting the spring rains to begin the cycle again.

To determine if a gall is still active, place it in a cup of water. If tentacles appear you know it’s still alive and kicking.

While the sight of these tentacled creatures is truly amazing, a cedar tree covered with this rust indicates serious problems with nearby apple trees. If you have apple trees or crabapple trees being damaged by this fungus, the best combat is to remove any cedars within a five mile radius to break the life cycle. Removing cedars within a two mile radius will only allow you to control the rust with a fungacide.

Quitting smoking was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tried most of the conventional methods of quitting and they didn’t work for me. After many years of trying and failing, I finally had a flash of inspiration and it helped me to actually quit smoking. What follows is how I got started, and how I stopped smoking.

My high school had a smoking lounge and that’s where all the cool kids hung out. Nick was a cool kid. I wasn’t.

Nick was such a hunk that I just HAD to find a way to meet him. I didn’t know anybody who knew him. He wasn’t in any of my classes but he did hang out in the smoking lounge. He was cool, he was gorgeous, and he didn’t have a girlfriend. I intended to change that. None of my friends hung out in the smoking lounge. They didn’t smoke. I’d look like a jerk just standing out there unless of course, I had a cigarette…

Cigarettes were great! I got a buzz every time I smoked one and for once in my life, I looked COOL. Maybe I’d even meet some of the other cool kids! I was only using the cigarettes as a prop. I wasn’t hooked on them and I didn’t intend to be. I just wanted to meet The Hunk.

I never did meet any of the cool kids but I did finally meet The Hunk through one of my neighbors (I hadn’t needed the cigarettes after all). Nick, however, was not interested in me and he disappeared a couple months later in the wild blue yonder of graduation. The only thing I had accomplished in the smoking lounge was to start smoking. The cigarettes didn’t disappear. I liked smoking. I liked the freedom of being able to go anywhere I wanted and look COOL, leaning up against a wall with a cigarette.

I was seventeen.

By the time I turned nineteen I didn’t want to smoke cigerettes any more. I wanted to quit smoking but I couldn’t. For the next eight years I tried all kinds of ways to quit smoking and never made it past 48 hours. I had it bad!

I tried to quit cold turkey. I tried gradual withdrawal filters. I bought these minty-tasting drops that you put on your tongue that made your mouth taste great and made cigarettes taste awful. I smoked them anyway. Foul tasting as they were with those drops I still had to have that cigarette! They didn’t have the nicotine patch back then so I don’t know if it would have worked for me. Somehow I doubt it.

I was one of those cigarette junkies who’d run out of smokes in the middle of the night and go rummaging through my car, feeling down in the seats looking for one that got away. I’d go through ashtrays pulling out old butts and relighting them. I had it worse than any heroin addict.

By the time I turned twenty seven I was totally fed up. Cigarettes were expensive. Cigarettes were unhealthy. People everywhere were quitting, why couldn’t I? Whereas once almost everyone smoked now it seemed that nobody smoked. Cigarettes weren’t cool anymore.

My boyfriend didn’t smoke. I always felt so guilty when we kissed. He tasted so clean and fresh and I didn’t. I really wanted to quit. He really wanted me to quit. As much as I wanted to start smoking to meet Nick, I wanted to stop smoking to stay with Ryan. It’s really hard for a smoker and a non-smoker to be together.

I wanted to quit for myself, too. I couldn’t forget all the pictures I’d seen of cigarette smoker’s lungs. I didn’t want to die 10 or 20 years ahead of my time. And just think of what I could do with all that extra money!

The plan was simple. I used a daily chart that divided each day into half hours. Every half hour I’d log how many cigarettes I’d smoked in that time. If I didn’t smoke that half hour I’d fill in that block with a bright orange marker. The object was to cut down and keep cutting down until I wasn’t so addicted to nicotine anymore. Then maybe I could stop.

The first couple days I just kept a record of my smoking. I didn’t really try to cut down. I did feel really great when I got so busy I didn’t smoke and could color a square bright orange.

After a couple days I starting trying to go a half hour just so that I could color in a square. Every bright orange square was a huge accomplishment. I’d find myself watching the clock and waiting an extra five or ten minutes for a cigarette just to be able to color in a square.

As the days went by I was able to color in more and more squares. My body was gradually beginning to withdraw from nicotine.

I didn’t put a time limit on myself. That was too much pressure. I figured a half hour at a time was pressure enough. I don’t remember exactly how long it took but I finally got to where I was smoking only three cigarettes a week. THREE cigarettes in a whole WEEK! I was so proud of that!

Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? I mean, why bother to smoke at all if you’re down to only three cigarettes a week, right? Most of the time my body didn’t crave cigarettes anymore. I’d get a twinge here and there but nothing I couldn’t handle. But about three times a week I’d get this major urge. It would hit me BAD. That’s the only time I smoked and I’d only smoke one just to get past those last few big urges.

After a couple of weeks of smoking just three a week, I quit. I finally quit smoking, absolutely and totally. The major urges had faded into twinges and I could handle twinges.

So after 8 years of trying to quit, I made it! I really and truly made it!

When it comes to quitting smoking there’s only one rule: Don’t stop trying to quit. Every stop smoking method does not work for everybody. Some people CAN quit using filters, gum, breath drops, acupuncture, nicotine patches or even cold turkey. We’re all different.

If you try something and it doesn’t work, don’t give up. Wait awhile, let go of that feeling of failure, then try again. YOU are not a failure. That particular method failed for you. So wait awhile and try again. Try something else. Sooner or later something will work. Just don’t ever stop trying!

Believe me, it’s worth the wait!

We were never bothered by flies in the house. Our dog Gypsy Rose could catch a fly in midair. Catching bugs, especially flying bugs, was one of her favorite pastimes. She could also catch wasps.

The first time our dog tried to catch a wasp I stopped her, afraid that she would get stung. Hovering like an overprotective mother I would intervene. Wasps in the house were an uncommon occurrence so I didn’t expect to encounter this again right away.

The next day brought more wasps. So did the day after and many days to follow. The wasps kept coming. Apparently they had some secret door into the house.

Gypsy Rose was mesmerized by these loud, buzzing creatures. Flies had always been a favorite treat and the wasps were bigger and noisier. She yearned for the hunt and I was growing tired of being the bad guy who kept spoiling her joy so one day I decided to just let her be. Gypsy Rose would get stung and she’d learn not to mess with wasps again. That would be the end of it.

To my utter disbelief she caught the wasp in midflight, pulling her lips back from her teeth and snapping the wasp in half. Several quick snaps of her teeth chopped the wasp to pieces before it could extend the stinger and the pieces disappeared down her throat as happy little dog treats. I was in awe. Surely this was a fluke.

The days passed and our dog caught wasp after wasp, thoroughly enjoying this tasty new morsel. I developed a morbid fascination watching her accomplish this daring deed. If she got stung it did not faze her because for all the rest of her years, Gypsy Rose happily caught wasps and ate them. Gypsy Rose was our bug catcher.

Dakota on the other hand preferred much bigger game. Dakota was an Australian Cattle Dog / Husky mix. These were two dog breeds from some of the wildest, untamed territories known to man. Cattle Dogs were bred to herd cattle out on the open range, running for hours on end to keep the cattle in line, risking their lives when a frisky cow would try to kick them away. Siberian Huskies were bred for the wilds of Alaska. Neither was a dainty breed.

While Dakota would happily tackle a bug on the floor and eat it, she could not master the art of catching flies in midair as Gypsy Rose had done. She preferred the chase of a squirrel or chipmunk, pursuits that fed her need to run fast and hard in the great outdoors.

More often than not she ignored my calls to come in. The Call of the Wild was an aphrodisiac full of irresistable temptations. Dakota was a house dog who loved the outdoors. The treats I offered to lure her back inside paled in comparison to the wonders that Mother Nature offered.

One particular morning I let her out for her final morning potty, the potty that would hold her the rest of the day while we were at work. I let her have a few extra minutes outdoors while I prepared my lunch. When I called for Dakota to come back in I was answered with silence. Something had captured her attention again. I called and called and several minutes passed before she finally came trotting up the stairs carrying something in her mouth. To my great surprise Dakota laid a four inch round turtle on the floor at my feet, her face alit with pure joy. He was tucked tight into his shell and appeared to be unharmed.

“Look at the really cool thing I found in the woods!” her eyes seemed to say. “Can I have it please? Can I keep it?” Joy and innocence shined in her eyes as she shared her greatest moment with me.

Being more focused on getting to work I didn’t stop to think how I should handle this important moment in our dog’s life. I picked up the turtle and gently told her no, she couldn’t have the turtle, then I took it outdoors and let it go free and off to work I went.

The event haunted me. I’d missed a golden opportunity. I got halfway up the street when I had to turn around. All I could think about was how I should have taken pictures of Dakota and the turtle before taking it away. I should have taken a picture of the turtle up next to something to demonstrate its size. I should have taken a photo of Dakota’s happy face, of her holding the turtle, of the turtle on the ground at her feet. I should have preserved this special moment to remember it always. This was an important moment for her, sharing this big find. I had to go back. I had to take pictures.

I turned the car around and went back home with the intention of bringing the turtle back in for a couple of quick photos then setting it loose again. A five minute delay, that’s all I needed. But there was one giant dilemma: the turtle was gone. I searched high and low for that turtle, all thru the woods and across the yard, circling wider and wider. Surely he couldn’t have disappeared so quickly! How far could a turtle have possibly have gotten? I searched and searched to no avail. The turtle was nowhere to be found.

All the way to work I tormented myself over an additional mistake I’d made in reacting to Dakota with the turtle. I realized that I’d handled the whole affair totally wrong. Dakota had brought that turtle to me having no idea I’d take it away from her. She’d never attempt to bring another in. From that moment forward she simply wouldn’t come when I called her. I’d worked so hard in trying to train her to come in from outside on command and now I’d sent the message loud and clear that to keep her tasty dog treat she’d have to stay outdoors and ignore my calls. We’d been struggling with this stage of her dog training.

What should I have done? I’m no dog expert but I believe I should have given her something in trade. The moment I took the turtle away I should have given her a desireable dog treat in its place. That’s how we taught her what she could chew in the house. We traded legal dog chews for illegal objects.

This tactic had worked well and Dakota had learned not to chew anything except what we gave her to chew. Rather than focusing totally on the negative, the NO, we were swapping it with a positive. We didn’t just punish her by taking something away and leaving her frustrated, we offered a replacement to entice her to make a good decision.

Had I traded for the turtle I would have sent the message that the turtle was not okay but that I would give her something enjoyable in its place. Instead I sent the message that she’d better go find a hidey hole if she wanted to keep her turtles. If mama calls you’d better run and hide!

It was a warm, summer night in Georgia. Toads were calling out for their mates and cricketsong filled the air. The moon was just a sliver in the sky. An owl hooted off in the distance.

Our dog Dakota disappeared into the blackness for her bedtime potty. I leaned on the railing gazing upward. The sky was full of stars and the music of the night creatures was a symphony of joy. All the world was happy.

My peaceful bliss quickly evaporated when Dakota came bounding up the stairs in frantic agitation. She was foaming at the mouth, long threads of goo flapping as she shook her head in panic trying to rid herself of… what? She was pawing at her mouth. Spittle was flying everywhere. What had she gotten into?

My mind raced thru the possibilities. Some sort of poison? But our yard was fenced and there wasn’t any poison for her to get into. Had someone thrown something over the fence? Dakota was an indoor dog so there was no barking to disturb the neighbors, no reason for anyone to want to harm her. Had she eaten a poisonous plant? Doom filled my belly as the prospect of her sudden death became very real. I panicked.

Should I give her something to make her vomit? Oh lordy I’d read so many books, I should KNOW what would make her throw up. Mustard, I remembered reading something about mustard. But wasn’t it the powdered kind? Come on, think! Hurry up and think! Urgent! Do something or she’s going to die right here in your arms!

Tears came streaming down my face as I screamed for Bear, not knowing what to do for her. I loved her so much I couldn’t bear to lose her. She wasn’t even two years old. We should have at least a decade more to share together. Oh Dakota… my beloved Dakota…

Something pulled me from my panic. A glimpse of something, a clue, was she having trouble breathing? Maybe something was stuck in her throat?

I reached in and felt around and sure enough there was a smooth round object lodged in her throat. What the heck? And then it hit me, our yard was full of toads especially at night and she liked chasing after them. Maybe she’d tried to eat a toad and it got stuck in her throat.

I felt around hoping to grab a leg and pull it out but all I could feel was a smooth slimy surface that I couldn’t get ahold of. I must have pushed it farther down because she swallowed and it disappeared. The foam stopped. Her agitation calmed and suddenly she was my happy, healthy dog again.

We were lucky. Some toads are highly poisonous and dogs die every year from eating them. The Colorado River Toad (Bufo alvarius) found in the Southwest and the southern Cane Toad (Bufo marinus) are two highly toxic toads. The Cane Toad can be found in the South from Texas to Florida. Other toads are not as toxic but all toads are poisonous to some degree. A highly poisonous toad sitting in your dog’s water bowl can poison your dog, too.

Toads release a toxin thru their skin when they are threatened which can be highly poisonous for dogs. A toad poisoned dog will shake their head, drool, paw at their mouth and vomit. They may also have seizures and heart attacks and can die within fifteen minutes. Rinsing the mouth with water from a hose making sure your dog does NOT swallow the water will help flush some of the toad poison out but the dog should be taken to a vet immediately.

According to the Merck Veterinary Manual online, the mortality rate for a dog poisoned by a Cane Toad is 20-100% depending on the potency of that particular toad’s venom and how much was ingested. If it’s a mild poisoning your dog may simply vomit for several hours.

The moral of the story is to prevent your dog from contact with toads if at all possible. Try to teach your dog to avoid toads. Do not encourage your dog to play with toads. What appears fun in the moment could be deadly for your dog.