Ivy Chasing Dust Motes

It is funny to watch Ivy take such enormous delight in the simplest of things. This morning her preoccupation is dust motes.

She is bug-eyed watching them float through the air like snow flakes drifting down around her.

It doesn’t take a lot to entertain Ivy. Dust motes, shadows, anything that catches her eye.

And she knows if one thing is different in this apartment. One little thing.

The other day I was looking for some checks I knew I’d ordered. I really only use them to pay rent, thus I forgot where I put them.

I was digging through the cupboard where my crafts are and found a few small plastic baggies, the kind used for beads. They were only a few inches long. I set them up on the top of the cupboard because I didn’t need them and planned to throw them away. Then I forgot about them.

Ivy was not in the room and the cupboard is high off the ground.

But wouldn’t you know I was sitting here in my chair on this computer less than an hour later and here came Ivy into the room with one of those baggies in her mouth.

She likes to take the things she finds and place them somewhere. Often it is the bathtub. She decided to put the baggie on my new boho table. Since it a small surface and she’s a bit uncertain of it, she very daintily rose up on her hind legs and placed it at the edge of the table.

She will leave it there awhile and then retrieve it and take it somewhere else. Well, I got up and threw it away, as well as the others I forgot to toss. She doesn’t need small plastic baggies.

I just can’t for the life of me figure out how she knows one little thing is different. That one thing has been moved.

Right now she’s watching the slant of the sun across the floor. Yeah, she’s quite easily entertained.

This weather is crazy. Last week it was really hot and tonight it’s supposed to freeze. I had to get up in the middle of the night and turn the heater on.

And yet I have not seen one tree with leaves turning. I thought the leaves started turning first and then it got cold.

Where is our fall weather? I love fall and I miss it. I hate going from hot to cold in one fell swoop. I hope this is just an aberration and we will have our fall weather yet.

Charlie doesn’t acclimate well anymore to the changing of weather. It’s harder on him.

We went to acupuncture and land therapy yesterday morning. Now I’m to do some of his exercises with him at home.

One exercise is where I sit in my rolling desk chair and raise him up by holding his two front feet. I then roll backwards so that he is forced to use his muscles in his back legs to walk. We then reverse and I roll forward, forcing him to walk backwards.

He can walk backwards better than forwards because the muscles he uses to go backwards are different from the ones to walk forward. And his biggest deficit is in the muscles that move him forward.

This is the kind of thing they do at land therapy. They isolate which muscles are declining and work on them to strengthen his legs in order for him to walk. He tends to drag his back right leg. They work on that at land therapy as well.

It is amazing all that they do. And interesting to watch other dogs going through their own specialized rehab. I like to watch the dogs in the big rectangular water chamber. They fill the water about halfway up the size of the dog, then turn on the treadmill so that the dog must walk.

I’m having lunch with daughter/daughters today. The younger daughter and I never know if her big sister will show up because she’s flipping another house. Sometimes she has deliveries or plumbers or someone coming to the flip house and can’t leave.

Sometimes she runs across a problem she wasn’t expecting and can’t leave in the middle of fixing it.

I never envisioned my probably 110 pound daughter at the age of 44 (45 next month) scraping popcorn ceilings or tearing down walls. But that’s what she’s taught herself to do and I admire her for just jumping in and teaching herself the ins and out of the structure of a house.

Sometimes she makes videos showing what she does and how to fix a particular problem. She could give a man working in construction or an architect or designer a run for their money. She strips a house and then goes in and remodels it. She is also a realtor.

So whether it’s daughter or daughters today, we shall have a fun lunch and catch up on the last two weeks. That’s our usual meet, every two weeks on Friday.

Then I plan on a quiet weekend. I’m on the third year of watching Breaking Bad on Netflix. And it’s such a great show. It would not have been a show I’d have thought I’d like. But the acting is so superb.

Last night I watched the episode with the fly in the meth lab. That was a funny one.

There seems to be a never ending supply of series and movies for me to watch on Netflix. I don’t miss cable TV at all.