V-Day

Happy Valentine's Day, y'all!!! I'll be spending mine visiting Reece at UT and feeding him lots of peppermints. He'll be looking for me around lunchtime, that's for sure!!! :)

HBOT

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is a concept I'm quickly becoming very familiar with, now that my horse Reece is at UT vet hospital. They are using HBOT to try and reduce the severe cellulitis he has developed in his 2 hind legs, due to an as-yet-unknown bacterial/microbial/viral/fungal infection. He seems to be improving (at least not getting worse) so I trust this treatment is helping him to get better, even though they don't know quite yet what has caused this condition. So much for starting his jump training next month. Do I have the worst luck, or what?

"Tell me if I'm going crazy..."

"...but everything you said amazed me."

Now, I know that I've gone on, and on, and on....and on, in the past about how Gary Lightbody is my absolute perfect soul mate, but the evidence to this fact just never ceases to overwhelm me. He is just too awesome. Funny, compassionate, interesting, smart, and very humble. Plus, we have the same taste in music. :)

"The universe just vanished out of sight/And all the stars collapsed behind the pitch black night/And I can barely see your face in front of mine/But it is knowing you are there that makes me fine."

R.I.P. Oliver, 2007

Today's post is a tribute to my little cat, Oliver, who went missing back on the first weekend of December. I wasn't sure what happened to him, but I knew that if he were able to return home, he would not have just disappeared. I had meager hopes that he had wandered off and been taken in by a neighbor family, but living out in the country as I do, those hopes were slim and overly-optimistic at best. I'm not 11 years old anymore, and I know that when my cat doesn't come in when I call him, then something is wrong. I had all but accepted the fact he was gone: killed by a fox or coyote or something out in the woods or carried off by a stray dog. I was devastated to lose him and missed him incredibly, but was starting to let it go. Last Sunday, I cleared all the hay out of the bottom level of my barn (where I'd had hay stored for the past 3 or 4 months) and when I got to the back corner, I was heartbroken to find Oliver's little skeleton. It was in a corner, against the back wall of the barn, next to an open section of wall where the boards are broken and my cats go in and out all of the time. I sat down and cried, and painfully enough, Oliver's brother Tiger slipped into the barn, saw Oliver (with me sitting there crying), and he looked up at me and darted off. I feel terrible that Oliver's body was right there all along and I just didn't know it. I think Tiger knew where he was all along, but obviously couldn't tell me that. I can't tell exactly what happened, but I suspect that he either got hurt by a dog or another larger animal on the night he didn't come in when I called him, and he crawled back there behind the hay to die. Either that or he ran in the barn and got cornered between the hay and the wall and whatever was chasing him. I'm not sure how he died, but I feel that it happened pretty quickly. I am right there in that barn all the time and if he had been hurt or if he had cried out, I certainly would have heard him. So, now I am down to 3 cats (which is a really low number for me!) and I'm ok now with having some closure to this situation. It doesn't make it any less traumatic, but at least I can now look back and remember what a sweet cat he was and how much I loved having him. These pictures are some that I have that really represent the funny, unique, and special cat that he will always be in my mind.

He's the Manning

If I can't have Peyton playing in and winning the Super Bowl every year, then I'll certainly take "the next best thing." Two SEC quarterbacks winning the Super Bowl in back-to-back years (nevermind that they're also brothers)?

Congratulations, Eli!!! :)

Orchids

'Tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes! Or, so says William Wordsworth, but I am inclined to believe him.

For Christmas this year, I potted 2 nice Amaryllis bulbs for our receptionists here in the Knoxville office. When the amaryllis(es?) were finished blooming, I replaced them with orchids. I gave Kim a white butterfly orchid and I gave Brenda a mauve carnival butterfly orchid (both of which are pictured to the left).

I love orchids, but I'm not sure I can care for them properly. I know they are complicated to grow correctly, so this will be an experiment and I hope to learn a lot. And, if the orchids don't go so well here in the office, I'll switch them out for something like Tiger Lilies in the summer. If I must be indoors rather than out-of-doors all the time, then I can at least bring a bit of the outdoors in.