ART IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Art is in the eye of the beholder ...

My Way Today

Castaway's affectionate call name is "My Way" or just "Way" .... No Way, yes Way! She was born July 27, 2010 and is 60 days old today, 8 weeks and 4 days, or 2 months in this life of hers.  She was attacked by her Mother at 2 weeks of age which I believe happened because her Mother might have been suffering from

Eclampsia

Eclampsia is the sudden onset of clinical signs associated with low blood calcium levels (hypocalcemia) that occur in lactating (nursing) bitches. It is caused by loss of calcium in the milk and is often combined with poor dietary calcium intake. This condition is different from eclampsia in women, which is related to blood pressure abnormalities prior to birth.

Predisposing Factors

More common in dogs than cats

Toy and small breeds most commonly affected

Large litter size

Highest incidence with the first litter

Poor nutrition during pregnancy

and lactation

Possibly worsened by use of calcium supplements

during pregnancy

Seen most commonly two to three weeks after-birth, although can be seen as late as six weeks after whelping (giving birth)

 

or some other severe medical problem which caused her to turn on her puppies in order to save her own life ... the owner gave 3 out of 5 surviving puppies to Adell Lantz to rescue and then Adell offered this one to Jeri who traveled to Palm Springs to get her and brought her to my home to see.... Jeri showed me the "scratch" on her eye and I noticed the eye injury needed immediate vet care and so that is how I have her now.

 

This morning  I observed her eye is healing back to normal  and the small depression filling in.  There might be some slight scar tissue ... too soon to tell ... and if so the vet will prescribe some drops to treat it.

 

Her eye did cause me anxiety and distress, and of course the need to treat it with medicinal drops and oral antibiotic does require additional time during the day and night.... This is in addition to learning Way's "norms" and making sure she was eating and getting enough water and fluids  as one would with any new puppy....  My heart and home is a little larger now with Way in it. No Way would I part with her now. She has made me Way happier than life without her.  Way to go as the saying goes.

 

Way does love baked chicken and is eating some Little Caesar too ... I made some puppy formula but used canned reg milk instead of goat's milk and she isn't eating it .... I made some rice and chicken broth mush and she isn't eating it either ... Way really is a dainty eater, but she is gaining weight .... This morning she weighed in at a little over 2 1/2 lbs, and she is still small enough to fit into 2 hands cupped together .... Way has her little puppy biscuits and dry food always with her water in case she wants to chew and nibble. I bought some beef liver for  .89 cents a lb at Ranch Market yesterday and she will most likely enjoy it.... it will mash it with some cooked carrots, spinach, and other vegetables that I eat as a stew cooked in pork neck bones.

 

My Way is really a pretty little charmer and very alert, very responsive. I enjoy admiring her special beauty and especially like her parti markings....   Way seems to be content and even happy with her new home and living quarters.... Way is ecstatic when I take her outside to see the other Pekingese with her tail wagging receptively as they gather around to "inspect" the new one in their midst. 

 

Until Way develops a stronger immunity, I am not letting her outside ,and when she visits outside it is always with my protecting presence.  I have tried to keep her as unstressed as possible giving her lots of time to rest quietly to improve her eye and health healing.  The artificial tears drops the vet said for me to apply in between the medicinal eye drops 4 times daily is helping a lot to keep her injured eye wet and comfortable.

 

A friend came over yesterday to see her. She  too thought Way was cute as could be, but was not pleased with my calling her Way.... ??? Oh well, I like the name because it is most suited to Way's guiding spirit.  She is the Way to my heart.

 

As I write this,  my Way is finishing the last of her Little Caesar  meal choosing it over her baby formula of rice, chicken broth, and ground up puppy dog food Jeri gave me ....  yesterday she was jumping and barking at her toys ... grrrrr woooooooof waugh! I HAD TO LAUGH OUT LOUD! LOL!

 

Way has a 10 inch Cabbage patch doll, a tennis ball with rope at either end,  a stuffed lion about 10 inch, and a lamb chops soft toy about 8 inches, and several other toys like a styrene squeeze hamburger, and small 6 inch cabbage patch dolly,, etc......  She plays with them all and every time I look at her playpen they are moved around .... she also likes sleeping on her soft toys...

 

The white white with brown and black spots  gives her a look almost as if she were a lovable, cuddly stuffed toy herself.....

 

My friend,Suzi, said that Way would be well fed and she is right about that ..... all of us here in my home are well fed .... LOL .... but I am getting lots of exercise working around my home in various projects and maintenance, and even though I may look like a Sumo wrestler, I do feel good even though I am not up to running and turning summersaults like I did in high school cheerleading ..... reminds me .... I need to mow my lawn again (good exercise).

 

I often think about my bouncing across the the basketball court waving my pom-poms in the air yelling out the cheers leading the crowd at the games ..... they were fun and made good memories for me.  At that time I had a sleeve white Pekingese that I loved as my pet named..... you guessed it .... "Snowball" ... When I went to college, she stayed with my parents who continue to love her in my absence ... and when I got married and had young children of my own, we bought a parti Pekingese puppy from the Kansas City downtown pet store which we named "Gidget" ... Gidget was also a sleeve and looked a like like Way ..... in the 1950's most Pekingese were under 10 lbs and since then they have gotten larger and larger and larger ..... I had one couple who came to visit us bringing their 25 lbs Pekingese who they had trained to do tricks.

Removing Salt From Your Fish Water Before Re-use Watering Landscaping

Aquarium salt is widely used in the keeping of fish .... but little caution is provided warning that disposing of the salted water can harm the landscape, etc and really shouldn't be put down the sewer either .... in fact, I suspect many fish keepers are improperly disposing of their salt water from their aquariums ... (even freshwater fish water uses aquarium salt to keep the fish healthy) .... As a gardener and nature lover, I realize the permanent damage done to soil if salted .... salt accumulation is a global problem!

 

So since some of my Koi pools have significant amounts of salt, in the water (those pools that don't have water plants), I need to learn how to remove salt from the water so that I can reuse the water directing it safely to my landscape ...

 

A search of Google provided this technique..

 

How to Remove Salt From Water

By Shaun Juan, eHow Contributor

updated: August 22, 2009

I want to do this! What's This?

The cheapest way to remove salt from water is by using a solar water distiller. Think of a solar distiller as the same natural process of the sun heating water in our oceans, turning it into gas and then condensing into a cloud that drops unsalted water back down to earth. You can replicate this process by following some simple steps. These steps can also be used to remove salt from water in a survival situation.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Clear plastic sheet, 5 feet by 5 feet
• Shovel
• Containers to hold water

1. 1
   Dig a hole roughly 3 feet by 3 feet and 2 feet deep. If you are in a survival situation and don't have a shovel, use anything that will dig a hole, including your hands. Dig your hole in an area that receives the most sunlight possible.
2. 2
   Place you container in the middle of your hole. Make sure your container is dug halfway into the ground so it will not tip over.
3. 3
   Use another container to transport the salt water to your hole. If you do not have another container in a survival situation, use the same container you used in Step 2. Make sure the bottom of the hole is thoroughly saturated with the salty water.
4. 4
   Place your plastic over the hole. Make sure the middle of the plastic is sagging a bit over your container in the middle of the hole. In a survival situation, any color plastic will work, but it will take longer to evaporate.
5. 5
   Anchor your plastic over the hole. You can anchor the sides of the plastic with whichever material you have readily available--tent stakes, dirt, sand, rocks. Just make sure you have a tight seal around the plastic cover so the water vapor cannot escape.
6. 6
   Weigh down the center of your plastic sheet. Ideally you can use a small stone placed on the plastic directly over the container in the hole, but you can use whatever you have available to weigh it down in a survival situation.
7. 7
   Wait 3 to 4 hours for the solar distiller to complete the distilling process. Your solar water distiller works by the sun evaporating the salty water into a gas (which leaves the salt behind). The plastic cover stops the water vapor from escaping the hole, water condenses on the underside of the plastic, gravity pulls the water toward the center of your weighted-down plastic and the unsalted water drips into your container.

Read more: How to Remove Salt From Water | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_5188575_remove-salt-water.html#ixzz10ZFHkede

 

Anohter useful lesson was this one which basically provides a better understanding of how of how the above process works ... this one is a small scale removal of salt from salted water ...

 

How to Remove Salt From Salt Water

By Claudia Henning, eHow Contributor

Excerpted from .... 

http://www.ehow.com/how_5127351_remove-salt-salt-water.html

 

Remove Salt From Salt Water

All images courtesy of Photobucket photo pool

The easiest method of removing salt from salt water is a process called distillation. The water is heated, turned to a gas, condensed and collected in a purified form. The salt will be left behind. Follow the steps below and be amazed at how easy it is to replicate the distillation process yourself.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Plastic bowl Small glass Plastic wrap Small rock Small pitcher of salt water (tap water with 2 tbsp. of salt added)

1. 1
   Large plastic bowl
   Pour a couple of inches of salt water into a large plastic bowl. One similar to the bowl pictured will work.
2. 2
   Place a small glass upright in the middle of the bowl. Make sure the glass is shorter than the edge of the bowl and that it remains dry inside. A juice glass would work wonderfully for this.
3. 3
   Cover the bowl with clear plastic wrap and secure tightly with tape on the edges. Keep the empty glass upright and center as you cover the bowl.
4. 4
   Use a small rock to create the condenser.
   Place a small rock on the center of plastic cover, directly over the empty glass. It should bend the plastic wrap in toward the glass without breaking through. The angle will aid in the collection of purified water. Place the bowl carefully in the direct sunlight. The heat from the sun will heat the water, evaporating it to a gas. The gas will hit the inside plastic covering and condense back to liquid as it cools. The liquid will then drip down into the glass. This is called solar distillation. The process distills or purifies the water. The longer it is left in the sun, the more pure water you will collect. What will be left behind in the bowl is the salt.
5. 5
   Remove plastic cover and try a sip of the water in the glass. You will find it to be salt-free. Distillation is done on a larger basis by providing artificial heat to salt water, collecting the steam on a cooled condenser surface and routing the purified water into a separate tank.

Read more: How to Remove Salt From Salt Water | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_5127351_remove-salt-salt-water.html#ixzz10ZGbr5b6

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IT'S MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS

IT'S MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS

It's midnight at my Phoenix water garden oasis home (My Song Pekingese Park), and I am awakened by a small lonely whimper. My new puppy that I took in as a rescue Sunday morning that day needed comforting reassurance and attention. I sleepily picked her up and then remembered that I need to give her a name since I planned to be taking her into the vet this morning for him to inspect and treat her eye. The left eye had been injured a few days earlier by another puppy in her litter. The name I chose for this new puppy and the one that came to my soul searching mind and heart was Californian Cherokee Castaway.

This puppy was from a litter whose Mother killed 2 of the 5 puppies, 2 weeks of age. The owner of the puppy's Mother brought the entire remaining litter into Forget Me Not Rescue in Palm Springs for Adell Lantz to save and hand feed nurture to an adoptable age. Needing to find homes for these puppies, Adell called Jeri, a friend of mine, to see if she wanted one of the female puppies. Jeri did agree to adopt the puppy Adell had selected for her, and when the planned rehoming time arrived, Jeri and her husband traveled from Phoenix to Palm Springs to get her new 7 1/2 week old puppy Saturday, September 18th.

Next day, early on a Sunday morning, Jeri brought the puppy to my home for me to see. I quickly noticed that the puppy had a serious eye injury (commonly caused by litter mates playing together too roughly digging a toenail in the eye). I told Jeri that I would take the puppy to my vet, Dr. Svoboda, Palm Glen Animal Hospital, for his expert care and treatment Monday, and I agreed that I would adopt this unpapered (but pure bred) parti-colored Pekingese puppy. We weighed the puppy and learned it was only 2 1/4 lbs. Normally, Pekingese puppies at 8 weeks are about 4 lbs or even more, but this puppy's parents were both sleeves (very small and under 6 lbs) so the puppy's weight was about right for her development.

Jeri and I were both very distressed by seeing the little puppy's serious eye injury, and we realized that vet care is expensive but also necessary. Also, Jeri really wanted to acquire a show quality female, registered Pekingese, one that she could breed to her Champion pedigree AKC registered male (hopefully one that I would have available in a few months time). My heart opened up engulfing Californian Cherokee Castaway, and now she is mine... and I am hers.

One of the reasons I am impressed by the Pekingese dog breed is that they
have one of the longest ancestral store of racial memories for a pet
developed by humans .... similarly
Arabian horses, and Koi fish do also. Koi have lived to be 265 years old. I
feel I have an awesome racial memory. One I was equipped with at birth, and
it even included future memory for my life time and my children's...

********
racial memory

-noun Psychology .
feelings, patterns of thought, and fragments of experience that have been
transmitted from generation to generation in all humans and have deeply
influenced the mind and behavior.
********
In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in
the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over
long spans of time. It is based on the idea that common experiences of a
species become incorporated into its genetic code, not by a Lamarckian
process that encodes specific memories but by a much vaguer tendency to
encode a readiness to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. It is
invoked to explain the racial memory postulated by Carl Jung, and
differentiated from cultural memory, which is the retention of habits,
customs, myths, and artifacts of social groups. The latter postdates genetic
memory in the evolution of the human species, only coming into being with
the development of language, and thus the possibility of the transmission of
experience. Racial memory is a concept in Jungian psychology. Racial
memories are posited memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our
ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious".

Language, in the modern view, is considered to be only a partial product of
genetic memory. The fact that humans can have languages is a property of the
nervous system that is present at birth, and thus phylogenetic in character.
However, perception of the particular set of phonemes specific to a native
language only develops during ontogeny. There is no genetic predisposition
towards the phonemic makeup of any single language. Children in a particular
country are not genetically predisposed to speak the languages of that
country, adding further weight to the assertion that genetic memory is not
Lamarckian.

*****************

From my own life experience and access to my racial memory from multiracial
ancestors, I personally believe that I do have extra sensory communication
abilities that others have not inherited and also have ancient memories that
are most valuable to me in my life. Intuition, instinct, and intelligence
coupled with a vast inherited racial memory bank are some of the resources I
value and use in my life. They are unique and individually mine and are not
common to others.

My Koi Pool Algae

A friend came to my home yesterday to pick me up for lunch and was looking at my large Koi pool which is now covered with a dark green algae on all of the interior surfaces, the water is filtered and has ultra violet light exposed to kill bacteria and the most noxious forms of algae (blue-green and string algae) but apparently it doesn't prevent the type of algae growth now existing in the Koi pool.

I enjoyed botany in college and in my choice of reading while doing home gardening. I even took a class to become a "Master Gardener" with the Maricopa County Agriculture Extension. So I will be trying to observe and learn more about the life its ecology in my Koi pool.

She asked me about it and I thought it would be a simple matter to give her more specific information about its name and attributes..... well this morning I learned there are 125,771 different species of algae! How do I go about finding out more information about the specific algae growing in my pool? My friend thinks it might be bad, but I assured her all pools have it , those that have water plants growing in them since one does not use an algaecide in a pool they want water plants to grow in also.
The "green algae" is the most diverse group of algae, with more than 7000 species growing in a variety of habitats. The "green algae" is a paraphyletic group because it excludes the Plantae. In biological taxonomy, a grouping of organisms is said to be paraphyletic if all the members of the group have a common ancestor but the group does not include all the descendants of the common ancestor. Groups which include all the descendants of a common ancestor are commonly termed monophyletic, although this term is sometimes taken to apply to paraphyletic groups, in which case they are called holophyletic.

Like the plants, the green algae contain two forms of chlorophyll, which they use to capture light energy to fuel the manufacture of sugars, but unlike plants they are primarily aquatic. Because they are aquatic and manufacture their own food, these organisms are called "algae," along with certain members of the Chromista, the Rhodophyta, and photosynthetic bacteria, even though they do not share a close relationship with any of these groups.

The major groups of "green algae" are distinguishable on the basis of their flagellar insertion (the number and arrangement of the flagella that the cells have); their method of cell division; and their habitat



http://megasun.bch.umontreal.ca/protists/gallery.html was an interesting sight and I think I believe my algae in the Koi pool is a "green algae"

Green algae:

Algae are not considered "plants" but are their own distinct life form and they do mutate creating new varieties...

I have a microscope but so far have not made a slide of "my koi pool algae"... Oh my, the mysteries of my Koi pool and the life within!

Life or Not

This morning one of my pretty Koi jumped out of the large 8 ft pool..??? I discovered him not quite yet dead while emptying my recycling can.

 

I picked his limp body up and had to decide to bury him or try to see if I could revive him.. I chose the latter. I sensed there was life, and I had hope he might be able to recover.....

 

I went back outside while writing this email and he seems to be alive since I don't see any dead body floating on top of the water or laying on the bottom of the pool... He may have suffered brain damage or may not live long because of his "accident", "bad decision to jump out", or whatever happened that he was out of the water...... but for now he is alive ...

 

How many of us consciously choose life or not, take risks, make fatal errors in life; and the lucky ones are saved and live to write about it or learn from their near death?

 

I wrote this blog post this morning on the subject of "Life or Not" ..

 

http://ymmartin.blogspot.com/2010/08/life-or-not.html

 

Each day is a new beginning .... Each day is what we make it.