Getting back to normal -- eventually . . .

After losing Rocky last Friday, I've been pretty depressed. (See "REMEMBERING OUR DOGS WITH LOVE . . . "In Memorium" there at the top of this page.)  And the house still has a really bad smell from Rocky's throwing up over his last two days.  I took the rug outside that he was laying on.  It has to stay out there until we can get it cleaned.  And I'm going to have to spray that wood floor and let it soak to remove that smell since that stuff actually soaked through the rug - but I'm not going to do that until this weekend.  I'm still at work for a while yet.

But regardless of how depressing it is, we do seem to be able to relax now that Rocky has gone.  And the other three dogs seems to be relaxing as well.  Check this out -- Joey has calmed down completely.  ;-D

Apparently Joe was as exhausted as we were!
(And Boo is asleep too in that dog bed there behind that sofa.)

And despite the fact that it's been raining continually over the last couple weeks and the paddocks are completely full of very deep mud, the horses seem to be doing just fine as well. They do need their hooves trimmed, but they're all COVERED in mud up to their knees and even if I clean them off, once Zoilo gets them trimmed they'll go out and get covered in mud all over again! . . . not that good for their hooves.  So we're waiting for the weather to dry out some.  But in one respect, I guess it's a good thing to have all this rain.  El Niño is causing a lot of additional rain -- but it's also supposed to prevent major hurricanes, so better rain than storms, that's for sure!  But as soon as it dries out some, we will not only wash up the horses, but we'll FINALLY get to spread out all that sand in the round pen and begin working with them in there - maybe even Arthur!  I sure am looking forward to that!

And we also have a number of things we need to get someone to come to the house and work on.  I bought a discount from Groupon to have a guy come and clear out the air ducts and even the dryer vents but I haven't been able to get a hold of them to set it up yet.  

And then there's our annual tax return.  Because there had been so many novel things going on last year I'm having trouble completing the return,  I usually do it online through TaxACT but I guess I'm going to have to go back to the CPA we used to use some years ago and get her to do it for this year and next year.  Then I'll probably be able to go back to doing it myself after that since things will then go back to remaining the same year to year after THIS year.

Oh - AND we need to get someone to come to the house and deal with ALL of our computers because there's some problem in them that prevents us from getting into Google and instead of Google there is some other odd thing that comes up every time we open the computers.  We can request Bing instead for searches, but it won't let us get Google and with my memory problem I used Google ALL the time!  So whatever it takes to get them fixed up so we can have Google back will be worth it to me, that's for sure!

But other than those things, we're actually pretty much okay again.  We're just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping Boo doesn't have any problems for a very long time, even though he turned 14 last December! 

Actually, I think we're going to get a closed-in crate and then add wheels to the bottom so that if we have to get HIM into one of our trucks to go to the vet (or probably LSU in his case) we can just put him in that crate and wheel him down the steps and up into the truck by using a ramp.  If we had to lift him we'd probably BOTH lose our backs again!  But hey -- at the moment he's just fine.  He races around outside and when he wants back in the house he comes up to the porch door and jumps up and down!  He obviously feels perfectly fine!  Thank goodness!