The Final Four (Months of 2015)

I've been writing about 2015 in four-month chunks, so it's time to finish things off with a recap of September through December.

SEPTEMBER

I started off September by spending afternoons with Curly, the labradoodle puppy. His people were going to be gone all day, so I'd come around to feed him breakfast and play with him and take him out so that he wouldn't get too restless in his crate. He was going through his second naughty puppy phase (ages 7-9 months), so he was constantly, actively looking for trouble, especially the sort of trouble you could chew on! You couldn't take your eyes off of him for more than a moment! It was a considerable contrast to Mr. Gorgeous, who was then down to his final weeks of life. I went to visit him one afternoon in the middle of the month just to make sure I got to see him before he died and got to talk to his family about his impending passing. That was the same day that a woman backed into the side of my car in a parking lot, a simple low-speed fender bender that morphed into a nightmare when, after the fact, the person who hit my car accused me of hitting her! Despite being blatantly untrue (as the damage to our respective cars attested), it upset me to be accused of lying. If I had been to blame, I would have readily owned up to it. It was quite the learning experience. A few days later, I heard that Sandy passed away.

Curly the puppy, bouncy and lively and wanting to chew on everything!

Mr. Gorgeous.
You can see the blood on his hind foot from where he scraped open one of his nails while scuffing his paws because of his degenerative myelopathy. 

Goldie parted company with this life in mid-September.
You can read my tribute to her here.

Warm, sunny weather meant our garden continued to grow like crazy! Despite our vigilance, the occasional zucchini got away from us and grew into a monster. Here's a big one next to Abbey for comparison!

I took some nice photos of bees in September, like this tiny one about the size of a grain of rice...

...and these honey bees at Mr. Gorgeous' house, as well as...

....insects that mimic bees, such as this drone fly.

I observed a bald eagle observing me.

A nice photo of Abbey, who learned a number of hand signals that month.

And in the final days of September, I looked after Mr. Gorgeous for one last time and said goodbye.

He was gorgeous to the last.

One of the nights that I was there was when the full moon eclipse took place. This is what I wrote to my friends on that day:

I would have had a pretty great view of at least part of the eclipse if I'd made the effort, but I was putting that effort into Mr. Gorgeous And by "effort," I mean, "sitting on the couch in the TV room for a couple of hours and not going anywhere so he doesn't feel like he needs to get up and also to keep an eye on him to hopefully prevent him from having an accident in the house." Thanks to my efforts, Mr. Gorgeous got to spend three hours sleeping inside near me WITHOUT having an accident and now he's gone to bed. It may be years, but there will be another full moon eclipse. There will not be another Mr. Gorgeous.

My last photo of the one and only. You can read my tribute to him here.

And so both a month...

....and an era came to an end.

OCTOBER

A variety of dog-related happenings went on in October, including time with Curly (ending 10/4), Mr. Gorgeous' death (10/6), Abbey's 11th adopt-a-versary (10/12), a short overnight stay with Pipsqueak (10/13-10/15), and Abbey's first and last experience trying on fairy wings (10/30). I also marked my 6th anniversary of living with chronic migraines (10/19) and made an especially cute veggie witch for Halloween (10/31), but October of 2015 was the Month of the Filling.

Curly was still busy chewing!

I took Curly to play with Cutie! They had a blast together and I was so proud of how Cutie modified the intensity of her play to match Curly's size.

Abbey's 11th Gotcha Day portrait.

Pipsqueak!

While Abbey may like wearing shirts, she does NOT like wearing wings.

Every year, we put out a veggie witch for Halloween. It's been my job for some time now to do the decorating and this was one of my cuter efforts!

It had been a year and a half since I'd last been to the dentist because between the migraines and the allodynia and fatigue and bad weather and dog-sitting, I'd had to cancel and delay appointment after appointment. To my chagrin, my teeth had suffered during that time and I needed six fillings. It's been an ongoing source of discouragement that my health issues have been so hard on my teeth, but I'm lucking to have a very understanding dentist. An example:

Last night, my brain thought it would be amusing to torture me with both can't-fall-asleep AND can't-stay asleep insomnia. The result is that today I am exhausted and nauseated and my skin is burning and I am in no shape whatsoever to get three fillings this afternoon. So I called my dentist's office two hours before my appointment and said, "Hi, I have an appointment this afternoon but I'm not feeling well..." and the receptionist said, "Oh, is this Colleen?" You see, they know me there. They know I often have to cancel appointments with just a few hours' notice and they are not only accepting of this, but really care about my well-being and always treat me with understanding and compassion. Everyone at the dentist's office--from the receptionists to my hygienist to the dentist--know that I am doing the best I can. This means so much to me!

Trigeminal nerve branches.

I had three cavities on each side of my mouth, so we decided to do the three on the right first and the the three on the left one week later. This seemed like a decent plan, but it turned out to be overly ambitious. Dental work and migraines do not get along in general, and while fillings are not usually a big deal, the lower branches of my trigeminal nerve (the upper branch is in a perpetual state of inflammation, thanks to my migraines) got irritated and hypersensitive. I couldn't tolerate heat or cold (and not just food--going outside when the air was cool was a problem!) and chewing anything firmer than a soft piece of bread was painful. Worse yet, the weather started impacting the sites! Any of these irritating factors could trigger a deep, sharp ache, usually deep down in my jaw but sometimes encompassing much of my face, that lasted for hours. I went back to the dentist multiple times to get my bite adjusted and to discuss this pain, but there was not much to do except to wait to see if the nerves would calm down. They did, eventually, after two months, but during the first four weeks or so in particular, I was miserable and had to spend most of my time in bed because the pain was eating up all of my energy.

NOVEMBER

Thanks to the filling-induced nerve pain, November didn't start off very pleasantly. There was a bright spot, though. One day, while getting out of my car as he was passing by on a walk, Curly recognized me! And not only did he recognize me, he went bananas with excitement! I liked that he knew it was me even though I was completely out of context and it was very affirming to have him be so happy to see me, especially when I hadn't been feeling well. In other health news, I restarted physical therapy on my neck at long last and received an official fibromyalgia diagnosis. This wasn't a big shocker, just a confirmation of something I'd suspected for a while after it dawned on me that most people don't get weird aching and stiffness and pain that come sand goes without any actual injury. It has been a background issue for years, ever since it was triggered by tapering off a medication a decade ago. It was constant and agonizing back then, but fortunately, it's typically only a minor irritation now, though sometimes it makes it hard for me to sleep and when I don't sleep well, all of my health suffers. In other notes, I finally had my car examined by the insurance company after more than a month of arguing with the person who'd hit my car and their insurance immediately decided that they would accept my claim (and my insurance denied theirs) because the physical evidence backed up my story that I was not at fault. It was a relief to finally have that contentious issue resolved.

Abbey enjoys some late-fall sunshine.

Sable and Goldie were best friends.

I spent the third week of November in the company of Sable and friends. Sable, a border collie-black lab mix, was Goldie's best friend and next-door neighbor. She also lives with a Yorkie mix I'll call Scruffy and a calico cat, Beanie. Their owner used to be a set designer, so their house is incredibly cool, full of art and plants and whimsical details. The dogs are very friendly and a lot of fun, so despite my dental work still giving me pain, I enjoyed my time with them. I spent most of my hours there reading and snuggling with the dogs on the couch. I couldn't ask for a more pleasant way of passing the hours!

Sable and Scruffy.

Sable likes to demonstrate her affection by mashing her face against yours.

One of her many endearing traits is that she likes to sprawl upside-down on your lap.

We all spent a lot of time on the couch!

This ceramic dog's head knob on the cupboard containing the dog food is one of the house's many delightful details.

Sable can be a whirlwind of motion one minute...

...and sound asleep the next.

She and Scruffy are good friends who enjoy a bit of wrestling from time to time.

Scruffy is sweet, quiet, and rather timid. He needs a fair amount of reassurance from the people around him, but he's a formidable hunter when it comes to small animals.

Beanie regarded me with a great deal of suspicion. I do not believe I was able to pet her on this first stay.

After a quiet Thanksgiving with only my parents, I settled in for a long stay with Pipsqueak. There was only one major issue to mar this beginning: Abbey, in my absence, got up in the middle of the night, got into the trash, and had a severe case of wandering intestinal remorse all over the downstairs of our house. Prior to her experience with prednisone in February, Abbey had never once gotten into the trash, but she found it a fitting way to express her displeasure at my absence. Oh, Abbey!

Silly Miss Abbey.

The final days of November were notable for the freezing fog that created beautiful frost on every surface. We don't often have stretches of weather below freezing, so it was a cool opportunity to get some unusual photographs.

DECEMBER

Because Pipsqueak's family had never left her before and she's a sensitive little dog, we'd spent the better part of a year working up to the point where she was totally comfortable with me being there and her family being gone. All that hard work paid off: Pipsqueak adjusted to living with me without any apparent distress. She ate her meals without issue and took to sleeping under the covers with me. Pipsqueak's house is very calm and quiet, so it was a good place for continuing to recover from my fillings, though I missed seeing Abbey on a daily basis and she most certainly missed me. According to my parents, Abbey panted and paced and cried and barked and was constantly demanding to go outside and was not her usual mellow self at all. One day, my mother came home but couldn't find Abbey, but she could hear Abbey banging on something. She finally found Abbey in my closet. Abbey had managed to somehow squeeze in through a small opening, but then knocked the sliding doors off the track so she couldn't get back out again! She was very glad when I came home after two weeks away.

She may be tiny, but she's also mighty!

All snuggled up.

Pipsqueak and I spent most of our days in front of the fire.

Miss Abbey, happy now that I was home again.

December was notable for the record-breaking rain. It wasn't the usual Seattle drizzle, either. It poured and poured and poured, hour after hour. Pipsqueak was not a fan and refused to go out and I didn't blame her! Many of these rainstorms were accompanied by very low barometric pressure, which made me miserable. As a result, even when my facial nerves started to calm down around the third week of December, I continued to feel unwell. Also, I managed to really hurt my back while mailing out this year's c.creativity calendars. Not, as you might think, from packing or lifting, but by stumbling into a hole in the dark when walking out of the post office! I had a very hard time sitting and rising for several days and had to enlist help to move all of my things back home from Pipsqueak's.

It was my most successful year for calendars ever!

One bright spot was the fact for the first time in years, I was not dog-sitting for Christmas. This meant that I had more energy than usual and was better to enjoy the festivities. Also, I got jeggings. This may seem like a funny thing to be excited about, but I have had a terrible time wearing denim in recent years because the texture of the fabric triggers sensory overload for me. Therefore, dressing like a normal person (and not one in pajamas covered in dog hair) is usually stressful and exhausting. However, these jeggings are soft and stretchy enough that I can wear them without being overstimulated and are loose and stylish enough that I look like I'm wearing ordinary jeans.

Abbey posing (unhappily) by the Christmas tree.

Abbey gave me one more bit of trouble in December: I'd vowed, after our traumatic experience back in July (which I still haven't written about!) where she didn't recover properly from being sedaed, that I would not have her anesthetized unless absolutely necessary. I'd hoped it would be a long time before any such need should arise, but Abbey, being an old dog, decided to manufacture a new growth. A funny pinkish patch on her belly, it quadrupled in size within a matter of weeks. The vet didn't care for the feel of it, so off it came on the 30th, along with the large lipoma directly underneath it, just in case some cells had strayed from one to the other. It was a good thing we removed it, because it was a Level One mast cell tumor (but because it was removed completely, it shouldn't come back), and thankfully she suffered no ill effects whatsoever from the surgery. She was ready to walk herself out of the clinic and jump into the car under her own power to go home and didn't even seem to notice that she'd had surgery. As usual, I didn't need to put a cone on her because she left the stitches alone, though she did enjoy wearing the shirts I used to keep the stitches covered. The vet could tell that she hadn't licked them even once! I was proud of my girl! I was also very pleased that Abbey, now fully deaf, happily slept through the New Year's Eve fireworks without a single shake, pant, or whimper.

From surgery to sunbathing in a matter of hours!

That brings us to the end of 2015 and my attempt to write about it in four-month chunks, a practice I think I will have to abandon in 2016, seeing as it is already April and I have more interesting things to write about than just about what I've been doing. If you missed the earlier installments on 2015, you can find them here:

January-April

May-August

Even if I'm not able to write as much as I like, I do regularly share photos on my Facebook photography page.

December Edition: Addendum to 33 Birds

An immature bald eagle (top, left of center, difficult to see against the trees unless you click on this photo to enlarge it) harasses a flock of coots, dive-bombing them seemingly for fun. 

Last month I wrote a blogpost called "33 Birds: November Edition" that listed, with photographs, all the different bird species I saw while taking care of Goldie during two weeks in November. Well, I went back to Goldie's house for ten days in December and saw nine more bird species! I thought it appropriate to create this addendum with photos of the additional birds, creating an even more comprehensive picture of the birdlife that can be found on the shores of a lake in the wilder suburbs of the Pacific Northwest in early winter. Remember, you can click on photos to enlarge them!

One of my canine ornithological assistants.
Sable shares my interest in waterfowl, but for rather different reasons.

Western Grebe

Just like the last post, since I am listing the birds in the order they appear in Golden's "Birds of North America," I have to start off with the worst photos of the bunch. I was standing on the dock one day when I saw a pair of birds with long white necks swimming at least halfway across the lake. I immediately suspected they were Western grebes because of their size and those necks and so I waited and waited and waited in hopes that they would swim my way, but they were apparently content to mosey around mid-lake, occasionally diving. These photos were therefore taken for identification purposes, for which they suffice. They certainly aren't going to win any prizes, though! I saw the grebes on one other occasion. They were on my side of the lake, but only just. They clearly like to do their fishing in far deeper water than the pied-billed grebes and others that I've seen closer to shore.

This is what they looked like through my 200 mm telephoto lens without any cropping.  That I noticed them and suspected they were grebes at that distance should give you an idea of how acute my vision is, which is a major reason why I see so many birds!

This is a cropped version of one of the telephoto images. Doesn't look like much, but you can see the long neck has a pure, white throat, the beak is slender and yellow, the top of the head and back of the neck are black, and the body is a grayish color. That's enough to call it a Western grebe!

This grebe was a little bit closer, but not much. You can see the redness of its eye, though!

It took a pause from fishing in the deep water near the center of the lake to preen.

Ring-Necked Duck

Some days there are just oodles of birds around and the 22nd of December was one of them. I saw coots, gadwalls, buffleheads, mallards, cormorants, a male common merganser (I see females far oftener than I see males), and mixed in with all of those, a couple of unfamiliar ducks. The weather was overcast with a lot of glare and the birds were gathered to the south of my dock, so they were backlit and especially hard to see. It was not until I got the images on my computer and removed the shadows that I was able to see the details necessary to identify this particular bird as a male ring-necked duck.

A male ring-necked duck (center, top) has white stripes on its bill.

It floats here among coots, gadwalls, and buffleheads.

A few days later, I captured male and female ring-necked ducks in flight. On the wing, they look very similar to scaups, but the male's bill stripes and the bill's large, black tip are helpful for differentiating it.

Lesser Scaup

The other new-to-me duck first seen on the day when so many waterfowl were out and about by the dock is the lesser scaup. Like the ring-necked duck, it belongs to a category of ducks called "bay ducks." These ducks are capable of diving and swimming underwater and eat both plant and animal life. There is also a greater scaup, which is larger, has a greenish vs. purplish head, and is more often seen on salt water.

A male lesser scaup has a golden eye, a dark head and chest with purplish iridescence, white sides and back with fine black mottling, and a black rump.

A male lesser scaup swimming with coots.

A female lesser scaup, with a dark brown head, back and tail, brown breast, brown sides with white mottling, and a white facial patch by the bill (not visible in this photograph).

A pair of male lesser scaups.

Bald Eagle

I had been very surprised during my stay in November not to see any bald eagles, since there have been bald eagles living on the northern end of the lake for as long as I can remember. It seemed like Goldie's house would be prime bald eagle territory. It turns out that I was right. I believe that the reason I didn't see eagles during November was because they were congregating around salmon-spawning streams. Regardless of whether or not my theory is correct, I started seeing bald eagles on a daily basis! I mainly saw an immature bald eagles and another that is just getting its adult plumage. The only downside of seeing the eagles is that the waterfowl make themselves scarce when these giant raptors are around, and for good reason: Goldie found the remains of a wing that probably belonged to a coot or bufflehead at one point beneath the eagles' favorite tree. It's funny: when one of the bald eagles gives me a once-over from the treetops or as it flies overhead, I find myself feeling honored to have caught the notice of such a predator!

An immature bald eagle. They have dark brown plumage mottled with white.

I felt so lucky to have this immature bald eagle fly almost directly toward me as I stood on the dock before it swooped up to land in a tree on the shore. The feet and beak are strikingly yellow!

A different juvenile, with much more white mottling, cruises overhead at sunset.

This bald eagle is finally getting its adult plumage: the head and tail are almost completely white and the body completely brown. Bald eagles don't get their adult plumage until they are about five years old.

American Coot

During the winter, coots can be seen congregating on the water in dense flocks. I think of them as "rafts." During December, rafts of coots regularly make their way past the house, sometimes lingering in favored spots just to the north and south of the dock. When not on the move--and sometimes even then--the coots dive below the surface to bring up strands of aquatic vegetation. Since there is no point in making the effort to dive for your own piece of vegetation if you can have part of your neighbor's, scuffles break out as all the surrounding coots try to snag a mouthful. I found that the coots were surprisingly difficult to photograph, a result of their dark plumage, the low winter light, and constant movement. In an effort to get decent shots, I now have way more coot photos than any sane person would wish to look through!

A wintertime congregation of coots.

Everyone wants a piece of your aquatic vegetation!

American coots.

Chestnut-Backed Chickadee

I expressed surprise in my previous post that I hadn't seen any chestnut-backed chickadees because Goldie's property seemed like prime chestnut-backed chickadee habitat. I was pleased, therefore, to spot a flock of them in the trees one day. As I waited for one of the chickadees to land on a branch unobscured by other vegetation with the chestnut back visible, it started to hail. I'm not going to stand around in the hail just to prove to blog readers that I saw a chestnut-backed chickadee, so you'll have to take my word for it. I saw them again on other occasions, but they move very quickly through the trees and I never had a good chance to take a decent photo.

This was the best shot I got before the weather turned uncooperative. You can see the brownish sides, if not the back.

Hermit Thrush

Several times during my stay I saw a noticeably nondescript (that sounds funny, but a plain bird is an unusual one!) bird flitting away in the brambles, but it wasn't until my second-to-last day that this light brown bird was kind enough to sit for a while on a branch that was visible through the tangle of vines and twigs, allowing me to photograph it and confirm my suspicions that it was a hermit thrush.

Hermit thrushes are one of a group of several similar North American thrushes with spotted breasts.
Trust me, you want to click on this photo: it's one of the best of the bunch!

This hermit thrush looks like it's singing, but it was, in fact, doing what I can only describe as "gargling berries."

Yellow-Rumped Warbler (Audubon's Race)

Yellow-rumped warblers were one of the thirty-four species of birds that I saw at Mr. Gorgeous' place in the spring, but it turns out that those bold colors are a thing for spring--the only feature I recognized was the shape of the tail! Google helped me figure out that I was indeed looking at the same species, just in a different season's plumage. The photos are poor, as a small group of them settled only briefly high in a birch tree before flying off.

It wasn't much, but the yellow throat, deeply lobed tail...

...and yellow sides were sufficient information for an ID.

Golden-Crowned Sparrow

I was looking out the dining room window into the thicket favored by the finches, juncos, and song sparrows when I saw a bird rather larger than the usual suspects perched on a branch on the far side of the bank of vegetation. It wasn't until I was looking through my camera's viewfinder that I realized I was photographing a golden-crowned sparrow. I only saw it that once, so I was glad to get a decent shot of it.

The bright yellow crown bordered by bold, black stripes give this sparrow its name.

These nine species seen during late December, added to the thirty-three I saw in mid-November, bring my total count of birds seen and/or photographed at Goldie's new place on the lake to forty-two. It has been exciting to see the variety of birdlife this piece of property has to offer. I look forward to getting to know its birds of spring and summer in 2015!

You can see the blogpost detailing the thirty-three birds of November here.

You may also enjoy my overview of thirty-four bird species in seen in April.

And don't forget to stop by my Facebook page to see the photos I post daily!

All photographs © 2014 c.creativity