Anya Bast

This post has absolutely nothing to do with writing. :) Also, I cross-posted this at The Bradford Bunch blog.

I am super, duper bleeding heart animal lover and have been since I was a kid. This is evidenced by our 8 cats, 2 rabbits and one dog. Most of them were hard luck cases. All but one of our cats were strays. Our dog we found slated for death at Animal Control.

Our rabbbits, one of them anyway, was slated to be Great Horned Owl practice prey at a Raptor Rehab program I was volunteering for. I, uh, smuggled him out. I love birds of prey, but I couldn’t volunteer there after that.

The owl food was the black one.

So, when I opened my patio door last week and spotted this guy on the deck near the dog house I was charmed completely. I grabbed my camera, which is always close at hand because I don’t want to miss any toddler photo ops, and took this picture:

Close up of itty bitty teeny tiny tortoise face:

It didn’t look damaged, so I thought he just got lost. It didn’t occur to me in my non-caffeinated state (it was morning) that he could not have gotten onto the deck without, uhm, “help”. I didn’t know what kind of turtle he was. I failed turtle identification class.

Worried it could be a snapper, I carefully got him into a container for transport:

I didn’t notice the blood when I took the picture…..

I moved turtle to our pond, where likely he was living before he had “help” getting onto the deck:

I wished him a happy and productive reptilian life and assumed my good turtle karma had gained a few points. That’s when I turned around to gather the container and saw…The Blood. Taking a closer look at the turtle, (remember, still not caffeinated yet), I saw his shell had been crunched upon and the soft underside (his actual body) had been bitten.

I knew instantly who the offender was:

Our dog. The scourge of all wildlife in our yard. Springtime is brutal around here, let me tell you…. Obviously she’d determined turtle was a really cool dog toy.

So I went back into the house and called my local vet to see if I could bring turtle in for treatment. They don’t treat exotic pets, she told me, but pointed me in the direction of a vet who does. So…. I gathered turtle up from the pond and put him back into the container with a little yummy pond water for his comfort. I rousted the kiddo from her high chair and off we went.

The strangest passenger I’ve had in a while. I don’t think turtle was all that amused.

Finally, we reached our destination:

Turtle was handed over to a really cool vet who does pro bono wildlife rehab work on the side. Turtle has a fighting chance, but the lining of his lung was punctured. She thinks she will take a couple months to get him back up and running and they might have to put a feeding tube down his little turtle throat. I can call later to check on his condition. If turtle heals but cannot be returned to the wild, I told them I would take him as a pet. He turned out to be a water turtle, not a snapper.

After making a donation to the program (what a cool program!) we came back home. Whew! Not the morning I’d had planned.

Why’d I take pictures of the whole thing, you ask. Uhm, I’m just a dork that way. *shrug*

Tell me about your animal companions! I love to hear about pets, animal rescues, really about anything warm and fuzzy. I’ll give away chocolate to one of the posters. (Yes, I’m running the contest over here too. *g*)

We have eight cats (or eight cats have us, actually). They’re indoor except that they have a sizable screened-in porch where they can bask in the sun, lounge and be otherwise lazily catlike. They share the porch with two bunny rabbits. (All the fuzzies are rescues, mmmkay?! We just couldn’t say no to them.)

We live in the country. Lots of critters out here, lots of insects and such. The porch is enclosed, but sometimes critters and insects still make their way inside. It’s just part of living in Boondockia.  You see where I’m going with this, right?
Anyway, last evening as I worked diligently on Witch Blood, I heard Wiggle, (the fattest of our cats, but surprisingly the best hunter. I think he’s very motivated by food in general.), meowing with his mouth full. I know this particular meow. It’s the meow that says, I have something rich and juicy and YOU CAN’T HAVE IT. This is the meow I heard moments before Wiggle once dropped a half dead horsefly in my lap. (I’m the mommy cat and therefore eligible for special “gifts”.) This is also the meow I heard when Wiggle dragged a huge lizard into the living room, dropped it wriggling on the floor and thus incited the Great Lizard Olympics of 2005. I remember it well because the lizard…er, okay, I won’t go there. I need more coffee for that.

I freeze, hand hovering over my laptop keyboard.  Wiggle races past, followed by 7 cats with eager expressions on their faces, (eyes bright, whiskers forward, ears pricked). Just as Wiggle disappears down the hallway, I see a gray tail hanging from between his greedy cat lips.

Me: Oh, shiiiiiiit.

So I race off after the pride, following them into the bedroom just in time to see Wiggle taking his yummilicious prey under the bed. I flip on the light, thus jarring my sleeping husband into full sputtering (pissed off) wakefulness and start babbling about cats and mice.

The chase ensues. Up, down, all around we pursued Wiggle through the house followed by the other 7 cats who desperately want a piece of the squeaky action.  FINALLY, we corner Wiggle and make him give up his treat. And get this…the mouse survived!!

In the dark, my husband and I instituted a quick mousie relocation program, complete with a new identity and a lovely brand new home of cut wood logs for the fireplace. We admonished mousie to stay out of the porch. I hope he heeds our warning, though one would think that having a fifteen minute joy ride in a cat’s mouth would be enough of a deterrent.

I’ll be at Lori Foster’s Get Together this weekend and may or may not have internet access. Even if I do have ‘Net access, I probably won’t be blogging. So, I’ll see you guys on Monday! I’ll prolly even have pictures.

Where was I? Dude, I was halfway around the world in Asia. Half. Way. Around. The. World! I have hella jet lag, I can’t even tell you and, oh, by the way…I’m a mommy now. :)

So, yes, I’m back and blogging again but bear with me while I get my inner clock readjusted and I get my mommy legs under me.

Some people scorn Valentine’s Day as a commercial holiday, some embrace it as a celebration of romantic love. Some people hate Valentine’s Day because they haven’t yet found anyone yet to share it with. Whatever you think of Valentine’s Day, here is it. Again.

My opinion of the holiday falls somewhere in the middle. I note it, buy a gift for my honey, accept his gift to me and move on. If my honey doesn’t buy me a gift…HE’S IN REALLY BIG TROUBLE!!!!! Ahem. Just kidding. Seriously, I don’t really care about V-Day. *koff* Really.

But Valentine’s Day has me thinking about love in all its various forms — ALL forms of love, not just romantic love. There is motherly love, sisterly and brotherly love. There is the love we feel for our friends, our pets. There is the love we hopefully feel for ourselves.

However, this Valentine’s Day I find myself thinking a lot about the kind of love I have with my husband. Something I would term “mature love”.

Ugh. I feel old now.

Anyway, after over a dozen years of being together I would say that the blush is definitely off the rose. Oh, we have our moments of return to that giddy place when we were first together, when passion ran high and my heart beat faster just because of his presence. But, let’s face it, that kind of love doesn’t last…and thank goddess! Otherwise we’d all have heart attacks five years into our relationships.

No, my husband and I have that enduring, settled, I-can-finish-your-sentence kind of love. The kind of love that has weathered storms that made our relationship stronger. The kind of love that is comfortable and based in deep friendship. My husband is my best friend and I know he’s got my back as we progress through life. Just as I have his back. (No! That’s NOT what I meant, you perves! I mean we’re protective and supportive of each other.)

Even though he and I are different personality-wise and we’ve found a way to make that work. We complement each other and give the other what we, individually, don’t possess in our personalities.

So, I guess I’m giving up a little yay for the more “seasoned” type of love this year…even though it makes me feel old. (I got married young, peoples!)

This Valentine’s Day, I hope you DO celebrate. Who cares if it’s commercialized! What holiday isn’t? Today is just one more excuse to honor love, in any form, and that’s never a bad thing.

If you don’t have a sweetheart, celebrate anyway. Celebrate yourself. Treat yourself to something nice, a bubble bath and a glass of wine. Give yourself the evening to do whatever it is you want to do and free yourself from chores and responsibilities.

If you have a friend you’ve been meaning to call, call him or her! If you have a pet, buy her some cat nip or a dog toy.

Celebrate the luuuurve, people!

And, so, to show my readers that I love and appreciate them, I’m having a contest. Send me an email at anyabast (at) gmail.com sometime before Friday, February 16th and put LOVE in the subject line and I will hold a drawing for a free download from my backlist.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

Today I’m going to talk about heartbreak. Tomorrow, in honor of V-Day, I’ll talk about luuuuurrrrve. Because, you know, into every life a little heartbreak must fall. It goes hand-in-hand with luuuurrrrve.

Yes, heartbreak is something everyone experiences. It’s a “character building experience,” as my father would say. So, yeah, I have a lot of character. Enough with the character-building already! That’s what I screamed in my early twenties. (Luckily the heartbreak ended shortly afterward because I met my current husband).

I can still remember my very first heartbreak poignantly. I was, oh…fourteen, I believe. He was my first Boyfriend of Consequence. It was the innocent, new kind of love. The fourteen-year-old “going with each other” love. Do kids still say they’re “going with” someone or was that an eighties thing?

And, boy, I can still remember the day he broke up with me. We’d been “going together” for quite some time. I thought he walked on water (that opinion changed soon) and we would be together forever, (I’m glad I was wrong about that because I looked him up later on in life. Ahem). It was the middle of winter, snowdrifts up to my eyeballs. That afternoon I’d walked to a friend’s house and talked endlessly of him because I thought he was so cute and soooo awesome and incomparable.

Then I called him. And right there, on the phone, in my friend’s house, out of the clear blue heavily gray snow-clouded skies…he DUMPED my ass! He gave me a speech about a monkey wrench being thrown into a car engine or some such. The bottom line was that…HE’D MET SOMEONE ELSE! Dumped for another girl!

Oh, I thought my heart was going to disintegrate. I can still remember the sorrowful trudge through the snow to get home, my tears freezing to my cheeks. Ah, the drama of youth.

I was miserable for a long time, moped around and thought I was dying. I never went through the “I’ll get him back” phase that most girls and women experience in the initial stage of heartbreak. I went straight to the “that rotten scoundrel!” phase. But I was still heartbroken and despondent.

Months later, after my heart had healed, a met a new boy…and I broke his heart. Heh.

So it goes, round and round. Break, mend, break, mend. And then…sound of angelic choir… hopefully you meet The One. And that love is all the more sweeter for the bedrock of heartbreak it’s laid upon. But more on that tomorrow.

Can you remember your first heartbreak?

We’ve been on a ski trip for the last week (which is why I haven’t been blogging, see?). Well, actually my husband and our friends were on a ski trip. I just sat around in our lovely rented townhouse, sipped hot chocolate by the fire and acted like a nordic queen (and I wrote a lot ). It was great. I love the cold and snow. I did my heart and soul good to be around it for a while.

So, I’m still a little jet-lagged, but here are some random shots from where we stayed.

Our Zen Alarm clock broke a couple days ago and my husband and I mourned.

We’d had it for a long time, about 7 years, and it had undergone lots of abuse…mostly from the cats. Cats abuse everything. We’re continually having to replace our blinds because little kittehs like to stick their little kitteh heads through them to look out the window and break the slats in the process (tangent).

Anyway, we love the Zen Alarm clock (no, I get no money for sounding like commercial here) because we hate — with burning passion of a thousand, million suns — waking to the obnoxious, annoying ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! of your standard digital alarm.

Neither do we enjoy waking to music or talk radio. I can STILL remember the Braunschweiger and Old Home Cottage Cheese commercials that were always on the radio as I awoke as a child. If I hear anything about Braunschwieger or Old Home Cottage Cheese to this day, it sends me into a violent fit. (tangent)

So, when we lost our beloved Zen Alarm clock, we sat on the bed with the object between us and stared mournfully down at it. I just ordered a new one. *Sigh*

They’re good, too, if you’re like me and dream vividly. I want to remember my dreams in the morning and being jarred from my sleep by ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! is not conducive to this. It, in fact, ruins my whole day. The Zen Alarm clock awakens you gently with carefully spaced ting, ting, tings that are graduated in volume.

Best of all, even if I hear ting, ting, ting, sometime throughout my day, I am not catapulted into an instant rage, like a red flag waved in front of a bull, as I am with the aforementioned commercials. I think this is a Very Good Thing. Anything to make life a little more pleasant, you know?

I know this post had nothing whatsoever to do with writing. But, now, I am off to write.