Susan Abel Sullivan's Blog, page 7

Canine Siamese Twins?

Joined at the hip? Moxie and Bo














Dogs certainly know how to relax.  Moxie and Bo are so comfortable with each other that they appear joined at the hip as if they were a new breed of canine Siamese twins or maybe a canine push-me-pull-you (from Dr. Doolittle).

If people were to glean any wisdom from dogs it would be: play hard, eat heartily, and sleep long and deeply. 

Happy MLK Day! Hope you enjoy your day as much as Moxie and Bo are enjoying theirs.

Click on each picture in the gallery below to enlarge each photo.

Stalking Stephen King

Stephen King's Bangor, Maine, home in 1999 from my personal photographs.














I had the opportunity to stalk Stephen King back in 1999. 

And by stalk, I really mean drive up to his house in Bangor, Maine, and take pictures.  Of course, I had this total fantasy that King would just happen to step out on his front porch while I was snapping photos and invite me inside for cheese and crackers and I'd tell him that I was his "number one fan" (the most disturbing line in his novel, Misery). And of course, he get the joke and not call the police on me for being a psycho. 

But alas, that didn't happen.  The hubs made me get out of the car so that he could take a picture of me in front of the beautiful wrought-iron gate surrounding King's home, but once again, this was before digital cameras and smartphones were the rage, so I'll add this to my growing list of printed photos that I need to hunt up, scan, and upload.

While the hubs and I were in Bangor, we did visit several landmarks that show up in the town of Derry in King's book, IT, like the creepy water tower, the barrens, and the huge Paul Bunyan statue.  We also drove over to the Bangor cemetery where a scene from the movie Pet Semetery was filmed.  A trip to Bangor wouldn't be complete without a stop by the independent bookstore downtown.  I don't remember the store's name, but they carried all things Stephen King. 

All in all it was a fabulous adventure for someone who'd been a Stephen King fan ever since I first read Carrie in the 7th grade. The novel that really clinched the fandom deal for me, though, was Salem's Lot. Other teenaged girls saved up for clothes and shoes and jewelry and concert tickets.  I saved up for Stephen King novels in hardback.  Yes, I was, and still am, a total fangirl.

Hookers and Guacamole

What do hookers and guacamole dip have in common?

Shirley.

As in "Shirley Guacamole," one of the first characters I ever created.  Shirley was a hooker with a heart of gold.  Of course, I was only twelve, so what did I know about hookers?  Only what I'd seen in movies and TV. 

I knew they had big hair and wore gaudy clothes, high heels, lots of makeup and lots of jewelry.  They usually had bra straps hanging down their arms. 

I started off doodling drawings of Shirley in my sketch pad.  At Halloween I decided to bring her to life for Trick-or-Treating.

That's right, I dressed my YOUNGER sister up as a street walker.  I think my parents thought it was a gypsy costume.  Lord knows what they would have thought if they'd known she was supposed to be a HOOKER!

My sister gamely went along.  I picked out her costume (consisting of my mom's old clothes that she'd given us to play dress up) applied her make-up, and fitted one of my mom's old wigs on her head for the big hair.  Man, she looked GREAT! 

My mom quit buying store bought Halloween costumes for us when my sibs and I were ages 10, 7, and 4, respectively.  We were tasked with creating our own costumes, and I have to say, I had so much more fun developing costumes and make-up than buying ones ready made. 

I am wracking up quite a number of old photos to find and post, but I do have a short slideshow of my sister and me when we weren't dressed up for Halloween.

My current hooker characters are vampire hookers from outer space in my song/poem "A Night at the Drive-in."  I have a feeling they're going to turn up in a future Cleo Tidwell Paranormal Mystery Novel. (www.worldweaverpress.com)

They have big fake fangs and big blue hair (like Marge Simpson--the hair, not the fangs), but I can partially credit their existence to Shirley Guacamole. 

Wild Animals in the House

The one exception to my dad's no-wild-animals-in-the-house rule was Charlie the catfish.

I found him one summer when our sub-division flooded. The adults weren't happy about the water table being so high that septic tanks backed up and having to drive their cars through two feet of water, but all of us kids had a BLAST playing in the flooded streets and yards. 

I honestly don't even remember how I caught Charlie.  He was a young catfish, maybe four to five inches long.  But catch him I did and I took him home like I did with every animal I found, and asked my mom if we could keep him.

She said yes.

So we prepped him to live in our aquarium as if he were a store-bought fish.  And he lived with us a year or so before he grew too big for the tank (which was a pretty big tank).

I'd tap on the side of the tank and Charlie would swim over to me.  I loved that fish.  And I cried when it was time to release him back to the wild.

The whole family loaded up into the car and we drove up to Black Water State Park where I released Charlie into the Black Water River where he'd have plenty of room to keep growing. 

As with the pet skunk I had in college, I'll have to dig through my old photo albums for pictures of all of these critters.  I grew up in a much different, much less regulated time.  And I'm happier for it.

Are Some Animals Psychic?

If you don't believe in psychic ability in humans, then you most certainly won't entertain the idea that animals might possess this trait, too.  But if you're open to the idea, read on.  I have a true story for ya.

When the hubs and I moved to Alabama from Chicago back in 2001, we, of course, had a veritable zoo of companion animals: two dogs, two cats, a king snake and a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.  My tendency, if left unchecked, is to live life surrounded by animals like Dr. Doolittle.  And yes, I even talk to the animals and often I understand what they're telling me, although they don't speak English, but communicate with a combination of sounds, expressions, and body language.

So I was determined not to fill up the wee house we'd inherited with animals like I had when we'd lived in Missouri and Kentucky.  And I managed to sustain this for a year. 

But in January of 2002, the urge to visit the animal shelter struck me out of the blue.  I'd never been to the Calhoun County Animal Shelter, had no idea where it was even located, and most certainly did not want to be adopting ANY MORE ANIMALS.  I resisted the urge to act on this impulse, but it only grew stronger and stronger over the next two weeks.

I'm a big believer in listening to my intuition, especially when it's persistent and shouting at me, so even though a trip to the shelter didn't make any logical sense, I looked up the address and paid them a visit.

First stop: the cat room.  I walked in and about thirty cats ran over to check me out.  Three seconds later, twenty-nine cats decided I wasn't worth their time.  The one cat who remained was a beautiful calico and she jumped up into my arms and went, "Meow!!" quite emphatically. 

"Hello, kitty."  I put her down and she kept jumping up on me...in my lap, on my back, in my arms.  This cat really dug me!  And she was so enthusiastic. 

I asked how long she'd been at the shelter.  The volunteer said, "Two weeks."

Two weeks.

That's how long my intuition had been hitting me over the head about visiting the shelter.  Had this calico been sending out some sort of psychic signal that I was able to receive?  Did we have some kind of extra-sensory connection?  It seemed coincidental that I'd been resisting an insane urge to visit the shelter for two weeks and she'd been AT the shelter for TWO weeks.

So the next step was to bring the hubs to meet her.  He didn't find her particularly alluring; he liked a long-haired Siamese mix better.  But once again, as on my initial visit, when the hubs and I walked into the cat room, every cat rushed us and then every cat but the calico decided they had better things to do. 

My husband WAS amazed at how she kept jumping and climbing all over me with such emphatic MEOWs!

So I asked if we could adopt her.  The hubs said yes (he rarely says no about these things), but someone else had expressed interest in her and we had to wait a week to see if they'd come back for her. 

They didn't.  On VALENTINE'S DAY in 2002, the shelter called and said we could adopt the calico if we still wanted her. 

How could we not?  She was meant to be with us. 

I brought her home and I renamed her Zoe.  It fit her high energy, enthusiastic personality.  If Zoe were a person, she'd be a cheerleader and the president of the welcome wagon.  I don't know if she'd ever had kittens before winding up at the shelter, but she is a natural mother.  When we wound up adopting a kitten in 2003 and two more in 2004, she treated those kits like her own and still has a strong mother/son bond with Spencer who is now nine. 

So do some animals have psychic ability?  Or do some people possess a type of extra-sensory radar that is tuned to an animal frequency?  I'd like to think so.  There are stranger things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. 

Zoe with one of her grown-up foster kittens, Cleo If you enjoyed today's post, please check out my guest blog at World Weaver Press where I write about how a dog on death row inspired the character of Luna in my latest novel, The Weredog Whisperer.

http://worldweaverpress.com/2014/01/14/saved-from-death-row-the-inspiration-for-the-weredog-whisperers-luna/

Moxie enjoying her perch on top of the love seat

My Elephant has Gone to the Hospital

Steiff Jumbo Elephant, circa 1950s/60s





























My poor Steiff elephant has been sent to a hospital...a hospital for Steiff toys, that is. 

She arrived from the Netherlands with her chest ripped open, her growler removed and gutted, and her right leg torn asunder.  Considering she's a vintage Steiff Jumbo Elephant made in the 1950s-1960s with the trademark Steiff button in her ear, I just about had a heart attack when I opened the box and discovered she'd been assaulted.

But she's in good hands now. I've sent her to expert Steiff repairperson Martha Anderson at Mar-ke Teddy Bear Repair in Virginia. http://teddybearrepair.com/ 

Martha has performed many impressive restorations and repairs on antique and vintage Steiff animals including an 8-foot tall Steiff giraffe belonging to a library in Massachuesetts.  She's been written up in Teddy Bear Magazine and other publications.

What a wonderful job--repairing beloved toys so that they can continue to bring joy to their owners for many years to come.

Catching Bats with Oven Mitts

 
Bats used to roost in the basement of our rural house in the wilds of Missouri.  We're talking RURAL, as in the OZARKS.  Even with two cocker spaniels, a beagle, and a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig sleeping in the basement, the bats still liked to roost in the stairwell. 

Well, one time I opened the basement door in the kitchen and in flew one of the bats.  Of course, I hollered the obvious.  "A bat!  There's a bat in the house!"

The cats were VERY interested in this bat creature. 

But since I love bats, I didn't want it to wind up as cat food, so I shoved big oven mitts over my hands and chased the bat around our living room until it flew into a corner and I was able to GENTLY scoop it up between the oven mitts.

I showed it to the hubs. "Look, a bat."

"Take it outside."

Me: "Geez, you sound like my dad."  My dad didn't like wild animals in the house. 

So I let it go back in the basement so that it could roost again.  We never had another bat fly into the house proper.

But we did have a young opossum waddle into our garage every night to eat dog food. 

Once again, the oven mitts came in handy.  I scruffed the wild possum, then picked it up supporting its weight on the hand with the oven mitt.  I took it inside to show the hubs.

Me: Look, a possum.

Hubs: I see that.  Is there anything you won't pick up?

Me: Spiders.  I won't pick up spiders.  Or roaches.

Hubs: Good to know.  Now take that possum outside.

Being scruffed and picked up by a human apparently wasn't all that frightening to the possum because it kept coming back for dog food every night.  I'd leave a little bowl out for the possum, but I never picked it up again. 

Oven Mitts: not just for cooking anymore. 

Pigs? We don't need no stinkin' pigs!

A young Pepper before we moved to Chicago













The city of Elmhurst had given us permission to keep our pet pig provided that no one complained.  I couldn't even fathom what anyone might complain about.  Pepper might be the ugliest looking pet anyone had ever seen, but she was quiet, clean, and smart and a much better pet neighbor than a yapping dog or a roaming cat with territorial issues. 

Our landlord was on our side, the city councilman for our ward was on our side, the city manager was on our side, and the friendly neighbors next door--an elderly widow and her morbidly obese, unmarried son who worked the night shift at a radio station--had been big supporters of us bringing our pet pig home from where we'd been boarding her in Florida for two years over fear of the controversy of keeping pot-bellied pigs as pets.

But when I actually brought Pepper home, the sweet neighbors next door morphed into a pair of bizarre sociopaths bent on getting us run out of town. 

They called the police on us.  Since we had permission from the city to have Pepper, no citation was issued.  They made constant calls to the city councilman in our ward and the city manager with claims that our house was filthy, WE were filthy, and our back yard was piled mile high with pig poop.  They also called our landlord.  He hung up on them. 

They went door to door on our street with a petition to kick the pig out of town.  They told everybody that we didn't clean up the pig poop in our yard.  That our yard stank.  They threw trash into our yard.  And they had the gaul to complain that our pig made their yappy min-pin dog bark. 

They told everyone that a pig on the block would lower property values.  In a city council committee meeting they walked in late and tossed a picture of our wildflower garden on the table, saying that this was what our entire yard looked like.  The city council people told me later that they'd just rolled their eyes over that.

I'd been warned by pot-bellied pig enthusiasts in Florida that people could be real asses over miniature pet pigs.  They weren't kidding. 

On the plus side, many sane, rational people rallied to our side.  Our other next door neighbor told the city council that our yard looked like a beautiful park, well kept and nicely groomed.  It did.  Another neighbor who lived behind us said the sociopath duo had a history of firing BB guns and breaking out people's windows and that they'd also violated pet ordinances when they bred Boston Terriers.  The Chicago-Tribune wrote an article about us. 

We publicly invited anyone to visit our house at any time to see for themselves how clean everything was.  Several people took us up on this and stopped by to meet Pepper.  One couple decided to acquire a pet pig before the new law went into effect.  Another sweet lady would bring Pepper carrots to eat. 

Keeping a hog in a small pen on a farm is nothing like keeping a pet miniature pig that lives in the house like a dog and even uses an indoor litter box.  But the crazy people next door insisted that the two were one and the same. 

The situation escalated to the point where the city council decided to write a law banning pot-bellied pigs as pets, but grandfathering in any existing pet pigs and placing restrictions on them such as requiring rabies vaccinations (pigs don't get rabies) and allowing them only two hours of outdoor access per day. 

The crazy people next door continued their campaign to overturn the grandfathering in of existing pigs even though Pepper had now been living in Elmhurst for a YEAR by that point and had been nothing but an asset to the neighborhood.


I would later read a book titled THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR that illuminated how some sociopaths seem like totally normal people but a single incident can set them off and they'll focus their energies on targeting a single individual.  Or in this case, family with a pig.

People wondered why we didn't move.  There was no place to move to.  We couldn't afford to buy a house in the Chicago area.  Finding another landlord who allowed pets would be extremely difficult and many of the surrounding towns and villages banned pet pigs.  So we were stuck.  And Pepper had already lived away from us for TWO years and it had affected both her and me negatively. 

However, being the target of a sociopath's sickness was taking its toll on me, too.

To be continued . . .

Surviving Fire Batons and Twirling Knives

Me twirling knives at Trout Lodge, Potosi, Missouri in the mid 1990s














Baton twirling is a dangerous sport.  Or it used to be. 

When I was in high school we twirled flaming batons that were hot!  And yes, I singed the hair off my arms a few times and caught the burning wick by mistake once and suffered a second degree burn.  But did it keep me out of the half-time show?

No frelling way! 

I smeared the burn with fresh aloe, wrapped my hand, popped a few aspirin, marched out on the football field, and flicked my Bic when it came time for the majorettes' fire-baton routine.  And no one over reacted to the incident, either. 

I also twirled knives.  They're not actually sharp, but the hook on one end impaled my hand once.  Again, I took the injury like Wonder Woman and kept on going. 

Another time, I was hit upside the head in a dark gym by a flying roll of toilet paper during a pep rally where we majorettes were performing a routine with glow-stick batons.  Sure, it took me by surprise and hurt like a son of a gun, but I took my lumps--literally--and kept on twirling.

Lighting up fire batons INSIDE the school was prohibited due to fire regulations.  But not at the MALL.  I auditioned for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus with not one, but two, flaming batons at an indoor mall my senior year of high school.  And won. No one was killed or injured during that performance. 

Another danger with fire batons was having to sling the excess gasoline from them right before they were lit.  The goal was to sling it away from you, not ON you or IN your eye.  Nowadays this kind of twirling is banned in many places, but I began learning to twirl fire when I was TWELVE.  And guess what?  It didn't kill or maim me.

More often than not, I prepped my own batons.  Took the gasoline can, poured enough gas in a big glass jar to cover the wick on the end of the batons, stuck the batons into the gas, and covered the top of the jar with aluminum foil to slow evaporation. 

After the wicks on one end had soaked several hours, they were wrapped tightly in aluminum foil so that the other end could soak.  Sometimes the gas would leak from the foil and run down the shaft of the baton.  Boy, would that ever make your baton slippery when it came time to twirl.

Considering how overprotective everyone is these days, it's kinda laughable to think about middle school and high school kids handling gasoline, cigarette lighters, and flaming batons.  And we'd lacquer our hair with hairspray before performances--also highly flammable. 

But we not only survived, but thrived from handling knives, fire, and gasoline.

Amazing, huh?

Dog Perfume Solves Mystery

Cara the cocker spaniel squeezed through a small hole one day in our privacy fence that we didn't know about.  She gallivanted through town for several hours before I even knew she was gone.  And the kicker: she wasn't wearing her collar. 

When I discovered she was gone, I jumped in the car and drove around the block in an ever widening radius, looking and calling for her. 

No Cara. 

When I got home there was a message on the answering machine from our dog groomer (this was back in 2006 before I had a cell phone).  They had Cara.

Oh my gosh, how had they found her?  Our dog groomer was quite a distance from our house. 

The story they told me was simply amazing. 

Cara had been found running on Quintard Avenue--the main drag through town and the busiest street.  (I almost had heart failure when they told me this--she very easily could have been hit by a car!) 

The people who stopped and picked her up noticed that she had been to a dog groomer recently and they recognized the dog perfume our groomer uses.  The groomer is actually located pretty close to where Cara was found. 

These very nice people took Cara to the groomer and asked if she belonged to one of their clients.  The groomer recognized her (also amazing considering how many dogs they groom and that Cara wasn't wearing her collar) and they were able to look up my phone  number in their records.

So a lost dog was returned to its owner all because of the doggy perfume she was wearing.  I'm tellin' ya, I wish I could make this stuff up.  Life really is stranger than fiction.