sheepdog

Anyone who is a responsible PET owner would not allow their pet animals to run loose and create traffic problems, so I don't think that is too much of a problem. Pets do on occasion accidently get loose though, no matter how careful a person is, so there is always that to watch for. In this area, it is the wild animals that are a big problem. Lately the roads around here are nearly paved with those stupid armidillos. As many of them as I have seen squished on the road, you'd think they'd become extinct. And today with the cheap fiberglass cars we have on the road, even small animal/ car collisions can be very expensive for the driver. Our son hit a racoon with his mini van and did over $2000 worth of damage to the front end of the vehicle. That's crazy for something no bigger than a coon. Where I used to live it was not uncommon at all for deer to get hit on the highway. Even some years back they could really mess up a car, but not nearly as bad as they could now. I've hit 2 or 3 deer, and luckily only one time was there any real noticable damage, I lost a drivers side mirror a couple years ago on our little car, but that was all. (although a month or so later the drivers window disinagrated one day when I just gently closed the door, and I think that was from the deer plowing into it.They used to make some kind of a little gizmo that you could attatch under the fender wall of your car that would supposedly make a whistling noise animals could hear and would get out of the way, but who know's if they really worked or not. Seems like they could hear the engine easier. I know our little dog can recognise the sound of our car three quarters of a mile away when we are coming home.

I dearly love sci-fi/fantasy books, and always head to that section of the local library first thing. I've read so many it's hard to find good new ones, and lately the pickens have gotten really slim. But last week I saw a good large collection of books written by a Terry Goodkind that I have not yet read. I noticed he had written quite a few books, so I picked one out, "Wizzards First Rule" and mentioned on the way home to my hubby that I really hoped the guy was a good writer, since he had so many more books available. I was almost to page 18 when I realized that what I was reading was the book the TV show "Legend of the Seeker" is based on! One of my favorite shows of course! The book was really good, though it was somewhat different than the TV series. Kahlan is the only surviving confessor, and is the actual mother conffesor threw out the book, where as in the series she became mother confessor. Also, in the book,she is afraid to even tell Richard what she is, instead of just being afraid to tell him she can't be his lover. Also, the first book is pretty much covered by the entire tv series, but the books have at least a few sequels that cover ground left out of the tv series. I just finished the second in the series, "Stone of Tears" and I'm not sure how many more there are, but I'm sure going to find out. So if you like the TV series, be sure to check out the books too.

Well, hot sleek slim and sexy it may be, but it sure wouldn't haul many puppy crates! Darn, what a dissapointment, I was ready to go out and buy one, lol, yea, I wish. Why can't they come up with a high gas milage car that has a little cargo space for crying out loud??? I mean really, even people who don't have pups have children and have to go to the grocery store, you need cargo space for other things too.

We like to keep a pretty fair amount of food stuffs in our pantry, you never know what kind of clamity might befall us and we would really need it. But I have not as yet, figured out a way to store flour type supplys. Regular flour, corn meal, pancake mix and cake and cookie mixes, pretty much anything flour based. Grain base products too, like oatmeal. Mine keep getting infested with meal moths. Even when they are put in glass jars with tight fitting lids, somehow the pesky little varmits get in them anyway. They have destroyed an awful lot of our stock pile of food. Anybody have any good ideas on how to prevent them from getting into our food?

I love the idea of encouraging and even seaking out the older people in our communities for volunteer work, and in some instances even some paid consultant or guidences fees paid to them for their expertise and vast knowledge. They can be a vast "databse" if you will for much information. At one of the places I lived on for a few years I had a 90 year old man for a neighbor. I got in the habit of checking on him pretty frequently, and we became good friends. His children lived near by, and they did check on him, but they never took him anywhere or actually did anything with him. I kind of felt bad that he was stuck home all the time. He was quite physically fit, and could get around pretty well for his age. I took him fishing a few times, and to town several times. He was really sharp. I learned a ton of stuff about gardening and how to do things from him. Remember, this man lived back when everybody still road horses to town! It was a great experience for me and I highly advice everyone to develope a healthy respect for the elderly and seek out their guidence. Another benefit of the volunteer work, it is actually benificial to the elderly person. Everybody has to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Having something to look forward to and really, to live for is very important no matter what your age, but it is even a bigger benefit when you are older, and things start weighing you down, like all those aches and pains that come along with old age. But as human age increases and we start living longer, most likely what is going to happen is the government will simply raise the retirement age. If you can't start drawing social security until you are 70, that is 5 to 8 more years that you will have to pay in to the government from your wages, and 5 to 8 more years they will not have to start paying you back all that money they took from your paycheck to start with.

Oh sure, it's probably illegal, but robbery, murder and embezzelment are also illegal. If someone is stalking you, or trying to blackmail or rob you or do anything else to harrass you, do you think they would care if tapping your phone was illegal?

I'm not sure what animal this is the Chinese year of, but around here it has definatly been they year of the snake!Just yesterday, hubby and I were looking around in the building for some hinges we purchased many moons ago, and as I pulled open a drawer in a big cabinet He yelled at me to get back, which of course startled me, I jumped, but I hadn't even seen the snake laying in the drawer all curled up taking a snooze. His yelling scared me worse than the snake did. A few minutes later he said, hey, look in that drawer again, see if the snake is still there. He had just stepped around the corner to the other part of the building and there was another snake crawling across the floor. (yes, I opened the drawer again to see if the other one was still there) A few weeks ago my hired man brought his wife along to help him, He is deathly afraid of snakes, and his wife is just crazy about them. She came walking up to the kennel and said, hey, look what I find, she was carrying a 5 gallon bucket. I figured I knew what it was, but when I looked in the bucket, I calmly stepped back and told her, Ahhh....that is a copperhead!!!! Silly woman had just picked it up and put it in the bucket to show us. She said, gee, I was wondering why it was striking at me! Thank goodness she was wearing tall, heavy rubber boots. I told her she needed to go find a shovel and figure out some way to kill it preferable without getting bit. I normally don't kill the snakes, except poisonous ones like the copperhead. Most of what we see here are black snakes. We have one that has been here for years, he is HUGE! Well over 10 ft long and bigger around than my arm. He's been here so long and we haven't bothered him so that you have to poke him with something to get him to move out of your way. I don't trust him enough to just step over him. But he mostly just hangs out in the barn and the western part of the goat pasture. The only black snake I have killed was one I found a couple years ago, it had crawled into one of my rabbit cages and killed a whole litter of baby bunnies, not tiny one's either, these were almost weaning size. I ran and got my 22 rifle and shot it right in the cage. It really ticked me off. With all the mice around here, he didn't need my rabbits, those are for me to eat. That's generally why I leave the snakes to their own devices, they do eat a lot of annoying rodents. As long as they leave my rabbits alone, I'm fine with them.

Hey, now there's a great idea, using an old bike for a trelis. Recently I saw where someone had used an old bike out in their yard, painted it all black, and had a big flower pot on the seat, it looked really nice they way the had it. Very decorative! My sister in law has a whole garden on her back deck, lots of tomatoe plants mostly, and a few other things. She can really raise a lot of tomatoes that way. I do some container gardening, but not that much since we live out in the country on a farm and have lots of room for a real garden. But I have a lot of big containers that we used to get goat mineral licks in, and they make fantastic garden tubs for plants. (after of course, you remove all traces of salt from them) I also like to paint up old water buckets the dogs have battered up for flowers, a bit of paint and you have some pretty interesting containers. Not much is wasted here either. Like you, I save all sorts of plastic containers, to start seeds in and all that sort of thing. Another handy thing to do is cut the tops off of milk or especially any larger clear tall plastic containers, like the 2 liter soda bottles. Use a thumb tack and stick them to a short scrap of 2X4 in the spring when you put your plants out early, in case of a frost, you can cover them up quickly.

ROTFLMAO!!! PFS (Puppet face syndrome),Oh, now that is funny. But seriously, why is everybody always picking on SM? And since I don't know what he looks like anyway, with or without, I couldn't say how he would look. My guess is that he is rip roaring handsome and that's why everybody is always picking on him, they are just jealous!

Oh EASY!!! I could live without mine for months at a time. Only time I need one is when I do a road trip, and I need to call home. Collect calls are WAY out of sight, price wise. And recently I noticed it is nearly impossible to find a pay phone, and sometimes when you do you have to have a calling card of some sort to even use it. Very frustrating!They would come in handy if you were driving down the road and had your car break down. That is of course, if you knew who to call when it did. Honestly, if I wasn't trying to run a business, I'm not sure I would have any kind of telephone. I really hate getting calls on the old home phone, nobody calls unless I am busy doing something that I don't want to be disturbed while I'm doing it. I'd actually rather just do everything with email.

Well, I guess it depends on how much money, and how much happiness! And of course, if it is money that makes you happy, you wouldn't chose to be broke now would you? Personally, I find it extremely difficult to be happy when I don't know how I'm going to pay for the next load of dog food. I get depressed when things get "tight" here. And while I don't mind driving an old car with a gazzillion miles on it, and don't mind shopping at swap meets, and thrift stores, and discount grocery stores, not having any money is a REAL drag. It would seem on the other hand, if you had a LOT of money, it would be hard to be unhappy. If something was bothering you, just buy your way out of the problem.

Tax may well go up, but medical insurance bills would plummet. Currently I pay Ł9.60 per month for the NHS. To get the same level of care in the US I have just been quoted a whopping $424.15 (Ł260) per month!!! May go up??????? LOL, yea right. You know they will go up, HUGELY!!! Obummer has allready increased several different taxes. And even if insurance premiums do go down, what if you don't have insurance now, and therefore are paying NO insurance premiums? Droping rates aren't going to help anybody that wasn't paying anything before. It is still going to take a big huge bite out of everyone's income. Obummer's idea of forced health insurance (like car insurance is now) is really going to hurt.

I am getting extrememly annoyed with my Wild Blue satalite internet service. It was great when I first got it, I loved the speed, but lately it seems to get slower all the time. But that is not what is truely ticking me off. For a lone time they were charging my credit card $55 per month. One day I happened to notice it was $62. I checked back several statements and saw that they had charged me that for a couple months. I called to ask them why and they said it was for some virus protection or some such thing. I told them I did not use their virius program, that I had my own, and they promised to refund the balance. On the next months statement, not only did they not refund the balance, they charged me the $62 AGAIN! I was pretty hot when I called them the second time. They once again promised to refund it, and sure enough, my next credit card statement came, ANOTHER $62 charge, and no refund. I finally had to go threw the credit card company to protest the charges and I did finally got my refund back. Well, once again, last month I saw they had once again charged me the $62, I really got hot this time and told them in no uncertain terms I was not going to be put up with being overcharged. They once again promised to take it off, and low and behold, the next month there was the same charge again. And no refund. I sure hope I can find a different internet service provider when my 2 year contract with those cheats is over with! Unfortunatly, I live in the boondocks, and don't have a lot of other options. So, if you have Wild Blue automaticly put on your credit card, make sure you check your statements every month so you don't get ripped off too. I surely can't be the only one they are scamming.

Congradulations to Alex! Now, if only a pay raise came with the promotion, then even I would be jealous! LOL

I saw Obummers speach last night, I have to say, I was fuming pretty good by the time it was over. He did talk about MANDATORY health insurance, just like we have mandatory car insurance now. This is just crazy. It's the middle income people that will be strangled by this new regulations. Health insurance is EXPENSIVE!!! Many hundreds of dollars per month, when most people are struggling to deal with the inflated economy, job losses, or job cut backs, the high cost of living. Being forced to pay out even more of your income is just crazy. Taxes going up, mandatory insurance, pretty soon we will be working for absolutly nothing but to exist. The politicians have it all wrong as usual. The problem with health care in the United States is not the lack of good care, or the lack of insurance, it's the bloody dang cost of hospital visits. It should NOT cost a years worth of your income for a 1 day hospital stay. If hospital costs weren't so inflated, people wouldn't even need insurance. In the event of an emergency, reasonable rates would allow monthly payments to cover the bills. A short stay in the hospital should not cost more than a new car that you will drive for years. In some cases, the bills for a hospital stay are more than a persons own home is worth. This is just NUTS!!!

I have to say, if anyone is going to want to plant even just a little bit of garden, the tomatoe is the one plant a person really needs to learn to grow. There is just nothing that beats the flavor of a home grown tomatoe. There is an old saying, "Only 2 things money can't buy is true love and home grown tomatoes!" Another important thing about growing tomatoes is that they have to be staked up. If the plants are left to their own devices, they will spread out flat on the ground and contact with the ground will cause the tomatoes to rot. Even staking them can be a challange, some people use a single wooden stake driven into the ground, but you have to keep a close eye on them and the tomatoes will still try their best to grow out of or fall out of the stakes. You also have to have something to tie the plant to the stake, and great care has to be taken in picking material to use for the ties. It has to be soft so it doesn't cut into the vines. Many people recomend old panty hose. Since I don't wear those, haven't tried that. But I used a lot of those rag rugs for the dogs, and when they come apart, I use those cloth strings for the tomatoes, that seems to work pretty good. Another good method for staking tomatoes is a circle of woven wire fiedl fence. Make a circle about a foot and a half or so around, and as the plant grows, encourage the branches to come out of the squares of the field fence. They also make a wire tomatoe cage with 2 or 3 circles of wire, and 3 or 4 wires coming down that you can push into the ground, but these tend to be a bit flimisy and if the plant gets big and heavy, they can tip over.

I've been awakened in the night for a lot of body complaints, like acid reflux, bladder problems, intestinal flare ups, and sometimes in the early morning hours I have to get up because I have terrible hip pains and can't lay in bed any longer, but the other night, I actually started sneezing in my sleep. I sneezed several times, it finally actually woke me up. Sneezed several more times after I was awake enough to realize what was happening. Had to make a run for the bathroom to blow my nose, it was just pouring. I went back to bed, and in the morning my nose was as it usually is, dried up like it had been poured full on concrete, which is normal for me anyway. I was just wondering if this is normal? Never happened to me before. Sure seemed weird.

I was always told that the potatoes you buy in the store are treated with something to prevent them from sprouting in long term storage, so you couldn't use them for seed. But they do seem to sprout somewhat if you leave them set long enough, but whether they would actually grow and produce potatoes, I don't know, I suspect they wouldn't grow real well.As far as vegtables in the store, many of them are from hybrid plants. They are bred for disease resistance, a particular shape, or productivity, depending on the type of vegtables we are talking about. Hybrids do not reproduce from seed, unfortunatly. Since they have to be grown in mass for consumer consumption, certain traits are important for the mass plantings and mechanical harvesting that is done with so many crops. It's a shame that tomatoes have to be bred for commercial harvest, and they forget about taste so they can be picked and shipped. I don't even bother eating tomatoes unless I grow them myself, they have absolutly no taste when you buy the store bought ones. I do feel sorry for people that are dependant on grocery stores for all their food. Sadly, most have no idea what they are missing!

How?s this for incentive to work and help support the children you helped to bring into this world? For those men who are chronic dead beats who refuse to work, NEUTER them! That?s right, snip snip, no more testicles. If they aren?t being responsible for the children they have already brought into this world, why on earth let them screw up any more babies they won?t take care of? Now, I?m not talking about the poor guy that has a run of bad luck, looses his job and gets a few months behind, I mean the hard core, worthless jerks who don?t care one whit about their kids, or make any effort at all to help them year after year after year.Humans have no problem with castrating males of other species, dogs, horses, bulls, all are cut for the convenience of man, to render them incapable of reproduction, in order to make them more docile in the case of the stud horse, or taste better in the case of bulls, or to correct bad behavior problems in dogs. Can?t imagine why cutting human males to make them stop chasing every *BLEEP* in the neighborhood that is in heat could be a problem!

I'm not really sure. On one hand, I never seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done I really need to do. And I have to spend an awful lot of time on the computer anyway, just answering emails, putting on classified ads, and working on my web site, so I really don't have any urges to spend even more time in front of this infernal machine. I actually wish most of the time that I didn't have to spend as much time on the computer as I do now, so for that part I'd say no, I might not continue to post here if not for the paid web site hosting. But on the other hand, the folks here at Xisto are really a pretty good bunch of people. I do admit, sometimes I feel rather out of my element here, with so many "youngsters" here, and a serious lacking of old foggies, dog breeders, farmers, rednecks, and the types of people I normally hang with. So being here is really good for broadening my horizons, learning about life in other places in the world and that sort of stuff. And since my normal crowd is like me in the lacking of computer skills, this place is a great wealth of information for me in that department. So.....since you just had yes or no, I guess that means I can't vote maybe???

I have done some reasearch into this subject myself, and so far have found it to be to expensive to be worth the effort to take it upon my self to do. Since purchasers can use a credit card threw Pay Pal to pay you, I decided it was easier and cheaper just to deal with Pay Pal. Is there any particular reason you want to avoid Pay Pal?I did also talk to my bank about this subject, that might be a good place for you to start with your own personal bank.

At the risk of sounding stupid, (which by now I'm sure ya'll know is probably the case anyway) what is is exactly that scans the iris? It would seem to me to be an easy way to damage one's eyes, even if it is just light, that close and that intense I can't see it being particularly safe, and as someone else mentioned, even if it was safe it could be tampered with to actually hurt someone. Even if it doesn't appear to be dangerous now, we always discover 10 or 20 years down the road that it may cause cancer or something to that effect after the technoligy has been around and in common use for some time.

A friend of mine sent me an email the other day with a wmv file attatched so I don't have the link to the story, but it was on Ch 13 out of Memphis, Tenn.It seems that they now have cell phone spy ware that can let someone listen in to all your calls, incoming and out going. It sends a message to the spy every time you get a call, and it even sends all copies of any text messages you write or recieve to that person also. And if that wasn't bad enough, the person can even remotely turn on the speaker in your cell phone, so even if you are not on a call they can listen in to you! And if all that wasn't bad enough, they can also pinpoint your exact location and SEE YOU with satalites, in real time. They know exactly what you are doing at all times. This is really awful. There is just no such thing as privacy anymore.

Pets do the darndest things. We have surely seen the favorite segments on David Letterman with the ?Stupid Pet Tricks.? And all the video?s on U Tube, and Americans Funniest Home Video?s that people have made of their pets doing strange things, sometimes tricks, and other times just odd, (or even typical animal behavior) It might be fun to share some of our own pet?s little stunts. Let me tell you Lottie?s story. She pulled several really great stunts in the years we had her. Lottie was our original English Bulldog. She was an old dog when we got her, her previous owner figured she was done with having pups, but she did fool them and actually had a litter for us. Unlike many bulldogs, Lottie was an excellent mother dog. She raised her own 3 pups and even fostered two Bullmastiff pups to boot. Bulldogs are notorious for mashing their pups, laying one them and suffocating them, or just in general not taking care of them. But not Lottie. She would however, scare the daylights out of us every time she went back to her pups after being outside for a potty break. She would go to her pups, nose around all 5 of them, seeing where they were, she sometimes pushed them around a bit with her nose until she got them all where she wanted them, and then BOOM! She would jerk all 4 feet up in the air and just crash down amongst them. I would absolutely freak out, knowing full well she surly must of mashed at least half of them, but she never not one time ever hurt one. It was really amazing to see. Now, as I have mentioned, Lottie was an old dog. At about 10-11 years of age, which truly is ancient for a Bulldog, she certainly had her share of infirmities. Her eyesight was not the best in the world, and she moved with the slowest walk you ever saw. Those splayed out bulldog elbows and the turned in toes made her walk extremely slow. It would sometimes take her half an hour to shuffle back and forth from the house to the kennel, even though it was only a few hundred yards. One day the hubby and I came home from a puppy selling trip. On the way back we had stopped at a roadside store that had lots of cool concrete statues. I found a pair of concrete Terrier statues that I thought would look really great out at the end of our driveway, so I had bought them, and when we got home and were unloading the car, I had to move one of them out to get to some other stuff. I just set it on the ground a little way away from the car. A short time later, Lottie came waddling up from the kennel to see what we were up to. She was retired by then and had the run of the place. When she got about 10 feet from the concrete dog, she just froze for a second. Her hair bristled up, and she perked up, and then suddenly, out of the blue, she just attacked the statue, going straight for it?s tail. She chomped right down on that hard concrete tail! Failing to get a response from the statue, and I suppose suddenly realizing the error of her ways, she backed off, took a good, though rather surprised look at it, and then you could practicly her hear go Hummph, and walked away looking totally disgusted, and quite frankly, embarrassed by her case of mistaken identity. I?m pretty sure she knew we were standing there laughing our butts off at her too. Lottie?s other surprise for us came one day when our cattle got out. We had a big, and I do mean BIG Charloais bull we were raising to butcher. Since we are not fans of ?baby beef? we let him get really huge, he was pretty close to 1600lbs. Now, as I have already mentioned, Lottie was a really slow mover. She never went anywhere in a hurry. She barely seemed to even be able to move. The hired man used to laugh at her all the time as she shuffled around the yard. But then she saw the bull. And I swear, it looked like that old dog got shot out of a cannon! She charged that bull, dead run, flat out, she seemed to fly across the yard after him! You could hear her teeth popping on his heels all the way across the yard. Bull apparently heard it too, because he bolted out of there like the devil himself was after him. That dog scared that huge bull to death, he was more than happy to head back out to the pasture, we barely got the gate open in time for him to save himself from the killer antique bulldog! But the shear look of total shock on the hired mans face was the real kicker. He just stood there with his mouth hanging open, not believing what he had just witnessed.

I can't believe with 58,085 members at Xisto, we have so few gardners!I'd really like to swap tips and tricks with other fellow gardners. My question now is how to prevent black spot on Zinnias. They are such pretty flowers and come in so many great colors, but they always get ugly looking black spots on the folage by mid season, sometimes even earlier. Other than the black spot and my total inability to get a good seed mix in my flower bed, it's doing really well this year. But somehow I managed to get most of the orange cosmos on only the first half of the bed I hand seeded. It's really thick on the first part of the bed and non existant on about half of it. The orange cosmos is a new addition to the flower bed, I did have the purple shades and a few white cosmos allready in the flower bed. I raised a small bed of it all by it's self last year and worked it hard to save all the seed from it so I could put it in the big flower bed this year. I manage to save a whole quart jar of it's seed. Now that I have the orange going good, I need to work on my white cosmos. It seems to have less and less of it growing every year. And I really could use a bit more white in the bed. I also seem to have trouble getting any merrigolds to thrive in the mix. I just get a few even though I do save a lot of seed from different varieties of merrigolds. I'm thinking maybe a lot of varieties are hybred and won't grow back from saved seed?????