We are waiting and hoping for rain today. It's extremely dry right now, and while that seems to be agreeing with horse and donkey hooves, the pastures need a good deep drink.
Leaves are falling, acorns are falling (and being browsed by busy squirrels, deer, and horses), and the sky is the autumn blue I love best.
The pollinator garden is totally planted as of yesterday. I'll write more about that later.
Right now the sun has broken through the clouds, birds are singing and tweeting through the open front door, Corgis are chomping down on their Himalayan yak milk dog chews, and the cats are sleeping in various spots. It's a nice day.
A couple of sad things:
Baloo's basic obedience class and Bear's Canine Good Citizen class were both canceled due to not having enough people/dogs signed up. I'm sorry we won't be going; Bear loved his basic obedience class last year and also his Canine Good Citizen class. We were unable to take the final test to get his certificate due to my schedule, so I had hoped going through that class again would be a good review and we'd take the test at the end. Baloo is doing well with basics - still tweaking his "down" and working on the "stay" but he is smart and will work hard to earn his treats.
The sadder thing is about the kittens. We learned that to be truly safe bringing in feral kittens to our home with other cats we would need to have the kittens tested and retested for FeLV and FIV. Until the second test results were done (in a few months) we would have to keep the kittens separated from our other four cats. Unfortunately we don't have a way to do this for the length of time we'd need to and so we've decided to let the kittens go to another home. I'm not sure what we would do if they ended up testing positive. It's generally recommended that positive-testing cats not be housed with those who are negative for these two diseases.
Sending out good thoughts to New Orleans area as Hurricane Nate moves in.
