Stress and good news

On the teaching front nothing too unusual to report. I am close to exhaustion now with all of the demands of teaching. It has been a good year so far overall but most days teaching is a little like dancing through a lion's den while juggling. I am trying to motivate all of the students and get them excited about learning science with mixed results. Many really get into the lessons but I have had discussions with several students who don't complete assignments or bring their books to class. These students come into class with the attitude "make me learn". I have changed seating assignments for a few of them and called several parents concerning their lack of effort. It is the same old story. 95% of my students are trying hard to learn the material and the other 5% are just marking time until they get out of high school and move on to another phase of their life where they once again will have no goals and no ambition to succeed. My impossible task here is to keep the good students on track and interested, to keep those few who are just taking up space from interfering with the learning of others, and to draw some of these recalcitrant students into the motivated camp. It requires a huge investment of energy to do this. Throw in the little irritations like having students pulled out of class for ring sales and similar meetings, losing students from class due to sporting events, and having a science FCAT progress monitoring test dumped on us this Friday with
no warning and the stress level has been over the top this week. With the progress monitoring test I have had to revise my lesson plans at the last minute to accomodate the time needed for administering the test. All of this is occurring while students who need extra help from me bombard me with questions all period. It can be quite overwhelming and every once in awhile I have to just step back and take a few deep breaths before jumping back into the fray.

Last week i got a call from a coworker here who needed help with finding a home for two Hunter hounds who had been found lying exhausted in the road near her home. She put out posters but no one responded. She lives in a condo and had no room to keep the dogs so she took them to our county kill shelter. Normally they would keep them for 40-60 days before euthanizing them but our city shelter is closing at the end of the month due to a lack of funds and they have been flooding the other shelters to capacity with their animals. These dogs, whom we named Elvis and Priscilla, had roughly a week before they would have been killed. I swore this would not happen to them so my wife and I spent all weekend calling and emailing around 30 rescue groups in our state. They were all overflowing with dogs like my own rescue group and had no available foster families. One email I sent to a friend finally paid off and a local woman offered to take Elvis and Priscilla in and to bring them into Petco on Sundays so my group could try to adopt them out to permanent homes. My wife and I adopted them out of the shelter yesterday and took them to our vet for a bath, exam, and tests. They go back Monday for their spay/neuters and rabies shots. Elvis and Priscilla apparently escaped from a deer hunter in the area. They are both the sweetest dogs who seem to really appreciate any attention. I got a huge tongue slurp across my face the first time I met them. I am really a cat person but I couldn't see these wonderful guys put to sleep just because they had no one who wanted them. The photo at the top of this post shows them at the vet just before we took them (they actually dragged us!) for a walk. Elvis and Priscilla are now with their foster mom and if all goes well we will be looking for a home for them very soon.

Photo of Gabriella

Here is the Gabriella I told about in the previous post. She came through the surgery fine. They amputated about half of her tail. She has never been handled before and is obviously pretty overwhelmed. My wife met her foster parent at the vet and took this photo. I think my student and her folks will actually wind up keeping Gabriella forever but the fostering will be a trial period. The foster mom really seemed to care about Gabriella and was very concerned about providing a wonderful indoor home for her. It's always so great when stories like this one has a happy ending!

Gabriella

I got a call from one of our deans this morning with an "interesting" problem. It seems that a student arrived at school and heard a cat crying under the engine hood. When he opened the hood a kitten sprang out and ran under another car. The dean and other staff members spent the next hour chasing this cat around the parking lot before finally catching it. They knew I did volunteer animal rescue work so he called me for assistance instead of our local "kill" animal shelter (thank goodness!).

I was teaching a class at the time so I called my wife and asked her to take off work and come get the cat. When class was over I hurried down and brought the kitten back to my room to evaluate it. The poor little gray tabby was scared to death and obviously had never been held by a human before. I immediately discovered the cat had a badly broken tail and was in pain so I put it back in the box quickly and put in towels and water. I didn't want to cause any further pain or panic so I couldn't find out the sex then. The cat calmed down a little bit after awhile and the wife came in about an hour to pick it up.

I told my wife to spare no expense since the cat may have other injuries so she took the little one to our personal vet, Dr. Russell, a great cat vet here. I called Karen later for an update. It seems that the cat is a female and about 5 weeks old. One of my students, Gabe, requested we name it after him. Since the kitten turned out to be a "she" we are calling her Gabriella. She weighs 1.1 pounds. Gabriella is in surgery now to amputate about a quarter of her tail. She was dewormed as well. Other than that she seems to be in good health. They will keep her overnight and we get her back tomorrow. I am not certain what we will do next. Several teachers at school have shown an interest in adopting Gabriella. She needs to be worked with a lot. She will also need vaccines and a spay. We are working with our rescue group Goliath and Bebe's World to find a foster parent and we will adopt her out to a good home that will keep her indoors as soon as she is ready. My group and their vet will give the necessary vaccinations and spay. I would take her myself but with 9 cats and a bunny in a mobile home we are maxed out. With her rough start in life I feel that I owe her a wonderful home so I will be very picky about selecting the home she will eventually be adopted to. She certainly deserves a little happiness after what she went through. We are waiving the adoption fee if we find a great home for Gabriella. I'll post photos soon.

Beau and Velvet

This afternoon Beau and Velvet were lying around. Velvet had his paw out and his son Beau had his head lying across it. How sweet is that?

We adopted them from Goliath and Bebe's World 2 years ago. It was after Daddy Cat died and we were just going to take the dad Velvet. They offered both of them for one adoption fee and I am SO happy that we took both of them. They were part of a local tragedy called the '50 cat rescue'. A lady who hoarded cats had to move in with her daughter and they dumped all of the cats with the rescue group. Goliath and Bebe's World had to really hustle. All of the cats were eventually adopted, going to families all over the state.

Our two guys are really nice. Velvet is sitting here on the arm of my chair as I write this. He is the proverbial 'lap cat' who constantly follows me around. Beau, or "Crazy Beau" as we call him, is a kitten at heart. He loves to carry foam balls around and toss them in the air.

Viscount Peter

We got Peter from the local kill shelter. He was the only bunny there, placed in the back in a bare wire cage. They had given him what looked like grass clippings to eat and he had no water. The dogs in the next room were all barking and Peter was scared to death. Even though he had obviously never been handled or let out of a cage before, when I opened the cage top and placed my hand into it, he came running over and nuzzled my fingers. It took maybe two seconds before I looked at the wife and said "We are taking him out of this hellhole". I found out from them that a young couple dumped Peter off when they moved to an apartment that didn't allow pets.

Now Peter has the more regal title Viscount Peter. He is a real sweet little guy. Here is a short video of him.

It's Called Acting, My Dear!

My better half and I were adopting out cats at Petco for our rescue group when I got the strangest request. Our president had gotten word that a chihuahua mix dog was dumped at the local kill shelter by a cretin. Since the dog had a bad knee and was 7 years old the chances of his being euthanized was excellent. The head of the humane shelter is a twit who refuses to work with any of the local rescue groups since she feels they are competing with the shelter. She is a very mean-spirited, nasty person who would rather kill animals than see them adopted. I was asked to go in, wearing my rescue group shirt, and somehow adopt this dog so the group could get it proper medical attention and then later find a good home for him.

The nasty woman grilled me about my affiliation with the group. "Oh, my wife volunteers for the group but I'm here because my good friend (never met him before, sorry!) had dumped this precious dog that I had bonded deeply with and I wanted to adopt my longtime buddy and take him home. The dog, Kiwi, played his part by licking my face when I held him up. "Oh, I missed you so much, you little scoundrel!" (never met Kiwi before, either!) "You are going to be SO happy in your new home! How horrible that Robert had dumped you. (that's about the only truthful thing I had said so far) " About 10 more minutes of complete bulls**t along this line and the head lady was convinced I had known Kiwi and his former owner for years. I signed the papers and strode out with Kiwi. The little dog now is with the head of our group and will see the vet Monday. If all goes well in a few weeks he will be able to go to a great family. As for me, I will just take a little bow, knowing that this was a better performance than any of my roles in little theater productions over the years, and for a much better cause. As the character in Saturday Night Live said, "It's ACTING!!" The funniest and most ironic thing about this whole idiotic episode is that when they brought out Kiwi into the main office he promptly pooped all over their nice clean floor. Now THAT was true acting!!

Freddie Mercury

Freddie has really come a long ways in the past two years here. From completely feral to somewhat shy is quite an accomplishment. He even lets Karen pet him occasionally but Freddie is still a daddy's boy. He watches the other cats and when one of them comes up to be petted he trots along beside them and demands his share of petting. Here is a nice picture of him relaxing on the couch. When we first got him he spent most of his time under the bed.