Yes Virginia, Santa's deer are real!

I was walking my dog when from the corner of my eye

two tiny reindeer I was sure I did spy

then out of my peripheral vision I knew

on the side of that house were another two 

they seemed solid, no moving, I thought they were fakes

then the snow started falling, magical Christmasy flakes

Suddenly the deer sprang from that place

you should have seen the look on my face

 

Then those deer turned towards my dog

and started to hop, one started to jo

they bound through the yard, the biggest one flew

I grabbed my camera, and that's when I knew

Santa was here, in my neighborhood early

he was spying it out, one reindeer seemed surly

he stared at my dog and snorted a bit

my dog started barking, so Rudy's snorting would quit

They had a conversation, they talked for awhile

then my little pooch started to smile

I caught a few words, "can't go", and "need help"

my pooch headed towards home, she barked with a yelp

she was so excited, seems she had a plan

if Santa needed some help, she was his woMAN!  

We returned to our house, and when we went inside

my hound ran up the stairs, came back down with deer pride 

then a loud noise came from my living room

I ran cross the house, I ran with a zoom

I saw my dog ju she pounced and she ran

Practicing, seems my dog had a Santa Claus plan

So when you look up in the sky

this Christmas Eve, 

you just might see something, 

that you won't believe    

Leading that sleigh

will be my good girl

she'll fly round the world

with Santa, she'll hurl!   

 

watch a hero in action

Hi, this fall has been a really busy one for me and I have neglected this blog.

It took the enclosed video to get me back to blogging.

I am incensed at times by bullies.  The kind of bully who treats animals in a way that is cruel and inhumane makes me want to SCREAM and is the most cowardly of all!  After all, they have total disregard for the feelings of a living being and that is deplorable!

HOW can anyone be so callous?  This story is really about a hero.  A man who walks the walk.  Who helps the helpless.  This is a tough video, but watch the whole thing. The wonderful thing about a story well told is a happy ending.  This one has a wonderful ending.  But there are literally hundreds of thousands of BILLYS out there waiting for a hero to rescue him or her. 

  http://chill.com/Ronda_Bertey/post/b17192342339415e891b2d8a27446151/heartwarming-rescue-video-will-make-you-cry-meet-billy-rescued-from-a-puppy-mill

Please consider an end of year donation to help these animals who have no voice. Seriously, ten dollars feeds a dog or cat that has been abused, think what you could do to bring some light to a little defenseless life. 

Water from the hose...

From Spring 2010, just a reminder of a favorite spring and a favorite little buddy.  Might be time to start thinking about a new addition to the family again...

"We have had a cold, rainy, snowy, blowy spring here in Colorado which has made everything lush and green and the trees have been flowering powerfully and then suddenly the past two days have reached into the eighties. It feels like Summer! I spent much of the day planting my veggies and herbs. My favorite basil and cilantro will be great in recipes this summer! We got four heirloom tomato plants which are going to respectively produce black, yellow, green with yellow stripes and red with orange stripes. We were going to opt for the white tomatoes, but were just having a hard time imagining them in a salad. I am pretty sure I am going back to get them this week. My curiosity is peaked and there are still some sunny spots out there.

As I work in my gardens and yard, it is often that I am shadowed by either my Italian Greyhound (Toots aka Batman) or my little Tonkinese Manx cat (Pwowie and the fact that she is a manx is why she has just a tuft where most cats have tails). Toots will generally recline within feet of where I work if there is a nice, shady tree to spend time under, but Pwowie is fairly insistent about remaining under foot and exploring and examining the slightest changes in her territory. She has a large rock in my front garden that is her outpost, where she watches the world go by, called Pride Rock, but if I'm working in the yard, she simply must come and oversee.

After working in the vegetable garden it was time to pot some flowers in the front pots to adorn our wonderful front porch, where we like to sit and take in evening and is my outside writing office often during the day. My mind drifted as I listened to Hall & Oates covers on my iphone (by THE BIRD AND THE BEE, which I highly recommend) and watched my cat following me from place to place as though she were really doing something to assist rather than just sniffing everything and looking at me curiously. After potting several pots and making a wonderful mess on the porch, I hosed it off and filled the watering cans getting ready to tackle my next project.

As I came around the corner, back up onto the porch I caught my little buddy Pwowie in the act of taking a cooling summer drink off the freshly filled watering can and I was suddenly reminded of two things; illustrations in Beatrix Potter's wonderful Peter Rabbit books and those long ago days as a boy when "stolen" drinks from the hoses connected to houses up and down the street was simply the premium refreshment, even rivaling many a mom's lemonade or Kool-aid (though for me, NOTHING rivaled grape Kool-aid!)

I remember summer days when we came home so hot from our adventures in the fields, at the fishing holes or riding in our gang on our stingrays when we felt like we were somewhere near Hades. The August sun baked the skin a dark brown and parched the throat so dry. The water that ran in the ditches was cool on our feet and fun to play in with hours of digging out holes where crawdads backed in trying to get away from a bunch of rascals or having water skipper races, where we each picked ours and tracked it up or down the ditch as it skittered across the top of the water either going with the flow or racing upstream against it. But somehow we all knew the chocolate milk looking water wasn't water we needed to quench our unbearable thirst. So we would hustle to one of our houses and turn the water on at the spigot and wait until it ran all the sun-heated water out of the hose and went cool to cold. Then we would drink so deeply that our stomachs would bloat, impatiently pushing each other aside to get a drink and invariably turning it into a cooling water fight, with the lucky one in control of the hose tethered to the house and hose as we scrambled to find other sources to drench him or her and steal away the hose. There simply has never been a more refreshing drink of water in my life that those. The water flowing out of that hose was like nectar.

So, this summer as I toil in the gardens, I will make sure there is plenty of cool water for my little buddy in the watering can and I will be drinking from the hose. Now I am off to my favorite gardening center to pick up some white tomatoes and I just thought of a place where I could put a catnip plant for Pwowie."

Bringing back the Chronicles of the Squirrels...?

It looks like another spring of Squirrel mania.  Yesterday I spotted three when the woodpecker was taking great liberty with my chimney.  I think I spy a nest, meaning there will be another gang.  My Italian Greyhound, Tootsie aka Batman is keeping a vigilant eye on the back windows.  Please reference the word cloud, click 'squirrels' or 'critter count' to see my saga in the past if you are not familiar.  Somehow, someway, this is all going to be a book someday.

What kind of squirrel capers would you like to read about?  OR, do you suggest to leave this subject be and find another saga? 

Signs of SPRING!

It is cold, snowy and blowy outside.  

For the past week, this little ladybug has been hanging around the kitchen.  She caught a ride on my sleeve for about an hour before I noticed her and returned her to the windowsill.  

Suddenly it occurred to me that she might be thirsty, so I gave her a droplet of water.  She stayed next to it sipping for a long, long time.

  NOW, here is my question; WHY do I assume it is a SHE?  Because it is a Ladybug!  

BUT, there have to be HE Ladybugs too... 

Anyway, just seeing this beautiful little creature is a reminder that spring is around the corner, and maybe even as important, we might have aphids!

Super Squirrels

Okay, I am about to throw in the towel and spring has just begun.

In the past (see the word cloud on the right for squirrel entries) I have battled the elements in my own yard kindly, especially when it comes to the DOGGONE PEACH AND APPLE LOVING SQUIRRELS using a humane trap to relocate them and tasty enticements leading away from my yard toward the open space to try to rid my yard of these crazy, chattering creatures. This way of treating them has backfired on me several times. Those humane traps have also trapped two raccoons (man those dudes are nasty when they are mad), three birds, countless squirrels, our cat and once the neighbor's cat too!

My main goal has been to preserve the end of summer preserves (hundreds of prized peaches and apples) not to mention keeping them from raiding our vegetable garden.

I wouldn't even mind if the fussy, fuzzy varmints had one or two pieces of fruit... problem is the squirrels don't play fair. They wait until my trees are bowing low with the "fruits" of my labor and then climb up into the tree, take a bite, throw the peach, take a bite, throw the peach, take a bite, throw the peach... In one day they will throw twenty peaches to the lawn below. We are not going to eat a peach that has been munched on by a varmint who might be carrying the plague. SO, what to do?

Here's what caused me to think I might throw in the towel and let the squirrels win (problem is Tootsie never will). I was up EARLY this morning because I couldn't sleep, because at VERY first light a woodpecker decided the metal on my chimney was the best way to attract a female. Trouble is we have two chimneys and it seems two males were playing their own version of "dueling banjos" on both sides of my house.

As I crept around outside armed with pebbles to toss at MY OWN HOUSE to ward them off, I realized how cold it was because I was wearing sandles, boxers and a t-shirt. AND OF COURSE, my next door neighbor just decided to go for an early morning jog at the same moment I was hurling pebbles at MY OWN HOUSE to scare off the wood peckers. She laughed into her fist and started jogging... Oh humiliation.

As I tried to get into the back door I realized I had let it lock behind me. Now I had to do the unthinkable. Trudge around to the front of the house where of course about ten cars went by on their way to work as I stood in my driveway trying to remember the garage code. DID I MENTION I WAS IN BOXERS?

I finally remembered the code, the same code as my high school locker, DUH!

Then I finally got a cup of French Pressed - French Roast, which now wasn't as hot as I like it, settled onto the couch in my office ready to pull my laptop open, begin some writing when TOOTSIE, my dog, went nuts.

Right outside my office window were, 1, 2, 3, 4... are you kidding me 5 squirrels chasing each other around the yard, each running up a peach tree and staking it out as if to say, "YOU JUST WAIT, WHEN THERE IS LOW HANGING FRUIT HERE, I WILL CAUSE MAYHEM FOR THAT WEIRDO IN THE BOXER SHORTS!"

When this happens there is no calming Tootsie down. She has to go out there and tree the squirrels, look straight up, BARK! look to the window to see if I understand what is happening out there, BARK! Look to my neighbor who is standing at her glass back door trying to figure out why my dog is barking and surely wondering why I was circling the lawn, throwing pebbles at MY OWN HOUSE and did I mention wearing boxers? She looks at me standing in the window looking at my BARKING dog and just frowns and nods her head. Did I mention I was standing at the window (the whole length of my office) wearing boxers?

I counted 5 squirrels treed with my shivering greyhound beneath them, running from tree to tree to tree to make sure none escaped. Then I heard # 6 and I believe #7 on the roof right over my head. I leaned as hard as I could on the window without going through it, looking upward to see if they were bungee jumping off the drainspout and of course as I pulled myself back off the window I noticed the three children who live behind me with their frowning, nodding mother were all pointing and laughing at me. Did I mention I was wearing boxers?

He Blinded me with Science

Steve Spangler is having a contest of sorts on his facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/stevespangler

Here is my entry for Science Fair Disaster:

When I was in fourth grade I designed a science fair project to show photosynthesis with bean sprouts, dixie cups and good soil. Some ten bean sprouts were distributed around the house in varying humidity and li...ght situations. I was very excited, using my Childcraft and Brittanicas for research as well as the public library books and worked really, really hard on it. Three of the sprouts were devoured by my guinea pigs and almost all of the others were tampered with by my older brother (he dug the bean seeds out and replaced them with marbles). The ones that were present on window sills etc were left alone and seemed to be doing very well, so I assumed my project was on track. Ten days went by before I knew what was going on it was time to gather my research and show the world at school. Much to my dismay eight of the ten had NO growth, except for the nubs left by the guinea pigs. I was so panicked. I wrote a note explaining to the viewers at the science fair that somehow seven out of ten of the beans had become marbles and explained what the guinea pigs did.


For extra credit I debunked the myth of the Sea Monkey by showing a report on brine shrimp. YEARS later, I included the story in my chapter book series and soon will have a comic book series published that was inspired by these events. The title: The Sea Monkey That Ate My Big Brother!

P.S. as a father, I shared this story with my son who did the same bean seed in a cup science experiment. This time, no guinea pigs, no big brothers tampering!

UNBELIEVABLE PHOTOGRAPHY!

Sometimes you find something, suggested by a friend, that you simply cannot keep to yourself. I have always enjoyed taking pictures and just when I think I have something really good, like my owl pictures and others I have posted here, I find someone who actually REALLY knows how to do it.

I hope you admire the amazing ability of this man and will pass his site on to others!

http://www.naturephotographyblog.com/

aliensallmixedup.com IS COMING TO YOUR IPAD/IPHONE!

Hi, my blog is being neglected because of some very exciting things I am working on presently! My new agent is getting a lot of WORDS to sell presently and I am caught up in creating a BRAND NEW CHARACTER and STORY for the world! THEN, there is this new website with my books going electronic! AND, I am recording some of my books presently in my den!

SO, please keep reading my books, blogs and please, please, please help me forward my words out into the world! My new website will be up very soon, please come see us! aliensallmixedup.com

THE LETTER Y

Day 25 Brought to you by the letter Y!

Yolanda Yack Yelps “Yo, You Yechy Yellow Young Yipper-snapper-Yellow-belly Yokels Yammering & Yodelingly!”

Yvonne Yachtswomen's Yelling, “Yahoo! Yeah! Yadda Yadda Yadda, You Yapping Yankee!”

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER X

Day 24 Brought to you by the letter X!

Xander ray-fish Xamines X-marks-the-spot Xylophone Xpertly Xeriscaping Xanadu.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER W

Day 23 Brought to you by the letter W!

Wannabe Wacky Walter Werewolf Whimpers When Wasps Wacked Wimpy, Wallflower Wesley Wallaby Who Walloped Waltzing Willameena Walrus While Walking With Wagons Waywardly Westward Wanting Warmhearted Wahoo Wailer’s Walkingsticks & Walkmans When Warbirds Warbled While Warriors Went Wacko.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER U

Day 21 Brought to you by the letter U!

Underdog Unger Urchin, Ugly Underwater-UFOlogist, Understands Uncomfortable U-boat Underwear Users Ultimately Uneasily Using Udderly Useful Uncle Urkel's Ultramicroscopic & Ultramodern & Ultrashort Undertaker's Umbrella Undies.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER T

Day 20 Brought to you by the letter T!


Tyler Trout Takes To Trying Table Tennis Timidly.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER S

Day 19 Brought to you by the letter S!

Stealthy, Sneaky Sneezing Steven Snake Suddenly Squeezes Something’s Sinisterly Slimy & Squishy Saddlebags So Sally Sits Sadly.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER R

Day 18 Brought to you by the letter R!

Running Rapidly, Red Riding Reginald Rabbit Raids & Ravishes Ruddy, Red Radish Roosts Ravenously Regularly!

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER H

Alliterated Alphabetical
Animals!

Day 8 Brought to you by the letter H!

Hottie Herman Hound Hates Having His Hardly Handsome Hairpiece Hassled Harshly!

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER G

Alliterated Alphabetical
Animals!

Day 7 Brought to you by the letter G!

Gordon Gecko Gives Greta Grundle Green Garters & Gigantic Goopy Galoshes Graciously.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290

THE LETTER F

Alliterated Alphabetical
Animals!

Day 6 Brought to you by the letter F!

Franklin Frog Forgets Funny Facts For Fun Frankly.

Alliterated Alphabetical Animals are catching on. At the Facebook page, they are chiming in already, check it out http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1016679907#!/pages/The-Works-of-Justin-Matott/213624096290