Living Large In Our Little House

It was Dale’s step­mom who clued me in last week that this com­ing Sunday, March 13, is the begin­ning of Daylight Savings Time.

“What? So early!?”

I could have sworn that it didn’t begin until April. I would have been right until 2007, when DST was extended from March to November.

I’m all for spring­ing into spring and leav­ing the win­ter behind us, but there are some dis­ad­van­tages to spring­ing forward:

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Our Little House cov­ered in 12+ inches of snow

I’m still not sure what to make of the fact that this area of Arkansas has seen its share of “100 year” weather events in the 3 ½ years since we moved to Our Little House.

Let’s recap:

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I read this sum­mer about the momma Grizzly bear close to Yellowstone that attacked some campers while they slept. One per­son was killed and the bear was later hunted and killed. Her two cubs were taken to a zoo. It was deter­mined the bears were starv­ing and evi­dently, became desperate.

This arti­cle, by the Associated Press, warns hik­ers, berry pick­ers and campers to expect more of the same as bears come down from the moun­tains in search of food.

The rea­son, accord­ing to this arti­cle, is a bee­tle that is sur­viv­ing warmer win­ters and killing the trees that pro­duce white bark pine cones and their nuts, a sta­ple in a Grizzly bear’s diet.

We have black bears here, but at Our Little House and in the Ozarks Region, we’ve also started notic­ing strange behav­ior in nature this year.

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Emma

I'm tak­ing the day off from post­ing, as I am dev­as­tated over los­ing one of the finest dogs I've ever known.

Emma went miss­ing some­time early Thursday morn­ing, hav­ing gone out to roam with Sade and Chloe before the hot sun came back out.

Emma hates the heat and there was a 100+ heat index yes­ter­day. I knew some­thing was wrong as soon as the sun appeared and Emma did not. We've searched by boat on the shore and tromped through the woods and have only turned up a lot of chig­ger and mos­quito bites.

In our search, we dis­cov­ered that my aunt's elderly dog col­lapsed on Sunday and they had to help him make his tran­si­tion to the next life later that day. Another neighbor's — more than 2 miles away — elderly dog dis­ap­peared two days ago, the sec­ond time he has tried to wan­der off to pass from this life (the first time this spring, he was found and nursed back).

It's been a long, hot and hard sum­mer. Emma rarely wanted out until after the sun went down. Last week­end, our friend Mike, pointed out how hard it was  for Emma to get around. It was true, at 11, she moved slower and her coat was no longer the shiny, healthy coat as evi­denced in this pic­ture taken nearly three years ago dur­ing our first full win­ter here. We were advised by our vet just on Tuesday to have two sus­pi­cious lumps removed from Emma's chest and leg.

I wrote on my K9 Cuisine blog how Emma once saved my life. I only wish I could have kept her with me forever.

Emma was my mother's favorite "Granddog" and if she is gone from our lives, she is now back with her Grammy, giv­ing her a lot of nudges and in return, she is get­ting a lot of pets.