HELP! My blog has been hi-jacked by a precocious 10-week-old Bernese Mountain Dog puppy! Sorry about that. She just took over and started posting. I’m still here. Well, I have to be, don’t I ? Bella’s paws are much too big and clumsy to use the keyboard herself.

I still have to work on my cheese making post and other things, but as you can imagine the minutes and hours of my days are filled with puppy stuff. I am exhausted! I’ve not had to raise a puppy for four years now. How could I have forgotten how much time it took? I can’t imagine how I added a new puppy to our house in years gone by at the pace of nearly one per year! But the younger dogs did act like nannies to the new puppies and that helped a lot.

I am getting quite the aerobic workout going up and down stairs carrying a 27-pound puppy x number of times per day. We have stairs no matter where we go. Stairs from our bedroom upstairs (where her crate is) to downstairs. If we go out the front door we have only five stairs. If we go out to the back yard we have two sets of stairs leading down to our yard. I think the shortest is ten stairs. At this time in her life, too much jolting from going down stairs is not good for her joints, so I carry her whenever I can. She can, and does, go down the stairs on her own quite nicely but I am always there to make sure she doesn’t go down too fast on her stumpy legs and take a head-over-heels tumble.  She knows how to come back up them, that’s for sure. I left her for a minute to come back inside and get my camera and when I got to the sliding glass door, there she was, and very proud of herself I might add.

Add to that the fact that our yard is not completely puppy-proofed and I don’t trust her out there by herself just yet (which means I am out there with her when she is out) and it cuts into other things I might doing pretty significantly. That’s why nap time is so precious. So why oh why am I sitting here at the computer as she is napping? I should be knitting, reading, etc. Yet here I sit. Boring you all to death. I know you’d much rather be seeing cute photos of Bella. Okay, here you go. Get your puppy fix. (Second photo is with Uncle Alex.)

Our beautiful leaves are pretty much gone now. The trees wave their naked branches around in the wind without the dry rattling sound we had grown used to. It was a beautiful fall season this year. It truly was. All the trees turned at pretty much the same time and gave us a good show. Now it’s time to mulch leaves again. Maybe this weekend. Right now they are damp and a bit slimy from our recent rain.

I do have color inside the house though. My cactus have decided they are “Thanksgiving” ones I guess. They are loaded with blooms this year.

Two of them I brought home from my Mom’s house and this is the first time they have bloomed here. She did love her cactus. One that I have is a continuation of the same cactus that my great-grandmother had. That one only blooms at Easter, so it’s not one of these. I had a surprise with this one. Two different cactus in the same pot. One a gorgeous fuchsia color, the other a pristine white.

This one was always just mine. I’ve had it for so many years I can’t remember how old it is. I’ve never seen this many buds on it though.

I’ve never subscribed to the way my Mom always watered and treated her cactus. I know the old saying is not to water them from a certain month to a certain month (see I don’t even know) and to also put them in the dark to force them to bloom. I water them year-round and lord knows they get plenty of light in my sun room. Go figure.

My goodness. I’ve been rambling, haven’t I? Sorry about that. I just needed to find “my” voice again. It’s getting dark, Bella is still napping and I need to take out the trash before it gets any darker. Then I plan to sit down with a glass of wine and relax. At least until she wakes up ... uh oh. Too late. I hear whining coming from upstairs ... later!