I have suspected for some time now that the creepy duck doll I found at the thrift store has been causing mischief at night while I'm asleep. 

This morning, I came downstairs to find my life-sized Steiff zoo laid out on the floor like giant dominoes that had been tipped over.  My eyes bugged out and I hollered a few naughty words.  Okay, an entire stream of naughty words.  Getting the lion back up wasn't easy.  Richard is HEAVY. 

Normally, I'd suspect one of the cats or our dog, Bo, but take a gander at the bottom of the creepy duck doll's shoes.  They're scuffed.  Now why would a doll that stands on a shelf have scuffed shoes unless it had been CREEPING AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT?????

I have this eerie doll listed for sale on my eBay store: Bama Sue's Online Zoo.  I wish someone would take the thing off my hands.  I'm fed up with it sneaking around the house at night knocking over my collectibles, stealing pieces from the Halloween village, yakking up on the hard wood floor, and swimming in the dog's water bowl.  It's worse than having a poltergeist or a lazy house elf. 

And don't let its sweet little face fool you.  It's possessed by a mischievous entity for sure. 

Of course, I could be totally wrong about all of this.  It really could be the cats and the dog in cahoots together.  We won't really know until the duck doll is out of the house, will we?

Yesterday I promised a blog about Pepper the Vietnamese Pot-bellied pig.  Sorry, but I changed my mind.  It's a woman's perogative after all. 

Instead, today's blog is a lesson in vocabulary.  Before you yawn and go check your horoscope or see what everyone's posting on Facebook, you should know that I'll be writing about cats with THUMBS.

Cats with thumbs, or any extra toes on their paws, are known as polydactyl cats, ie, cats with many digits.  Pterodactyls were flying dinosaurs.  They might have had extra toes.  I don't really know.  But pterodactyl SOUNDS an awful lot like polydactyl.

Why cats with opposable thumbs haven't taken over the world yet is beyond me, but I suspect it has something to do with their extra toe not being a true thumb.  So they're really not all that good for opening cabinet doors or handling tools or using computers--all necessary for world domination.

Polydactyl cats are also known as Hemingway cats because Ernest Hemingway had cats with extra toes down in his Key West home.  Rumor has it that all polydactyl cats are descended from a Hemingway cat.  I don't know if that's true, either, but it sounds really cool.  Ernie is from Jacksonville, Florida so there might be some truth to that.

We originally called our polydactyl cat Little Ernie Hemingway, but he quickly outgrew the "Little" part of his name and now we just call him Ernie.  He has a thumb on each front paw and is really good at catching toys tossed in the air. 

He also loves it when I weigh myself.  Out of the five cats in the house, on weigh day Ernie magically appears as soon as I step on the scale.  Usually he tries to grab my toes as I stand on the scale, but he was a bit camera shy today and wouldn't perform on film. 

I did, however, get him to look up at me.

And that concludes today's lesson on polydactyl vs pterodactyl.  Thanks for tuning in.  Ernie thanks you, too.

When I was in college, I had a pet skunk.  Yes, you read that right.  Skunk.  As in stinky.  As in not.  His name was Sidney, he was about as big as a cat, and he'd walk on a leash right behind me without a lick of training.  I bought him at a pet store in Auburn, Alabama where I was attending Auburn University and he lived with me and my three room mates in our campus apartment. 

Quite against campus housing rules, I might add.

Since Sid the kid (that's what I called him) was nocturnal, he'd sleep all day under the kitchen sink or in a bathroom cabinet and then he'd climb up on our beds at night and nip at our toes.  In retrospect, I never should have showed him how to climb up on the bed.  He was a cute little guy and liked to wrestle with my friend's ferret.  Sidney would just sit on the ferret and win by default.

Not everyone liked Sidney.  Sometimes when we were out on our walks around campus, people would drive by and shout, "Take that skunk back to the wild where it belongs."  What they didn't know was that Sidney was no more wild than their dog or cat. 

Yes, there are people who breed domesticated skunks and if you are a responsible pet owner, they can make great pets.  They're clean, quiet, affectionate, playful, and since they're near-sighted, they'll stay right behind you on a walk.  Domesticated skunks are also de-scented, meaning they've had the glands removed that allow them to spray foul fluid at potential attackers.  

I'll have to go dig up some old photographs of Sidney.  I attended college way back in the days of when cameras actually used film and pictures were printed on photo paper by stores like Walmart or photo-mats.  But in the meantime, you get an idea on what he looked like by this sculpture. 

I'd love to have another pet skunk, but currently the state of Alabama says you can only have one if you buy it from a breeder IN Alabama.  Not Georgia, not Florida, not Mississippi, but Alabama.  Guess what?  There are no skunk breeders in Alabama.  Arrrgh!  I could move to Georgia where domesticated skunks ARE legal, but there's that tiny little thing concerning my husband's job being in ALABAMA! 

Meanwhile, I'll just enjoy the zoo of companion animals that I already have.

Next time: Pepper the Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Stay tuned...

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been blogging instead of writing, but finally got my butt in gear and went to work on proofing my second novel before my end-of-the-month deadline arrives. 

And you know what?  It wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be.  By this point in the writing process, you've read and edited your book so many times that you're sick of it.  Proofing your copy is like picking fleas off a dog.  You hope you don't find many fleas and you hope you catch any and all fleas on your dog, but you still have to use that fine-toothed comb to go through their fur and can leave no part unsearched. 

And even with all that diligence, a few fleas will still probably get overlooked, even with a couple of other people proofing the book, too.  It's the nature of fleas: they're small and wily and are good at hiding. 

The good news is that I was able to proof seven chapters in three hours.  The bad news: because I run two businesses and teach classes and take care of a zoo of companion animals, I'm not able to work on writing-related tasks every day.  It's just how it is. 

But at least I'm no longer procrastinating, something I do when I'm overwhelmed with too much on my plate.  But hey, at least I'm never bored, right?

The Weredog Whisperer is scheduled for a December 31, 2013 release in trade paperback and eBook from World Weaver Press. www.worldweaverpress.com

 

For the past three weeks I've been tryin' a little experiment.  I wanted to see if daily blogging about my real-life wacky house,  critters, and obsessions would increase my website traffic or if I was just another voice shouting amongst all of the millions of tiny voices in cyberspace. 

And the answer is: A....blogging has definitely doubled my daily website visitation average.  Even my doubting-Thomas hubs has been impressed. "I don't have a hundred and sixty people wanting to read anything I've written," he told me. 

However, the time I've spent blogging has been time I haven't put into my paying work or my fiction writing.

Oh, sure, it's been tremendous fun.  But fun doesn't pay the bills or get novels written. 

So, if you've enjoyed my silly, wacky, or off-color posts, keep checking back periodically.  I'll keep blogging, just not every day.  I'll post links to Facebook and Twitter when I have something new up. 

Thank you again for your readership and visitation!  I hope to one day be in a position where I can wear fewer proverbial hats and not only write more fiction, but also write more daily columns, i.e., blogs. 

~Susan

A few years ago a psychic visited my home.  I'd told her about seeing the ghost of a woman in the main house and how my niece had seen her, too, and I was curious to see what impressions a psychic might have. 

We'd visited an antebellum home together in Georgia one time and as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the Greek-revival style house, she said matter of factly, "Someone died here."  We toured the Southern mansion that had been built before the Civil War and when we reached the very last room on the tour, an upstairs bedroom, a plaque on the wall told the story of how the plantation owner's wife had died in this room back in the 1850s.  A shiver rippled up my spine.  My psychic friend had been right on the money. 

In my novel Haunted Housewives, the heroine, Cleo Tidwell, becomes friends with psychic Faye Eldritch who makes several predictions that come true.  In real life, I'm friends with several psychics.  Truth is stranger than fiction and real life the inspiration for much of my fiction. 

I gave my friend a tour of my house, expecting her to "see" something.  Nothing.  No psychic impressions at all.  But when we stepped into the backyard to see the servant's cottage, she stopped cold on the old brick patio and said, "I can't go in there." 

Me: Why not?

Her: There's something bad in there.  I'm feeling very bad energy."

Me: Eek!

So we didn't go in the cottage.  The cottage does creep me out a bit, but not so much from ghosts as from the dirt, clutter, and dire need of rehabbing.  The interior is more or less in its original state, although someone in the past must have decided to start restoring it and pulled most of the plaster from the walls and ceiling leaving bare lathing exposed.  And then they stopped.  The floors are the original unfinished wood floors.  The fireplaces are the original coal-burning fireplaces.  The roof has been replaced due to a tree falling on the cottage twenty years ago and we had the exterior painted when we bought the property.  Someone added electricity in the past.  We also replaced a broken window in the back room with a door. 

The house is only two rooms with no indoor plumbing.  My guess is that the servants washed up in the kitchen of the main house, and used the outhouse in the basement of the main house.  Or a chamber pot.  As for bathing, they must have bathed in a portable tub.  A pretty rustic existence.  And no furnace.  Only the coal-burning fireplaces.  But people used to lead much harder lives in the past.

I still don't know what exactly is in the cottage that is so bad.  Perhaps a servant died there.  Or maybe a baby was born stillborn.  Servants didn't tend to make the newspaper in days gone by unless they killed someone. 

But I'll tell you, I wouldn't want to spend the night out in that cottage.  Not with the rats, and squirrels, and bats, and spiders.  Or the nameless bad thing that the psychic felt.

Hammydown: Southern slang for Hand-Me-Down--used clothing that is passed from an older relative to a younger one.

Once upon a time, we had a pet pig at Casa Sullivan.  Her name was Pepper and she was a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. 

Pepper lived indoors with us and had an array of personal items such as her own bed, a harness, special shampoo, hoof trimmers, toys, a wading pool, a ramp for the mini-van, and even a special cart on wheels to corral her when we went to the vet. 

She also had her very own, custom-made coat.  Made of fuzzy fabric on the underside and water-resistant material on the outside, it fit over her like a horse blanket and snapped around her chest like a dog harness.  Pigs get cold in the winter just like people, so the warm coat was wonderful to wear on her potty trips outside during the cold months. 

 Pepper lived to the ripe old age of 13.  She went to Hog Heaven in 2005.

Flash forward to this week.  I pulled out a sweater box under the guest bed and discovered Pepper's old coat.  Our pit bull, Moxie, is now somewhere between 11-14 years old and has arthritis.  Seemed to me that wearing Pepper's coat would not only keep Moxie warm indoors, but would keep her joints warm. 

And that's how Moxie came to get a "Hammy down" from a pig.  Pretty fitting, huh? Pig . . . ham . . . HAMMY down.  The coat's a little large, so she can't wear it safely outdoors, but it's great for indoor napping.  [photo gallery below: click on each photo to enlarge it]