Back when we were still green and eager and trying to turn a buck however we could, we offered some services grooming dogs.
Not cats. I quit law because I was depressed, not suicidal.
Aside from crass monetary considerations, we were marketing ourselves as the first pet resort in our area. Resorts have spas, right?
When we retired, we moved from 100 acres in the country, where our house was set back a long way from the road, to a small house in a small town. Our four remaining cats had been used to the freedom of the great outdoors in the country.
Once in town, we decided they had to stay indoors. Two of them were old as well as timid, and didn’t really care. The other two were confused. Tiberius especially begged to go out. We bought harnesses and leads and started training them to be tethered outside.
Despite her name, Fiji did not hail from the South Pacific. She was a medium sized German Shepherd cross of some kind, who was fun loving and sweet natured. We had no problems with her during the week she initially boarded with us. She belonged to a Canadian military family. Fiji’s dad was being posted to Edmonton. At the end of the first boarding, he asked if we would take Fiji for another five weeks, until they could get settled somewhere that allowed dogs. We were happy to agree.
Sweet Fiji. Quiet Fiji. Well behaved Fiji. READ MORE
The largest number of dogs we owned at one time was three. After Annie, the last of these, died we were without a dog for the first time in many years.
John and I agreed that we would not get another dog. For one thing, every day at the pet resort, we already interacted with anywhere from ten to thirty dogs. For another, the requirements we had for an ideal dog were just too important to take a chance with.
I was fortunate to be in Vienna while the Museum of Natural History was having a little exhibition on dogs and cats in science and art.
Although a good part of the space was devoted to interactive displays aimed at children, there was lots to interest the adults in the room.
As the author Willie Morris once wrote of his dog Skip, “they had buried him under our elm tree, they said — yet this wasn’t totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.”
Montpellier is in some respects an outlier among cities in the south of France. Unlike Toulouse, Nimes, Avignon and others, it has no Roman or Greek roots. It is a newer city (by the standards of Europe), having been established about 1000 A.D. when the local lords, the Guilhems, combined a couple of villages, built a castle and surrounded the whole thing with a wall.
In Europe there is almost always an interesting thing or two to know about even the smallest and least famous town or village.
The first recorded interesting thing about Pezenas is that in 980, the Vicomte de Beziers gave the town to his daughter Garsinde as a dowry, on her marriage to the Count of Carcassonne.
This is my second visit to Tourbes, a tiny village in the south of France. I housesat Cassie and Nousha here in March of 2016 and the homeowners kindly invited me for a return engagement.
We resume our walking tour of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Markt at the Stadhuis (City Hall basically).