Meet Mandie

We have a puppy - and we named her Mandie.
She was born on Sept. 25 and this picture was taken when we got her home on 10-Nov.
We'll be posting more pictures as time goes by.

More Grief

I just found out that Ray Marshall, the ex Op's Manager from Lansing, died yesterday morning of a heart attack. A week before Kelly, JJ McCrae died of a heart attack, and now Ray.
It wasn't more than a few weeks ago that I talked with him and we had a good conversation, getting caught up, cracking jokes.
Our thoughts and prayers ago out to his wife Bonnie and son John.

Robert

Update

We're still sad about Kelly but life is going on. Susie's allergies are really giving her fits, hopefully the doctor can help. Robert has finally started to clean up his "office."

We've collected most of Kelly's toys (she had a bunch of 'em) and we'll wash and keep most of them for the next dog (yes we're looking). What might be an issue is the food - we were mixing 2 different brands the last couple of months and we mixed up 2 bags a couple of days before she died.

We're still gonna try to get some more Kelly pictures up on the picture gallery.

Kelly 09-Jul-1993 to 22-Sep-2007

Robert thought that she looked kinda funny in the t-shirt that we put on her to keep her from scratching one of her tumors. Little did he know it was to be her last picture.

Kelly had a grand mal seizure this morning at 00:15 and we decided that it was time to let her go. She didn't want to but it was plain to see that she was feeling bad.

We took her to the 24 hour vet service here in GJ and she carried in her frisbee. She even took herself on a tour of the facility. It was quite funny to watch the staff chasing her down. What wasn't funny was to see her stumble and fall when she stood still. She carried her frisbee to the end.

She went to sleep for the last time at 01:40 22-Sep-2007 her body may have been failing her but her spirit shone through.

We will be taking her ashes to WIA in early October since her social life began there it is only fitting that we help her finish it there as well. She will be missed!

It tends to be hard to keep up the blog with so many things going on. We had a great trip to Europe in June to Belgium, Germany, England and Wales. The whole trip went almost flawlessly except for getting in lost in the middle of Brussels for over an hour and missing the Eurostar.

Thankfully, it all worked out.

We have also attended 3 weddings since April – it must be an epidemic.








Robert and Susie are still quite active in non-profit volunteer work. Robert is the local District Representative and Susie is the state Alternate Delegate. In the next couple of months we will be busy helping put on the State Convention over Labor Day (in Grand Junction), presenting the 2008 budget (in Fort Collins), attending the WIA Retreat (in Buena Vista) and putting on the next assembly (in Glenwood Springs). Hopefully, after that life will calm down.

Along with the volunteer work, we will probably perform at a coffee shop in Delta in September and/or October. We are also still dealing with Kelly and her skin cancer. She now has 13 masses on her. It doesn’t seem like the chemotherapy is working, although her large masses don’t seem to be getting any larger. We are having to take this one day at a time. She is still quite spunky and walks regularly a mile with Susie.


Susie started her new job with the school district on Thursday and the kids first day is Monday. We’re off on another school year. The next few weeks will be hectic at work. Robert keeps fighting with the late summer thunder storms and the havoc they create for the radio transmitters and power in general. It seems like we get a call almost every night that something is off or having a problem. The transmitters are spread throughout the area so they keep him hopping.

WOW it's been a long time

for starters we've formed a band of sorts (playing at local coffee shops occasionally) not much but it's been fun.

On July 09 Kelly turned 14. We had a couple of nasty looking masses taken off of her a week before and the results came back on her birthday - it was a particularly nasty cancer called hemangiosarcoma. The vet pretty much had her written off right then and there but we held out some hope for her. The particular form of it that she has was dermal (in the skin) and the x-rays didn't show anything inside, which was good news (it shocked the vet). In the past two weeks she's gone on chemo (not the incredibly nasty type that we humans get but much milder) and she has about ten masses on her now. Two of them are pretty bad looking (one on her gums by her right canine and one by her belly thats about 1" in diameter). The good news is that they don't seem to be getting any bigger but the bad news is that shes getting more of them. There were four or five of them this time last week.


Kelly is still acting like herself albeit a bit slower these days (hey, if you were as old as she is you'd slow down a bit too). Actually she just rests more but when she gets active she still runs around like she always did. We're updating the website to include a section just of her.

Susie got a new job in the school system out here - she's now what they call a Sped-Tech (Special Education Technician) and it's more in line with what she wants to do.