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I can't understand it, he was perfectly fine, active eating, drinking, no symptoms, this morning I found him in the corner of the nesting box with the babies all snuggled up on him, and he was dead. Poor Mango is freaking out, she keeps flying to the top of the cage and sending out "Where are you??" calls. I dont know if I should pull her babies (Apple and Cherry) to hand feed them to relieve her of some stress, or what... I dont know what happened to Kiwi, he was only 3 and doing perfectly fine... I am still waiting for the enviornmental test for PBFD but Mango tested negative for PBFD, I got her test results back two days ago. Hers was the first one back...

Fly high sweet Kiwi- one of my first ones. You were so beautiful and I will miss you terribly  

Just a few pics from the dog park yesterday- we took all the retriever loving dogs to the dog park, 9 I think. We were the only ones there but we brought the park with us! It was my three goldens, my volunteers golden, 2 lab mixes, Sunny the old golden, the lab cocker mix, and the GSP. Took two cars, I had to recruite a volunteer

More pics coming tomorrow because we are gunna take them out in the front yard for the first time.

These were taken on wednesday so 3.5 weeks. They are 4 weeks old today!

Ozzie: (Anyone know when the ticking on an ACD comes in?)





Blake: (he does have eyes, I promise)







Domino:







Raven:




Nero's pics didnt come out, the poor guy. I  will get some pics of him tomorrow! I guess with no real white on him anywhere I just couldnt get a shot of him that didnt make him look like a black blob.

Warning- this is long.

Today's been a really cruddy day and honestly, I didn't know where else to go to vent about it, so you all get stuck reading it 

OK, very very long story short-- I started 'dating' James back when I was 12 years old. We stuck together all the way through high school, got married, settled down and bought a house, you know, all the "all american high school sweetheart" stuff. One boyfriend my whole life. James was in the army, went to Iraq, was gone two years. Those two years were the worst two years of my life. Not only because he was gone and I was still newly seperated from my parents and now alone in a strange place with not many friends, but because I had just gotten diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and I made the decision not to tell anyone because I didn't want James to find out and be worried. (Silly me, huh?) So, I went through the removal of my ovary, therapy and chemo all by myself. All in all, a very stressful time. James did find out about the cancer though, because I was hospitalized the night he came home from Iraq and ended up there for two months. The first night he was there with me and never left my side... then I never saw him again the rest of the time I was there. He never came back in to visit me. I had pretty much screwed up our lives being sick and not asking for help- bills unpaid, house falling apart, no job, I had eaten into our savings so that he wouldn't see that I didn't have a job because of the cancer. Those things were my fault- I should have told him instead of letting him come home to discover it all in one blow. At the time my excuse was, he has too much to think about just trying to stay alive over there, and I'm not going to add to his plate. This was back in the first wave of the attacks.

So anyway... we made it another two years but things never fell back into place. He was a different person, colder, more distant, and he had the army mentality that illness/injury was a sign of weakness or personality flaw. He hated seeing me sick and he let me know every day. I was also concentrating on myself, something that he just couldn't understand. I should be taking care of him, not the other way around. Finally he got very emotionally and verbally abusive (including one fight where I had to call the police on him because he seriously threatned to kill my macaw and chop her into bits and i thought him mad enough to do it), and also destructive to property-- he kicked down the bedroom door when I locked him out, and I don't mean one kick, I suppose the better term would be he beat a heavy solid frame door down with his fists and feet until his hands bled, while I cowered on the other side. I asked him to move out the next day and ordered a seperation.

We were seperated for two years- I tried everything to get him into counsiling because I felt like he had PTS. He would go, see the counslor one time, and then as soon as they told him he had severe anger issues and needed to be in solo counsiling, not marriage counsiling, he would back out. We must have gone to 20 counsolers. The seperation just sort of lingered. He was dating the entire time (I heard he had his first date a week after he moved out) and I stayed single and wore my ring for the first year. I finally started dating someone (the guy I am still dating now) but I guess there was still a lot of loyalty and love left for James because I always had it in the back of my head that we could fix this.

January he called me out of the blue and said he was filing for divorce and we needed to settle terms. All of a sudden, he is agreeing to everything that I had asked for back when we first tried to sign papers, and he's not putting up any fight. I knew him, and I knew he wouldn't give in if it wasn't something big so I asked him why he was so desperate for the papers to be signed. He wouldn't tell me, and I remember getting off the phone and saying to my friend "I bet he's getting married". But I didn't really mean it- I knew he and his girlfriend had only been together about a month, and James was enjoying the single players life of a different girl a week, why should he settle back down?

I found out- she's pregnant. (I can't have kids. Cancer and all.) He just married her today and she is 4 months pregnant. He proposed to her before I even signed the papers, and WAY before the divorce was actually finalized. Months before.

Is it wrong for me to be completely and utterly blown away by this? And I mean bad, the last month or so its pretty much all I can think about, except for animal rescue (Some of you wonder why I do so much, that's why, it takes up all my time and thought and I don't think about this stuff). Reading the synopsis of this he comes across as a terrible person, but I knew at the time all of this was going on that he probably had PTS and that it wasn't the real him. Now he's happy and doing everything for this new family, and I can't help thinking why couldn't he for me? The last couple of months we had been really civil to each other and had even gone out for a cup of coffee and to catch up a couple of times, but as soon as he found out he was expecting he turned into a friggin jerk again and became cold, manipulative, abusive and selfish again- IE trying to back out on agreed to terms from the divorce which would leave me totally screwed, being really nasty to me, etc.

so is it wrong for me to feel totally and utterly betrayed and heartbroken over this? I really can't talk to my family and friends about it, I just get scolded that it's over and I should be letting go and moving on, but I can't- I was with him my entire life, and I worked so hard to fix things that I just can't seem to believe I failed.

ok.. *SIGH* im done. I just didn't know where else to go, and I love you all 

Here are some new baby apple and cherry pics for you Apple is two weeks old and cherry is 10 days old.

Question for all of you bird people who have seen babies this age before (Ahem Michelle!!!)

Does Apple's feather development look normal? He has parts on his head and wings and back that are very shiny with no down or pins at all. I am so paranoid about PBFD.

the baby birds are active, chirping and growing like monsters. Still no sign of baby #3 who will be named Papaya if he ever comes out.... candled the egg this morning and it still looks viable so maybe it was just the last one laid. That will be very hard with apple being so big, I might have to pull Apple early to hand feed so he doesn't squash his siblings.

Apple is now 11 days old and his eyes are beginning to open- you can see them blink under his little lid. His beak is also hard and is getting the black coloring, and his feathers are starting to come in a little. He is fuzzy now. He also has a bit of a personality, when I pulled him out this morning he was trying to chew on my hand

Here's Cody now, 3 months after his initial rescue. He is doing so great, 78 LBS (from 34 I think) and thanks to good old prep-H we were able to remove the scars on his face- after the vet told us they would never heal, 3 weeks of daily applications and they were GONE (See profile shot). He had horrific scars. Yes- this is the same dobie from my signature! This is him out enjoying a sunny  day while having a good "lunge" on a 200 foot training line.