Title: Your Dog Is NOT a Primate
Author: Clea Saal
Born: July 22,2021
Genre: Dog care/Dog rescue
Format: Paperback/Kindle
Page count: 124 pages
ISBN: 979-8528059693
Price: $9.95 (paperback) $7.75 (Kindle eBook) (more…)
Title: Neutering Is Forever
Author: Clea Saal
Born: June 8, 2021
Genre: Dog care/personal/controversial (general)
Format: Kindle eBook
AISN: B0936SXJ95
Price: $4.95
1. Signs
‘The only balls your dog needs are the ones he fetches,’ so reads a sign outside a veterinary clinic. I guess they thought it was funny. This story, unfortunately, is anything but. It is the story of my best friend, whose life I basically ruined by listening to a vet who shared that casual attitude towards his physical integrity; a vet who saw dogs as a bunch of bits and pieces that could be taken out at will... who saw dogs as things that were there for humans to play with, and to be modified in any way we saw fit. (more…)
Yes, I know I’m not perfect, and there are things I hate about myself. One of those is the fact that at times I seem to have a hard time controlling my temper, and while on the one hand I know that is not the most uncommon of traits, the guilt I feel afterwards... well, let’s just say that it is no fun. And how does that connect to my dog? Well, because too often he is the target of that rage. Now, when I say rage I don’t mean I am beating him on a daily basis (or ever), but a couple of nights ago, for instance, after I had barely slept the night before, my boy took it upon himself to start barking like crazy in my ear about an hour after I had finally managed to fall asleep. Let’s just say that the animal in me was not amused, and barked back... loudly. (more…)
Okay, so posting this under a header of A Happy Pessimist may be stretching it more than a bit, but seeing how there is no other category in which it fits better, here it will stay. Just be forewarned that this does get kind of dark. Sorry, that’s the mood I’m in today... and with good reason. Let’s just say that life’s been kicking me hard over the past couple of months, and leave it at that, but now let’s get to the meat of this story (with my apologies to any passing vegans, of course). (more…)
As you may have noticed, I love my dog to bits. In fact, if I were to be perfectly honest here, I would have to say that I can count the number of people I love as much on the fingers of one hand, and I would probably have quite a few fingers to spare. It is an uncomplicated relationship. I love him, he loves me back, end of story. (more…)
Is it me, or is there something bizarre about the way in which the most absurd displays of excess seem to coexist with the direst warnings of ‘what is to come’ unless we learn to scale back on our consumption, and yes, I am looking at you, Buzzfeed. (more…)
As you may have noticed, my dog has been featured rather prominently in this blog lately. Part of the reason is that that ‘dog’ used to be ‘dogs’ until not too long ago, and I’m still mourning his companion. The other reason has to do with the fact that the inspiration for roughly half these posts comes from random thoughts that pop into my mind as I am walking the little rascal. Today’s post is one of those. (more…)
One hundred days ago today I watched my best friend --or rather one of my best friends-- die right in front of my eyes. It was horrible. It was also a moment that changed my life forever, and I find myself in a weird mood. (more…)
No, I’m not a vegan, I’m not even a vegetarian, I would never donate to either Greenpeace or PETA, and even though I consider myself an animal lover, I freely admit that my tolerance for animal rights activists is rather limited. I am also honest enough to acknowledge that that does make me into something of a hypocrite. (more…)
What you have here is one of my favorite photos of my three boys, one in which you can definitely see their distinct personalities shining through. It is also one of the few I have of my three babies together, as the kitten was only three and a half months old at the time, he had been with us for a little more than two months, and it had only been a few days prior that I had finally allowed my dogs and cat to hang out together (okay, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that it had only been a week since one day, much to my horror, the kitten snuck past me out of the room in which he was being kept, and didn’t get eaten), and we lost Terri less than two months later. In fact we lost him three months ago today, that’s what drove me to share this picture, and yet I hesitate to do it, kn...
Yesterday we had a gorgeous day, with a truly perfect weather, and a beautiful sunset. There were birds flying, and families playing. It looked almost like a postcard, and for a moment I could almost allow myself to forget that we are living on borrowed time, that the perfect days won’t stretch endlessly into the future.
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The news that Yahoo groups is shutting down has hit me, and hit me hard, as you can probably tell by the fact that this is my second rambling post in a matter of hours on that particular subject, even if I usually try to update only twice a week. The thing is that knowing that I would soon lose access to this particular resource has sent me rummaging through my fic collection, and that has caused me to rediscover some stories I had all but forgotten. It has also made me realize just how much the world has changed because stories that were deemed to be way ahead of the curve when it came to gay rights less than twenty years ago would now cause their authors to be burned at the stake by the queer community’s speech police (a point that was driven home by the realization that some classics, s...
Yahoo! groups is shutting down. That is not exactly unexpected, in fact I have feared that this day was inevitable for a number of years now, but that doesn’t mean that this development does not represent a sad day for me. Yes, with a couple of exceptions my groups have fallen completely silent, but there are those exceptions, not to mention that to me the groups are a lot more than that. (more…)
This is not the post I set out to write today, in fact this is about something that is likely to be totally irrelevant for anyone but me, but for once I don’t care. This is my blog, and I’ll break my rules if I want to... and yes, this is another post about pets, about what losing Terri did to me, and about a seemingly small incident that left me absolutely devastated a couple of days later, one that, especially in the aftermath of what happened a few hours ago, made me confront some of my own prejudices. This is the story: (more…)
I like to walk. That, as pretty much anyone who knows me will tell you, is probably an understatement. In fact I suspect I am one of the very few people on this earth who has doctors telling her to please walk a little less whenever they get half a chance (I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this happens on a regular basis because I refuse to set foot in a doctor’s office often enough for that ever to become an option, but still, you get the general idea).
To me walking is not just a means of going from one place to another. In fact most of my walks are back and forth a nearby stretch of beach --very deliberately going nowhere-- with the occasional excursion through a small thicket that is also by my place every now and then, just to mix things up a bit. What can I say, I’d rather spend a...
On March 29, as I was walking past a vacant lot, I heard a faint meow. In fact I heard three of them. The place was a jumble of weeds and tall grasses, with countless nooks and crannies. Not exactly welcoming, especially not considering that I live in an area that is crawling with venomous snakes... or at least that we have enough of those critters to make it seem like they are crawling all over the place. (more…)
Today is September 30, tomorrow will be October 1... it sounds so simple, and yet it is anything but. You see, July 31 was a day I will never forget. (more…)
A few days ago I tried to join Quora. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but instead I came across yet another unpleasant reminder of one of the most ridiculous aspects of my life. In a nutshell, the site insists on real names. I fact they are pretty adamant about it (facebook at least allows you to use the name you go by in your everyday life). That doesn't sound so bad, and considering its nature as a Q&A site it sort of makes sense, as it can help keep things honest. The problem is that I am one of those people for whom the very concept of a 'real name' is somewhat problematic. Why? Well, because I had the misfortune of being born in one of those countries with stupid laws that restrict the names parents can give to their children, and the name my parents had chosen ...
Okay, so maybe I should be saying 'Welcome to my new home on the web!' or something along those lines, and I do welcome you, but I also wanted to take this opportunity to explain why, after so many years, I decided to move to a new site, rather than keep updating booksandtales.com as I had been doing since the dawn of the millennium.
The reason itself is simple enough: in the fourteen years since that site came online the web has changed too much, and booksandtales itself has accrued too much dead wood. The problem is that it's a kind of dead wood I don't really want to get rid of, not entirely. There is the print on demand comparison, which is now ridiculously outdated, but which was once a useful starting point for people looking to self-publish, and also my early attempts at writing ...
