Other Pirates

There is some concern that I will have to stop writing if, indeed, Jack finds a new home.  Never fear, my life is full of pirates, past, present and future.  Jack, by the way, is doing really well upstairs in his room.  I've taken a few people in to introduce them and he has warmed right up to them.  He's lonely, though, and I wish he didn't have to be alone so much.  I try to sit with him every day for awhile--much to the chagrin of my main pirate, Zuza. 

She's really the captain of the ship.  I'm sitting at Starbucks right now, so I can go online, and she is sleeping on my chest, tucked in my sweatshirt.  For those of you who are far away, Zuza is a Prague Ratter and is the pup peeking over my shoulder in my profile picture.  She and her brother, Lukas, just turned 5 in February.  Luke stays at Briar Patch when I'm at the PT business because he has waaayyy too much to say and is indefatigable.  ("Hey!  There's someone in the parking lot!  Hey!  Someone is going to the bathroom!  Hey!  The door bell rang!  Hey!  Do you want to play with something?  Look!  I gotta squeaky duck here. Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak...")  She, on the other hand, sleeps happily in a bed with a heated snugly unless she feels it necessary to join the client on the table, where she will curl up on their thighs, oozing sweetness and cuteness and warmth.  She weighs 3lbs10oz and I hold her 3/4 of the day.  When she was just 11 weeks old she broke her left elbow, and even though she had a very successful surgery, the screw broke 2 months later and she now has a permanently broken left foreleg.  So other than the fact that I carried her in a pouch for 2 months, she is unaffected by her disability.  She runs, she kills rodents stupid enough to come into a house with 2 ratter dogs and EIGHT cats (you have to know that we are thinning the herd of all the really dumb rodents).

And why is she a pirate?  Why are all of them pirates?  They board our ships and take possession of all we have and then they direct all we're going to do.  And then, like Captain Jack Sparrow or the guy that Orlando Bloom played--(I don't care, he played Legolas the elf in the Lord of the Rings and I will love him forever)--they steal our hearts as well and we feel that we can't possibly live without them.