Missing Our Martin-Cat

We lost a very important member of our family on Monday night. After 5 months of dealing with kidney problems, invasive surgery, a handful of complications, and a whole lot of ups and downs, Martin died on Monday night.


There aren’t quite the words to express what Martin meant to us…

Cautiously Optimistic

Martin has made some serious progress since my last update! He took another step backwards, but this past week and a half has been very positive for the little bugger!


Martin first started having problems because of his kidneys. He was making kidney stones, and wasn’t able to pass them. So his kidneys got obstructed, and they couldn’t clear the toxins from his blood like they were supposed to. So he didn’t feel good, and he stopped eating.

One Step Forward Two Steps Back

This Martin cat is proving very challenging. It seems like every time we start to make some forward progress, something else happens and he has another back slide.

He got over the little GI bug he got from Leo, and was starting to do a little better. He was acting more normal, hanging out with the other cats, and eating a little bit on his own (although nowhere near enough).

It’s not often we get all four cats on the bed at the same time! (See, I told you I wasn’t making the bed anymore!)

Tagg Pet Tracker

I had the opportunity to test-drive the Tagg Pet Tracker from Verizon Wireless for two months for our dog Sadie. This handy little device attaches to your dog’s collar, and keeps track of where your dog is, and how active she is.

Here’s the tracker clipped on Sadie’s collar. It’s nice and small, and she never bothered it once. (Don’t mind her fur. It’s summer, she’s a Husky cross, and she just started shedding… she won’t be pretty for another 3 weeks…)


Here she is again, looking slightly more respectable. Slightly.


The main goal of the Tagg Pet Tracker is so you know when your dog leaves your property, where she goes when she leaves, and how to find her once she is gone. The Tagg will send you an email and a text message when the dog is outside the Home Tagg Zone (that you set).

Sadie doesn’t actually leave very often, and when she does she just goes to the bottom of the driveway (which I set outside our Home Tagg Zone). So to really see how the tracker works, I took it off her collar and went for a drive.


You can use your computer or the free Tagg app on your mobile device to locate your dog’s current location on a map, or to track your dog’s progress. With the track feature, you will get email and/or text notices (depending on your settings) every 3 minutes with updated location information.

Here’s another location, a few minutes later. The email and text messages will give you an address close to her location.


And a map is included in the email. The blue box is where Sadie (or at least, her tracker) was.


(Love, Sadie. Because she didn’t really mean to run away, and she’ll be so happy to see you again when you find her!)

From the website, you can see the map with Sadie’s location (the orange paw print).


And you can see the trail she took to get to her current location. The orange dots are sort of “check in points” – I got an email to correspond to each of these locations.


Then, when she comes home on her own, or you find her (or bring the tracker back home), you’ll get another email/text saying “I’m back!” Phew! No more worrying!


One other feature I was really excited about was the activity tracking. Sadie’s an old, arthritic Husky cross farm dog. As she gets older, she spends a lot more time sleeping on our porches, so I really didn’t expect that she was getting all that much activity. Boy, was I wrong!

Here is one of her more active days… She racked up 239 Tagg Points (compared to a monthly average of 169).


I love the timeline feature. Who know that between 1:00-3:00am every day Sadie gets up and takes a tour of the farm? I wonder why? (But not enough to get up and spy on her.)


And her total time active really surprised me! This was a busy day for her, clocking in over 3 hours of activity. Most days she gets more like 1.5-2 hours of activity. As the weather has gotten hotter, she has been less active (and who could blame her?). But still, for an old arthritic farm dog, that’s pretty good!


Veterinarians recommend at least 30-60 minutes of activity for dogs daily. This is a great way to see if you dog is hitting that goal! You can also set Tagg Point goals to hit each day. These point totals are easy to see on the Tagg mobile app, so it’s easy to keep track of how your dog (and you!) are doing during the day.

Here’s Sadie’s last 30 days of activity…


And a snapshot of the two months that we had the tracker. Some of the dips are from when the battery needed to be charged and was on the docking station instead of her collar, and some of the dips are on the hotter days when she just hung out in the shade. But, overall, a pretty good activity level for our old girl!


I used this on our dog, but it could also be used for any other animal. This would be a great tool for cattle. They tend to stay in herds, so not every cow would need a tracker, but a tracker or two on the troublemaker cows would alert you if they broke through a fence and were off wandering around. The Tagg Pet Tracker would also be great for a sick animal – we could monitor the activity levels of animals we were worried about to be sure they were moving around to get food, water, and a little exercise even if they aren’t feeling great.

What systems do you have in place to find your dog if she goes missing? Collars, tags, and microchips are very important, but none of those can tell you where your runaway pet is right now!

{Thanks to Verizon Wireless for letting me use the Tagg Pet Tracker for two months. All thoughts, opinions, and photographs are my own.}

Martin the Wonder Cat

Or should I say Martin the high-maintenance cat? Or maybe Martin the time-consuming cat?

Martin has had a very rough last two months. His ordeal started on May 5, and hasn’t ended yet. But, hopefully he is through the worst of the craziness.

Homemade Dog Biscuits

One of my favorite things about Gooseberry Patch’s new cookbook, “Garfield… Recipes with Cattitude!” is that it includes a recipe for cat treats and one for dog treats. We can’t forget about our fluffy friends!

I am not one to normally make homemade snacks for my pets, but I had to give these recipes a try. And boy, were these dog biscuits a hit!

Homemade Cat Treats

I have seen a bunch of recipes for homemade dog treats. But I had not seen a recipe for homemade cat treats before. (Granted, I hadn’t looked very hard.) When I found this recipe in Gooseberry Patch’s new cookbook, “Garfield… Recipes with Cattitude!” I knew I had to try it!

What to do with Martin?

Martin has been having a rough go of things lately. He’s usually quite personable and photogenic. He loves to hang out on the furniture, play with his squirrel toys, and help me in the office. Heck, he even almost went to college.


But Martin hasn’t been feeling very well lately.

Jail Break!

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you probably saw that we had an… incident… on Saturday.


These calves are supposed to be behind a fence in the pasture, not in my (sad) flower beds!

Hungry beasts

There’s not much that’s cuter than the first calf of the year! We’ve got our first four babies “on the ground,” with five more on the way at our house (and about 15 at our other farm). It’s not all fun and babies around here, though. While the babies primarily eat their momma’s milk, the mommas are big eaters – especially when they’re also feeding a 60-pound newborn!

Till the cows come home

Our cows came home two weeks ago! I never would have thought that I missed having cows at my house. But I sure did!

Snow day

As you’ve probably heard by now, we got a Christmas snow storm here in Indiana. Lucky for us, it held off until Christmas night, and we got to spend a nice relaxing day with our family before the “Blizzard of 2012” hit. Not everyone was upset about the snow – Sadie, our husky mix had a blast!

(Yes, she had somewhere warm and dry to go. She just didn’t go there. Silly girl.)

This is what we saw when we got up on Wednesday morning. Almost every window in the house got this winter treatment overnight. First the screens iced over, then they collected snow. Made it pretty dark inside!

The doors were not left out of the snow experience. And our outside tree was a little windswept…

It always amazes me how the wind moves on top of our hill. There were patches of bare ground that had been swept clean, and snow drifts 4 feet tall. The back part of the house got covered in snow, but it didn’t really stick to the front part on this side.

We intentionally left the barn doors open during the night. There is no center beam to hold the doors shut (makes it easy to get trucks and tractors in and out, but means the wind catches the doors when they’re closed). So… open doors meant snow inside.

My truck is behind this door… behind this very tall, still growing, snowdrift.

Farmer Doc spent about 3 hours on a tractor on Thursday afternoon digging us out. Here’s the garage after a bit of thawing and lots of plowing.

The trouble with a gravel driveway is that if you plow too deep, you move around a lot of the dirt and gravel that is the driveway and make lots of ruts and bumps. If you don’t plow deep enough, you don’t get all the snow off.

Getting down the driveway and this hill is the easy part. The hard part is getting back up. The trick is to start up the hill with just enough speed so you make it to the top on the first try… but not so much speed that you lose control in the snow before you get to the top.

It’s a fine line.

And… as I write this on Friday evening… it has just started to snow again. Which means we get to do this all again this weekend! Who’s excited?

Our dog Kodi

We lost a very good friend last week.

A day on the farm

Just another fall day on the farm. The dogs are lounging outside in the sun.

Cows like fall

Just like me, the cows love this time of year! We’ve got Black Angus cows, and it’s really hot for them in the summer. Cows can’t sweat, so they need plenty of shade to stay cool in the summer months.

Time for some fly spray

While some of my friends and I are having a problem with gnats and fruit flies around the house, our cows are having a problem with flies out in the field! This summer was so dry that we didn’t really have a big problem with insects earlier in the year. And now that we have gotten some rain, the bugs have come back out. Ick.

Because the cows are being bothered so much by the flies, we treated them with fly spray. Farmer Doc and I went out to visit some of our cows we keep at a different pasture and give them a fly spray bath.

First, Farmer Doc put out some corn to entice them to come out of the rolling pasture and into the barn lot. (Where we could reach them.)

Weaning calves

It’s that time of year again. Our calves were born in February and March, so now they’re around 6 months old. It’s time to wean.

We started them on creep feed back in June, and they’ve been eating hay with their mothers for a few months. They don’t know it yet, but they’re ready to be weaned.

First, we brought all the calves into the barn and left the mothers outside on the pasture.

Martin goes to college

Every once in a while, Martin gets mail. But it’s not often that he gets a diploma!

The cats’ favorite toys

We have no shortage of cats around here. Which means that we also have no shortage of cat toys. There is definitely one type of toy that has emerged as the favorite.

It’s a squirrel. They love this toy so much, we have two of them. And for some reason, our bed is the favorite place to put the toys.

Don’t leave your door open

The other night I got my mixer out to make blackberry cobbler.

I left the cabinet door open long enough to put the mixer down on one of the other counters. When I turned back around, this is what I found.