BuckStopping

This week has been very hard. On Sunday evening, our senior Shiba Inu Aiko couldn't get up on her back legs. It had been damp and  cold, so I thought she maybe just needed to have her pills and lay down on the warm carpet next to the heater. By Monday morning, she was still not able to get up on her back legs, so we made the excruciating decision to let her go. I've been crying ever since. A piece of my life is gone, and all I can think of is her laying her little soft head on my chest as we laid in the back of David's van in the vet's parking lot, and her beautiful brown eyes losing the spark of life and growing dim as she passed. She was only 9, but due to what I believe were congenital defects from in-breeding - she was  a puppy mill dog - she had several health problems and long-term problems with her knees that made her old for her age. Despite that, she was a gorgeous red Shiba Inu who always knew she was special, from the day her daddy fell under her spell an...

I have a lovely cushy La-Z-Boy recliner that I love. It was expensive, and not something I want to toss out for being grungy. It's been 5 years since it was last cleaned, and it had gotten dirty areas, especially on the arms and head rest, due to kids and dogs and life in general. It looked pretty gross. I thought right away that I needed to have the chair professionally cleaned, so I started calling around. The best price I could get in my town was $50. Not really bad considering what they have to do to clean a big old chair like that, with all its nooks and crannies. BUT. I am cheap and wanted to know if there was something I could do and not have to pay $50. So, I looked around to see if I could find a blog or video with "home-made" instructions. I found quite a few, but they all included a lot of water along with the vinegar, oxi-clean or whatever else they were using, and I wasn't sure my upholstery could handle a lot of water - some don't. I then...