End of the Quest

This week Ellie opened the adventure book and we set out to visit another site that was part of the story of the Texas war for independence from Mexico that was fought 175 years ago.  As I've mentioned in previous posts we have been using the  Texas Independence Trail  passport as a guide and following the trail of sites that were significant to the war of independence.  At each site we got our passport stamped to show that we had been there.  When all of the stamps are collected you are supposed to send in the passport to get a commemorative gift. 

This week we decided to take a run to San Felipe De Austin , the town that Stephen F. Austin founded when he began to establish a colony in Texas.  It's about 150 miles from our house so we thought it would make an easy daytrip.  In a couple of hours we had reached the site, which was well-kept and easy to find.  The only down side was that there wasn't a lot to see.  The town had been burned by the Texas army when they retreated to points east during the war.  Apparently some archaeological digs have taken place, but unlike the Alamo, the town has not yet been rebuilt.  So we got our passport stamped, toured the museum and were treated to a well-informed tutorial from the two folks working there.  By lunchtime we had seen the entire site and were on the lookout for a place to chow down.

The folks at the museum suggested a good place to eat in Sealy, the closest town to San Felipe.  We had lunch there at Annie's Deli and Garden Cafe  which turned out to be a little gem, although it would have been hard to spot if the ladies at the museum hadn't given us great directions. 

By about 12:30 we were finished with lunch and, as there didn't seem to be a lot shopping or anything else of interest to us in Sealy, we debated about whether to head home or go somewhere else.  I guess I should have mentioned that our anniversary was this week so we were in one of those prom weekend modes that Ellie likes so much.  So, even though we had been celebrating our anniversary for nearly a week, we were not in the mood to end it and head home.  Ellie pointed out that we only had one more stamp to get: the one for the  San Jacinto Monument in La Porte, 73 miles away on the other side of Houston.  We had planned to hit San Jacinto later in the year in conjunction with a long weekend in Galveston, but since we were so close we decided to run over there and pick up that last stamp.

We had to drive straight across Houston to get to La Porte but it was early afternoon and the traffic wasn't too bad.  Our GPS was in a cantankerous mood so we ended up taking the wrong freeway at one point, which probably added twenty miles or so to our trip, but we reached the San Jacinto monument at a reasonable hour and had plenty of time to visit the museum, which is in the base of the monument.  The monument itself is a 570-foot tall stone column.  That's 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument, which is supposed to be the tallest obelisk in the world.  I'm not sure why the Washington Monument is called an obelisk and the San Jacinto Monument is called a memorial column, but ours is bigger and that's the truth.  Like the Washington Monument the San Jacinto Monument has an elevator inside and observation areas at the top.  Ellie and I decided not to ride it because she doesn't like heights and the monument is near the Houston ship channel and tank farm area so we thought the view might not be all that spectacular.  The battleship Texas is also moored at the San Jacinto site but neither Ellie nor I are into WWII ships, so we didn't tour it.  We just collected our stamp, checked out the museum and headed home.  Our daytrip ended up being a 423-mile journey.  It was a long ride but we enjoyed both the San Felipe De Austin and San Jacinto museums. 

We've driven between 1350 and 1400 miles this year to visit the major sites on the Texas Independence Trail.  That's a lot of time to spend in the car but we have had the opportunity to meet a lot people who are passionate about the history and heritage of Texas and we've learned a good bit about the events that culminated in the formation of this great state where we have made our home for over thirty years.

We're going to send in the fully stamped passport this week.  Can't wait to see what the commemorative gift is.  After all that driving I hope it's a gas card.

Heavy Petting

My wife and I like animals.  Over the years we have had lots of pets.  When we moved to Texas, it seems like a lifetime ago, we did it in a van filled with us, our kids, a dog named Woodstock, a parakeet named Pickles, two anonymous gerbils and a slew of houseplants.  We looked like a cross between Noah's ark and the Partridge Family.  Although we've had a cat, a lizard, fish and other animals,  we're mostly dog people and, since we consider them to be social animals, our dogs lived in the house with us.  For thirty years there was never a time when there wasn't at least one pooch in the house and sometimes there were as many as three.  I'm clumsy and don't like having an animal running around the floor that is so small that I might hurt it if I stepped on it, so most of our dogs have been around 80 – 100 pounds.  They've also mostly been labs, which means that they were really active and therefore big eaters.

About five years ago were down to one dog, Buck, a lab that was about eight years old.  He contracted the canine form of AIDs and passed away on July 3, 2006.  We were terribly sad because we both loved that dog.  Buck faded for nearly a month before he went, though, and he was in such misery that we should have had him put down.  We didn't do that because we couldn't stand to let him go at such a young age and we kept hoping that he would come around.  So it was really a blessing when his suffering ended.  Also, even though labs are hunting dogs, Buck was deathly afraid of the fireworks that  usually shatter the air around here on July 4th.  So at least he didn't have to go through that another time before he died.

After Buck was gone the house felt empty.  He was always underfoot, of course, because that's part of the family dog's job.  We never sat on furniture with our feet on the floor because we had this big, warm, furry footstool cozied up to the couch.  Whenever we came home from running an errand we were greeted with boundless joy and enthusiasm and the hope that there might be some goodies wrapped up in a napkin.  Buck didn't beg, though.  When we ate supper he lay on the floor quietly waiting until we were finished in hopes of getting some tasty leftovers and he was rarely disappointed.  We never worried about a break-in in the middle of the night because Buck slept on the floor near our bed and his sharp ears would pick up the sounds of someone outside long before ours could.

It felt so strange to us to no longer share our house with a dog.  So after grieving for a few weeks my wife and I started mulling over the question of whether or not to get another one.  We briefly flirted with the idea of a cat but both of us decided that we didn't like the fact that, unlike dogs, cats usually get up on furniture and counters.   No, a cat was definitely not in our future.  If we got another pet it would have to be a dog.  We debated about whether to get a small dog like some kind of terrier or miniature schnauzer or something, but we were so used to larger dogs that we gave up on that idea.  We quickly realized that what we really like are labrador retrievers so it would have to be a lab or nothing.

We already knew all of the positives about owning a lab.  We had never really listed the negatives, but some of them were pretty obvious to us.  For one thing, labs are extremely active dogs that need a lot of interaction and exercise.  They have lots of enthusiasm and play rough.  That wasn't a problem when we were younger.  In fact we liked roughhousing with the dogs way back when, but we are not really up to that now.  So we thought that it would not be a good idea to get a lab puppy because we just couldn't give it the attention it deserved and that wouldn't be fair to the dog.  An older rescue lab seemed like a more viable option.  Whether we got a puppy or a rescue lab, though, we knew we were talking about some significant expense.  I had calculated at one time that we spent between $1000 and $1200 per year on each dog that lived with us.  That included food, medicine and vet bills but not extra toys and goodies that we might buy for them.  Nor did it include kennel fees for those times when we took extended trips.  Another downside, and the one that finally made us decide not to get another dog, is that an inside dog can reasonably be expected to hold its bodily functions in for a relatively short time.  That makes it more or less impossible to take really long day trips or to turn a day trip into an overnighter.  We have found that we like the spontaneity that living without pets supplies.  So in the end we decided to live petless from here on out.

This is a question that a lot of retirees have to face.  It is comforting to have the companionship of a pet, especially a cat or a dog, as one gets older.  This is especially true for those whose spouses have passed away.  I can't quote any sources but I'm fairly confident that someone-or-other has pretty much proven that people who have someone or something to care for live longer than those who don't.  So, from that perspective at least, having a pet to share life with is a good thing.  There are those downsides though.  No matter what kind of pet you have, you will have to spend money from your fixed income to feed your pet and to maintain its health.  In addition, many dogs in particular are high energy animals that require a lot of exercise and probably a lot of interaction and toys to keep them from getting bored.  That can be hard to provide as you age.  If you have a big dog the problem gets worse as the dog ages.  It is pretty easy to lift a twenty pound terrier into a car for a trip to the vet, but it is a different story if you are dealing with a 100-pound lab with bad hips.  Then, of course, there is that time in the pet's life when it has aged to the point where it is in pain and discomfort much of the time.  Eventually most pet owners are going to have to make the choice to put the dog out of its misery and I can speak from personal experience when I say that that is a really difficult thing to do.

So I guess the bottom line here is that, if you are a person who is aging and who shares his life with pets, you might want to think about the pros and cons of owning them before replacing a pet that has recently passed away.  Big dogs live around 12 - 15 years and small dogs and cats and live to around twenty pretty easily.  So if you're in your sixties or seventies and thinking about getting a new pet, please make sure that you can handle the downside for the life of the pet or at least make some arrangements for some else to do that for you if you should suddenly be incapacitated and can't take care of it.

Exercise

Exercise.  I hate it.  It always seems like such a waste of time to me to do some exercise just for the sake of exercising.  I mean, I don't mind getting exercise when I'm doing something productive.  For example, I mow my own lawn rather than using a lawn service, even when the highs are in the triple digits.  Of course, our lawn is so small that it only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to mow, trim and blow the chaff off.  Still, that's productive exercise as far as I'm concerned.

Even though I don't like exercising for the sake of exercising, I still do it.  My wife and I try to walk at least three times a week.  We prefer walking in a park or somewhere else where there are interesting things to see, but we will walk at the mall or on a treadmill if it's too hot to walk outside.  So why do we do this when we both acknowledge that it's something we hate to do?  The reason is very simple: we've decided that in order to live you have to keep moving.  We've had some pretty good examples of what exercise can do for a person as they age and what happens if you don't get enough exercise as well.

My parents rarely exercised for the sake of health.  My mother was a stay at home mom who did a lot of housework in a two-story house with a basement.  She had to go up and down the basement stairs, carrying a laundry basket full of clothes, probably twelve or fourteen times a week in order to do the laundry.  Then too, she spent at least one day a week cleaning that big house.  She did this right up into her late eighties, although when she was about 80 years old, she told my wife and me that she didn't really do such a great job of cleaning anymore.  We were both amazed that she still cleaned at all, although I guess we shouldn't have been because Mom was the Energizer bunny incarnate. The point I'm trying to get to here is that Mom lived in and worked around that two-story house every day until six months before she died of cancer three days short of her 89th birthday.  My dad, on the other hand, didn't do much to exercise after he retired.  To be sure, he had spent thirty years or so a letter carrier, walking a route with a satchel full of mail over his shoulder for eight hours five days a week.  When he was working age he also mowed his own lawn, at least until we boys were old enough to mow it, and did the rest of the yard work himself.  After he retired he had to have an aortic aneurism repaired and his doctor told him he should exercise every day to keep his heart in shape. He did that for a few months and then pretty much gave it up entirely.  He died of a heart attack at 77.

My wife's parents started out with good intentions.  They both retired in their sixties and for awhile they both walked five or six days a week at the track at a local park.  To begin with they both made a couple of laps around the track.  Then my mother-in-law got to the point where she would walk one lap and then sit in the car and read the paper while my father-in-law walked his second lap.  Later on she walked about a quarter of a lap and then walked back to the car to read while my father-in-law finished his two laps.  Eventually she just sat in the car while he walked. My mother-in-law sort of gave up on housework too.  My father-in-law would make the meals and do the laundry while she read the paper or watched TV.  They lived on their own until she got sick and had to move into a nursing home at 80.  She died there about six years later.  My father-in-law is 91 and even though he has to use a walker to get around, has cancer and is permanently attached to a catheter, he rides an exercise bike for half an hour five days a week.  In fact, he was recently in the hospital for nearly a week to check on the status of his cancer, receiving chemo while he was there, and on the afternoon of the day he came back to the assisted living place where he lives, he rode the bike for half an hour.

OK, I know that some of this could just be good genes, but I see the value of exercise here.  So Ellie and I try to get exercise in at least three times a week, in my case, and five in hers.  We plan to keep moving until the lights are turned out and and we can't move again, hopefully way into the future.