Family | My Life as a Ham

Aug 14 2014

I’m a good boy

Well, I did another good thing the other day. Add it to the list of all the good things I already do: finish all of my meals, give everyone lots of kisses, keep Veda’s back warm while she sleeps, bring joy to the world and everyone I meet. Check, check, check and check. Now, the latest good deed done is this little guy.

This is Ollie. He’s our temporary houseguest.

You wouldn’t believe it, but he’s homeless. Yup, he made a long journey from San Antonio to Chicago with hopes and dreams of a better life and a consistent bowl of dry, brown roundish bits. He’s just a little guy with a spotted belly and a tendency to roll over on his back with the slightest nudge. He moved into our house last week and peed on a few things, but nothing I haven’t already peed on. It was supposed to be a longer stay with us, but a week into his visit we found him a forever home! His forever home is not with Ms. Veda and me because our parents only have 2 hands each which means they can only pet two dogs at a time and more than that would be cruel to me. If you are petting a dog with one hand then you better get that other hand busy by petting me! Do you think you evolved to have two hands for a better reason? Maybe to throw two cats out of the house at the same time, but that’s the only other reason! Just kidding, I love my feline friends and their pointy claws.

: Veda showing interspecies respect to the late Smokey Bones

These posts never stay on track! Let’s return to our original focus of Señor Ollie. His days of wandering the country in search of a place to call his own have come to an end in the City of the Big Shoulders. Check. I think my heart is going to break that little heart meter from the Grinch pretty soon if these good deeds keep stacking up. Watch out Mother Teresa! Mr. Hambone is on his way up the ladder of the Saints.

-Hamanitarian of the year

Tagged adopt, Chicago, foster home, good deeds, interspecies friends

May 12 2014

Lost Balls…not those ones, those were taken from me!

2011-12-23 14.34.10

Sometimes I lose my ball under the couch. It gets lodged underneath just out of reach of my long nails. It makes me sad because I can see the ball and I can remember what it was like to have it, but it’s just too far away to reclaim. The taste of the soft rubber lingers in my mouth and I can almost feel the ball squeak between my teeth if I think about it hard enough. Thoughts and memories are funny in this way. If I could just forget the ball was under the couch then life could continue without much of a fuss about my loss. Instead, I try to find a nice sunny place to lay down and distract my thoughts with the fish tank or the fly behind blinds or sounds of possible dogs outside, but my thoughts always seem to meander back to my ball. For example, I start to think about the fly behind the blinds which reminds of my Dad’s pant’s fly (which is always down) and thinking about my Dad leads me to his best friend Uncle Paul and then BALL! It goes on like this for hours…maybe minutes…time is a difficult concept. Tragically, there is nothing in the world I can do to get the ball from under the couch…on my own. See, I have these friends with really long, furless arms on whom I can rely on in these tough situations. They can understand what I need and want without my having to tell them anything. These people are, of course, my lovely Mother and Father and they always come to the rescue. Always! Even if they don’t get the ball from under the couch just having them around makes things a little better. You better believe that ball is still in the back of my mind, but it doesn’t consume me as it did when my parents are gone. It does help that they feed me and pat me on my rump which makes the painful memory of the lost ball dissipate a teeny weeny bit. I love them very much and at the end of the day I wish I could make those word sounds so I could tell them one simple thing: GET MY BALL FROM UNDER THE COUCH, YOU BEAN EATING CABBAGE HEADS!

-Hamory (it kind of looks/sounds like memory. Throw me a bone here. Literally. Throw me a bone!)

Tagged balls, Loss

Mar 27 2014

The Dames

Whoa, whoa, whoa (click and read). Everyone, allow me to introduce one of my close friends Mozie or Mipsy or Monty or whichever one she is. I may have forgotten to describe a few animals in my life not because I don’t love them, but because they’re so little that my eyes brushed right over their heads as I was gazing at the timeline of my life. These little ladies are Yorkshire Terriers who, as you can read from her comment, smother the heck out of me even if I tend to step on them, roll over them, and overlook them (literally, they’re tiny!). Perhaps it’s my deep brown eyes or deep brown fur or deep brown smell that attracts the love and lust of many a female. I try to keep up with all of them because I truly do love them equally. Right, men? You know what I’m talking about. Sometimes it seems like you get in trouble if your tail wags in the wrong direction, so I started wagging mine in circles to cover any possible direction. You have to please the ladies. Mozie, I did search for you when we first arrived to our new place. I looked everywhere I could think a little one such as yourself might fit. Here’s the proof.

Searching for Mozie

Spoiler: Mozie was not in the bottom of the box. The rigorous search ended a few minutes later because that box was stuck on my head and I got lost in personal thoughts as I stared into the pitch black nothingness of an empty Coke Zero fridge pack. The head encompassing box lead me to ask the tough questions like: If I can’t see people, can they see me? or, Is that smell the box or me? It was a self reflection moment all spurred by my search for my loved, lost friends. In the end, I found myself in that box. I also found a raisin. Thank you, Mozie. Veda and I do miss you and the other ewoks.

-Sir Hams-a-lot

Tagged inner thoughts, Yorkies