Motley Moose – Archive

Doors

I live with two dogs and two cats. They all need me to let them in and out. 

This is because I worry. I worry that if I made them their own door, they’d get in trouble. Casey the Border Collie would freak out at some noise and claw himself over the fence and run off. Jess the Calico Cat would take to working the streets and never come back again.

Charlotte the Mildly Autistic Tortoise Shell would likely still hang around and sleep on my spot on the couch. She likes being an indoor-ish cat. Caught herself a big mouse on the stoop this evening though. I was effusive with praise. Jess hung back and looked at me a bit plaintively, perhaps suggesting that she’d had a role in this fine capture of this exceptionally impressive mouse?

Likely. I’ve seen them tag-team before.

My other inhouse non-human here is The Fabulous Furry Frolicking Falcor. All my pets are rescues, and he and the cats date from last year. Falc is a border collie-Great Pyrenees cross, and is okay left in the yard, but still, I worry. What if something horribly terrifying happened while I was gone? I’ve only been his human since last summer. We haven’t done the thunderstorm thing since the weather hasn’t been cooperating. 

So, I do the door thing all the time. I keep my non-human peeps here in, I keep them out occasionally. But it all seems so rude on my part. 

There is an ex-pet door, covered over with plywood, that I could uncover and rework. I could also fit it with a movable cover.

Point being, I spend a lot of time here on my turf. I like to keep doors closed because of flies. (mosquitoes are technically flies.) So why am I being so controlling about this door thing with my nonhuman friends? 

I can probably fix this by knocking out a little sheetrock, maybe cutting back a few two-by-fours some, and making some kind of flap and then working out an interior barrier with plywood and slotted hardware. 

Yes, I can.

This is Dedicated to My Pal Shauna

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The What, I walk dogs, I care for cats and occasionaly an odd assortment of little pet creatures. By industry standards at three years plus, I’m a longtime veteran.

I had planned on telling you how phenomenal my employers are, about how our mission statement might be a model for other businesses to emulate, but I made the doing the fun part first mistake of writing about the woozles, heh so this diary will be too long if I did.

The What part can wait and probably deserves it’s own diary.

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The Why, well that’s easy. I’m an animal lover, always have been and always will be. My wife is too and the joke around here is that we have 10 pairs of legs in our family: 2 humans, 2 pooties and 2 woozles. There hasn’t been a time when I didn’t have a pet and when it wasn’t a cat or dog, it was a lopp eared rabbit.

The more immediate question is why now, at 58? That answer has some history, all recent and none of it very positive really. Although I’m happy doing what I’m doing, the journey to get here was painful and there are scars still healing.

I’ve been self employed almost my entire life and I’ve reinvented myself three times, starting three completely different businesses on a shoestring, chasing a passion. At 48 I was ready again. I loved to cook, I’ve always wanted a little cafe and at that age, cooking seemed like a career I could continue until I was ready to retire or unable to work. Industry people I spoke with had their doubts but I know what I can accomplish when I make up my mind, so I went for it.

I spent two years learning in kitchens, working 14 -16 hour days, commuting for hours and honing my craft. I applied for line cook positions at two restaurants and set up both interviews in one day. The restaurants were across the street from each other and I was hired for both jobs, one morning shift, one afternoon.  

I worked my way up to managerial positions at both spots, trying new recipes, designing menus and managing staff. I was seemingly on my way, it all pointed positive until the the bottom fell out of the restaurant business here in Chicago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2007. It was the foreshadowing of our Great Recession and of worse things to come.

I was laid off from both restaurants the same week and I spent the next two years, the most difficult years of my adult life, without work. We’ve all heard the horrible stories about the new discrimination of fifty year olds, I was suddenly a statistic with a very odd resume. I never gave up looking and in a very quirky,

‘I really don’t care what I write on this application because no will really read it’, answer to a question about something I was passionate about, the answer got my app noticed.

I wrote paragraphs extolling the many virtues of our Honda Element. Worried sick about having to sell it because we were getting so heavily into debt, I was already beginning to miss it. I recieved a call from the interviewer the next day. We spent an hour talking Honda, he finally decided to buy the one he had test driven, oh and I was hired.

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