This has been such a complex week that there’s been no time to write. It appears that the alien is a done deal because it has remained under the lip of the kitchen cabinets for a solid week now. I keep hoping it will redirect its energies into the art of French cooking (including cosmic shopping for same), but this has yet to happen. Rita told me she saw a really big alien pet toy, but just the thought of such a thing boggles the mind.
The puppies are now 8 weeks old and will go in for exams, health certificates, and their first vaccines this week. They continue physically and behaviorally developing at what seems like a breath-taking rate. Nonetheless, Fric believes they still need a mother’s touch as well as some comfort nursing so they eat half their food and she eats the rest in addition to her own and continues nursing. I remain in awe of her dedication to this because all have a full mouth of parahna teeth and are do big she must stand while they nurse. Still I doubt she’ll give up this part of her maternal duties until she thinks it’s time. As I watch her I have to wonder if, as in cats, the act of nursing also keeps puppies in the learning mind-set relative to those things their mum thinks they need to know to succeed in a human world.
Just for the heck of it, I removed the small crate from the pen today and replaced it with a small cardboard box. In no time, they were all playing King of the Mountain. But no sooner did the Masked Marvel get up there than he started eying a clean towel draped over the edge of the pen beyond his reach. Darned if, as I’ve been writing this, they didn’t push the box over under that towel. When I just turned around to see what they were up to, he was on top of the box and the towel was in the pen where the puppy Formerly Known as Peanut Buttercup was vigorously attacking it.
And speaking of the Masked Marvel, I’ve decided to keep him rather than Cori. I realized that my desire for a female arose EBB, i.e, in the era before BeeBee. As I’ve watched her develop into a typical corgi (aka, a saw-offed German shepherd dog) and recalled my own recommendation to have as much difference between dogs in a multiple dog household as possible, I realized another female, and especially a spirited one with at least a few twists of leprechaun DNA like Cori might add a degree of spice I didn’t want at this stage of my life. It was a very difficult decision to make because she really is something special, but the Masked Marvel, whom I’m thinking about calling Ollie (as in “I don’t know, what do you think Ollie?” rather than colleague of Kookla and Fran), is much more laid back.
This week also brought a progression of visitors which was good for three reasons. The first was that it was very good for the puppies. The second is that the weather was decent enough that it was possible. And the third was that the hole in the driveway didn’t get any bigger with the increased traffic.
On the downside, it also brought a problem Watson has been having to the forefront much sooner and in a way much more dramatic than I was prepared for. I’ve been aware that he was aging rapidly and that his sensory perception was waning. And for years he’s had minor seizures, but these were sufficiently infrequent and short that the side-effects of the medication would have been more problematic than the seizures themselves. He was responding well to a new painkiller for joint-related discomfort and I’d worked through several scenarios regarding what I’d do the day he couldn’t make it up the stairs by himself. Having dealt with this with BeeBee, it wasn’t a big deal. I also notice that sometimes he became disoriented, but chalked that up to his loss of hearing and vision plus confusion created by wind, etc. When he reacted with an uncharacteristic amount of vigor when the pups were harassing him on Thursday, I chalked that up to the stress of company and the more numerous trips he’d been making up and down the stairs associated with this. Yes, and not for the first time, the niggling thought occurred to me that all was not well, but I could find plenty of reasons not to believe that.
Anyhow to make a long story short, Saturday morning he had what we suspect was a psychomotor seizure. For no reason that I can discern, this incredibly tolerant lovable lump o’hound suddenly went into attack mode and repeatedly lunged and bit at something I could neither see nor hear. Unfortunately, in the process of doing this, he encountered Bee and she wound up with multiple puncture wounds on her face and head. And damned if most of them weren’t on her good side. As I pulled him away from her, he growled at me, but it was an unusual sound, not only because he so rarely ever growled but also because it didn’t sound like a normal growl. It was obvious he had no idea who I was or what he was doing. The whole episode only lasted a minute or two, if that, and when it ended all of the signs I didn’t want to see suddenly became crystal clear. After I was sure Bee was OK, I took him to the clinic with me when I went in to see a client. He was the first of my animals with whom I did not stay or euthanize myself. I knew it had to be done and that it was the right thing to do, but I could not bring myself to remember him any way other than as I saw him on the drive to the clinic, hanging with his head out the car window so he wouldn’t throw up while I froze to death driving the 20 miles.
By time I got back from the clinic, all I wanted to do was make sure Bee was OK yet again, feed everyone, clean up the puppies and go to bed. Instead, after crying most of the way home, I had a major weep-out, talked to Ann and cried again, and talked to Dan and cried some more.However, the puppies would have none of my blubbering. They’ve become accustomed to me letting them out of the pen every day so they can race, bounce, jump on, leap, climb, slide, fall, roll, and do all the other things puppies like to do with mad abandon until they drop. And so I did and they did. And then I went to bed.
I think I mentioned in the BeeBee Chronicles that because of her pronounced (greatly!!) overbite and semi-paralyzed tongue, Bee’s breath normally smells like a wet dirty sneaker. Because one of her wounds is inexplicably on the inside of cheek and there was still a small amount of blood seeping from it, sleeping with her in the bed last night was like sleeping with a +20 pound used tampon. Although my aesthetic self screamed at me to have her sleep elsewhere, I didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I put a healthy slug of lavender oil on either end of my pillow case to drown the stench. She’s living proof of lavender’s calming effect because she slept like a rock. She’s a little more subdued than usual, but not enough to cause her to miss a molecule of food last night and this morning. That and some swelling are about it, and I can’t say I mind the subdued part all that much because I feel pretty subdued myself.
I feel like I should write something about Wats and what a great dog he was but the words don’t come. It happened too fast. And, yeah, he was just a dog. But like all living beings, he was unique.
“Time to chill,” say the puppies. They’ve now pulled down a little rug that was also hanging over the edge of the pen, dragged it to an open area behind me, and are now sleeping in a pile on it. Beats me how anyone could look at that and not think that all was right with at least their little part of the world.