At the end of my last entry about BeeBee, I was sitting in my car sobbing, but I didn’t remain that way for long. For one thing, there were too many nice people coming to the clinic who would surely come over to ask me what was wrong. If they did, I knew I would immediately start blubbering along the lines of, “I just left my brain-damaged, deformed dog to be spayed and what if her too long upper jaw and too short and crooked lower one makes it impossible to pass the tube into her trachea and give
Read more →On the drive to the veterinary clinic, BeeBee looked out the window for while, or at least she faced it for a while, then shifted her focus to the air coming in the vents. She soon tired of that, too, and curled up on the passenger seat and went to sleep as if riding in the car was something she did every day. Because it wasn’t, I was impressed. When we got to the clinic, at first Bee wanted to take a closer look at the donkeys and the llama, but as we got closer to them she decided
Read more →Did you ever congratulate yourself for having all the bases covered only to watch everything go down the toilet in an instant? That’s what happened to me the last day of April. I got up that morning and made a note on my calendar to set up an appointment to get BeeBee spayed in May sometime after her first birthday. My thinking was that she’d be old enough that her growth plates should be well on their way toward closing if not already closed and her stitches would be out before I took her to my son’s to babysit
Read more →Once again I’m behind as spring clean-up and creating a new garden out of an area that consists mainly of sand and rocks takes up what little free time I have. Still, there have been some changes and BeeBee has been involved in most of them. Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a
Read more →Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until
Read more →A friend recently sent me the following lovely poem by poet extraordinaire Mary Oliver. Because it was about a dog, I automatically compared that animal’s experiences with those of my puppy, Ollie. Once I did that, I could not resist the temptation to portray Ollie’s alternate reality poetically, too. Below are both poems, the exquisite original and the parody. Luke, by Mary Oliver from Red Birds I had a dog who loved flowers Briskly she went through the fields. yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of
Read more →Spring officially came last week and with it a lot of changes. Let me pause here to note that “spring” is a relative term. Last week that meant only one snow storm and one night with record-breaking low temperatures. However, in spite of the fact that the snow was very heavy and very wet, there was only about 3″ of it and I decided to let it melt rather than shovel it or have it plowed. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to take the puppies out every day to get them used to the outdoors, to get some sun, and
Read more →Here is a link to a toy my son Dan got his animal-loving daughter for her birthday. But when Lauren started playing with it, he realized what it was about when she yanked on the dog’s tail and poop came out. (All he saw was Barbie and dog and thought, “Perfect gift.” That’s my boy!) As he was coping with his shock regarding this surprising turn of events, the obvious question occurred to him: “Where does the poop come from?” Then he discovered that the poop also serves as the treats that Barbie feeds the dog. Hmmmmm….. Being the
Read more →Although I always hope I’ll be able to take those professional-looking pet portraits, the reality is that little puppies are remarkably fast. Add that the battery in my camera crapped out and I was reduced to plugging my camera into a wall socket which greatly limited my puppy-chasing mobility, and I had no choice but to resort to what my son did under similar circumstances to keep Cori still long enough to photograph her: I popped them into a decorator wastebasket. The only disadvantage of this is that, as you can see, they did not see this as a
Read more →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,
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