Tag: dogs

Poor, pathetic puppy.

A week and a half ago, specifically Sunday June 19th, we noticed that there was something wrong with Rerun.  For those of you who know Rerun that’s a pretty general statement.  He’s a weird little dog.  Specifically, this time he had a foot problem.  He’d apparently managed to impale a toe or get bitten or something.  Either way, it wasn’t pretty.  His second toe on his front left foot was approximately three times the size it should have been and he had licked/nibbled on it to the point that hair was missing.

Knowing Rerun’s temper, we muzzled him, wrapped him in a blanket, and functionally hog tied him to keep from hurting himself.  He thrashed, growled, probably swore, and tried, despite the muzzle, to eat whatever human body part got closest to him.  Despite all of this we managed to bathe his paw in hydrogen peroxide, clean it, and drain the infection out of it.  Because it looked like, at minimum, an allergic infection, we gave him a weight appropriate dose of Benadryl and decided to call the vet first thing in the morning.

We called when they opened and they had an opening at 11:15am.  By the time we got there is was clear that he was feeling a little better, but his toe was still quite swollen.  The vet, one of the newer members of the practice took a look, inspected all of his feet, and upon finding out from us that he was a self nail trimming dog, opined that it was most likely that he’d split his nail to the quick while chewing on it and that’s how the infection had gotten in.  When she showed me that there was, um, infected fluid, coming out from under his nail, it made total sense.

We came home with a scrip for pain meds, 3 weeks of antibiotics, and the Cone of Shame.  That’s right, Rerun got an e-collar.  This immediately turned him into a Zombie Dog.  He came in the door and refused to move.  He just lay down wherever was most inconvenient and remained there like a rock.  A rock with Sad Puppy Eyes.

Naturally this required pictures.  For posterity, of course.

The Cone of Shame
"Daddy, please take this off. Please???"

 

"I keeeel you."
"Take another picture and I eat your face."

If you look closely in the photos you can see the swollen toe on his front left foot.  It looks MUCH better now and he’s clearly feeling better, though he still HATES the e-collar.  If I can get any more photos without inducing him to kill me in my sleep, I will.

~Kelly

Oh, and speaking of dumb

A restaurant here in Massachusetts decided to turn away a group of diners because some of them had service dogs.  At a restaurant called Bamboo in Dedham, staff decided that a group that included several people with service dogs could be refused service.  The police were called in, and unfortunately, the police sided with the restaurant.  How this is remotely compliant with the ADA is beyond me, but these days, businesses seem to be getting the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a lot of things.  It will be interesting to see where something like this will go in the courts.

At any rate, this little local chain, like Upper Crust, will be one that Kelly and I avoid and encourage others to avoid.

-Geoff

At least today was pretty constructive

Today Kelly and I managed to:  take Rerun to the vet (he had a problem with one of his paws); take care of the details at the tuxedo rental place (details to come later for those renting tuxes) ; take Kelly to an interview (which went well); do some research on things to do this summer and fall with visiting family; picked up some prescriptions; picked up some clothes from our tailor, Mr. Sordillo, and dropped off two more pairs of pants of mine to be hemmed; and stopped at the hardware store to pick up a few odds and ends we needed.  So all in all, a pretty constructive day for a Monday.  – Geoff

Another ordinary Saturday*

*Unless of course, you count that whole Rapture thing.

For those of you who haven’t heard (and I imagine that by this point there are not many of you) today, May 21, 2011, is supposed to be the day of the Rapture.  I figured that this concept has reached a saturation point in our society when even Boston.com is talking about it at length.  So the big day is supposed to be today according to one group of very determined fundamentalist Christians.  Sunday is Rogation Day, and Kelly and I are planning to bring the dogs with us.  We do not anticipate any theological or metaphysical issues with our plans.  And speaking of pets, it turns out that there is a group who is fulfilling the dual purpose of taking care of animals and forcing the people who actually believe this stuff to put their money where their mouth is.  They are called Eternal Earth-bound Pets and they have a website.

I am thinking that there has got to be someone, somewhere, who is a really wealthy fundamentalist Christian and who is concerned about the state of their earthly affairs after today.  They are wondering what is going to happen to their beloved boat.   I wish I had thought of it.  I could have volunteered to take care of their boat while they are gone.  How else am I ever going to get one of these anytime soon?  Hopefully I will not have to compete with any of the 800,000 (so far) people who signed up on Facebook to participate in the post-Rapture looting.

-Geoff

More on Brimfield

Geoff here – I have to say that we had a really good weekend at Brimfield.   This was our first road trip in the new car, and it did quite well.  It is phenomenal the gas mileage that thing gets.  I did not have to refill the tank at all for the entire trip.  In fact despite driving over 200 miles we barely made a dent in the gas tank – the gauge went down maybe a quarter.  I haven’t figured out exactly what kind of mileage we got but it is probably somewhere around 40 on the interstate.  We managed to get everything packed inside of it, and still have room left over for the things we bought AND to make a little space for the dogs to lie down and nap.

Anyway, we stayed at our usual place, the Publick House in Sturbridge, about 7 miles away.  We love that place, it has always been good to us.  And the restaurant is phenomenal.   We usually try to eat breakfast there on Sunday and sometime we will have dinner there if we are meeting other people.  This year we just went for breakfast.   We did not go out much for dinner, since we were trying to be more thrifty.  We brought our big cooler (to keep all the food in) and the small cooler (to put in the wagon to hold drinks).  The wagon Jo (Kelly’s mom) got us is turning out to be the envy of everyone.  Seriously, we must have been stopped at least 50 or 60 times so people could ask us where we got it.  There were a few other people that had the same wagon, and whenever we would see them we would joke about it because they got the same questions.  We even got our picture with them.  See Kelly’s earlier post for that picture.

Of course, the dogs were also a center of attention wherever we went.  We were greeted by all sorts of “awww”s and such, especially when the dogs were in the wagon looking particularly cute, which was often.  Rerun especially got tired after a while, and by Saturday he really did not want to go anywhere.  I even had to lift him out of the car and put him in the wagon that morning.  So he stayed in there most of that day, and occasionally Thumbelina would join him.  We saw a lot of other dogs this year.  It seemed like more than we usually do, and this time we saw a lot of other dachshunds.  It was quite cute to see how Rerun and Thumbelina would interact with the other dachshunds.  Thumbelina definitely liked them more than the other dogs she saw.

We got a little sunburned on our first day, but after that we did pretty well.  In fact, we got quite a bit of exercise ourselves.  Kelly’s pedometer showed we had walked over 7 miles on one day – no wonder the dogs were tired!  But the weather but cloudy and somewhat cool most of the time we were there, until late Saturday when it started to look like rain.  Luckily it did not rain until after we had already quit for the day.  The next day, Sunday, it was already raining by the time we got out there.  So we decided to leave the dogs in the car where they were sleeping while we checked out the last few tents that we had missed the previous day.  While we were inside the first tent, the skies really opened up.  It was raining so hard that suddenly there were rivulets forming in the tents and vendors had to start moving things around.  After an hour or so of heavy rain some tents had several inches of standing water in them, and low-lying areas near some tents had water that must have been close to a foot deep.  People were quickly abandoning any hopes of shopping and many vendors were packing up.  Still, we managed to wander through the last few tents and even find a few real bargains.  It helps when the vendors would rather sell for a song then have to pack things away.  Afterward we stopped by a couple of other places to pick up some things on our way out of town, and then we headed home.  The dogs were asleep in their little bed area most of the drive back to Cambridge.

More later!

The first of the Brimfield posts

It’s that time of year again, the May Brimfield show has come and gone.  Geoff and I took the dogs and spent Thurs – Sun walking through the fields looking for treasures and getting a little too much sun.  This year was slow going, we got a LOT of attention because of the awesome little red wagon my mom got us and because of the dogs who were often riding in it and begging for attention or walking near it and looking for food.  But, we did the whole show and found an unbelievable amount of fantastic treasures.

We got home late yesterday afternoon, unloaded the car, and took a serious nap.  Today is laundry and sorting the loot and we’ll eventually photograph everything that isn’t destined to be a gift and post it here with descriptions.  For now, here’s the link to the photo library from Amanda.  We met up with her and Beth for a marathon day of antiquing on Saturday followed by dinner at the Thai place near our hotel which is totally yummy.

More photos and descriptions will follow.

~Kelly

Of pet food and creationism

Ok, stick with me.  This one gets a little weird.

So, today I discovered that the place that I usually order our expensive and highly specialized cat food from is run by a bunch of right wing creationist wackjobs.  You must understand, Geoff and I are firm believers in voting with our feet, our wallets, and, you know, at the actual voting booth.  (Interestingly, I discovered the complete wackiness of the pet food vendor from the vendor themselves, Google just confirmed it.)  Anyway, I called Geoff at work and explained the dilemma.  The food is really good for our cats.  They love it, it’s been easy on their kidneys and bladders as they age, but I really, really, can’t abide lining the pockets of a company run by someone who describes himself as a “New Earth Creationist” or who holds that everything modern medical science has told us about “cholesterol and the human body” is a “myth”.

Right.  Um, this guy is a Veterinarian, not an M.D.  I wonder if anyone has pointed that out to him?

Anyway, we feed our dogs this stuff and they scarf it down.  They LOVE it.  Thumbelina’s skin has improved 200% since she started eating it.  She’s almost 10 and still has a waist which is a minor miracle for a dachshund.  Rerun?  He looks more like a sausage, but I think that has more to do with the fact that he is patently lazy than anything else.  Anyway, as Royal Canin was one of the few pet foods only marginally involved in the major 2007 pet food recall as most of their food did not at the time use wheat gluten, (none of it does now, as far as I know, or if it does, it is all domestic) naturally, I looked there first for a new cat food.

I found a perfect substitute, only it required a prescription.  This was absolutely fine by me and, turns out, fine by my vet as well.  (I love my vets, they’re awesome.)  So after checking out our vet’s affiliated order and ship website I also checked out PetFlow.com.  I had received an email or two a while back from Dogster about this new service from PetFlow and had filed it away thinking that if I ever needed to have cat food shipped I’d check it out.  Well, there’s no time like today while running screaming away from creationists.  I was able to sign up for regular shipments of the new prescription food, the price is better than the vet’s affiliate site, and with the coupon code “Dogster” the shipping is free.  As in, free always.  And it ships automatically every 6 weeks.  I have not yet discovered if the people who run PetFlow.com are in bed with the Koch brothers or anything, but for the moment the Liberal science teacher in me can rest easy.

Pretty cool, huh?

~Kelly

Today was a crappy day.

This made it a whole lot better.  Dachshunds are not only stubborn, they’re tough little buggers, too.

~Kelly

Dog survives a month in burned-out house

By Brian R. Ballou, Globe Staff

A Hyde Park woman cried tears of joy this week after finding her dog alive among the ashes of her burned-out and boarded-up house, where the dog had survived since a blaze totaled the residence on Feb. 23.

Terisa Acevedo initially thought that Lola, her year-old long-haired dachshund, escaped the blaze and was wandering through the neighborhood. In the days after the fire, the 24-year-old EMT and Northeastern University student posted fliers on telephone poles and walked the neighborhood hoping to find her dog. But as the days turned into weeks, Acevedo began to think that Lola perished in the fire.

But on Monday Acevedo returned to the house to shut off the alarm on a truck she was keeping parked there, and she heard a scratching noise at the boarded-up front door. She immediately knew it was Lola.

Acevedo yelled out her pet’s name and with the help of friends, tore the plywood off the entrance. Lola, apparently out of fear, retreated into the blackened interior of the house. But when Acevedo called out her name again, Lola ran into her arms.

“It was a miracle,” Acevedo said yesterday, hugging her dog at the Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Jamaica Plain, where Lola is being nursed back to health.

On a very different note…

Everything going on in Japan is just so terrible, and so heartbreaking.  Kelly and I know a number of people from Japan (like our property manager and the former organist at our church) or people who live or have lived in Japan (like Liz, Dan, and their kids).  It just seems to get worse and worse too.  But there is still cause for hope, I think.  And there is much to be thankful for in our own lives.

I saw this photo today, and it almost made me cry.  This poor man is lucky to have his dog back, especially since he may well have lost everything else.

A survivor is reunited with his dog by a rescuer

– Geoff