Snarling dogs at 3 o'clock, wingman

3am, I am awake and running down the hall full-speed. Naked. What, you haven’t tried it? No I was not warming up for the naked olympics, I was rushing toward snarling dogs. 

Typing that out, I realize that maybe that’s the opposite of what a normal person would do; run towards snarling dogs with their ‘junk’ flopping around like a treat or something. Ahem. Anyway.

They were our dogs however, and around that time I was awakened simultaneously by their sudden pissy fit over each other and by The Girl’s screech that they were having a hissy fit over each other. So you see, no time to waste here, right? Naked’s the way to go. 

So yes, a little over a week later and there was another fight. It wasn’t very fruitful, there was a little blood from Chase’s ear, but other than that & a scrape by Hunter’s eye, nothing. I think I actually got the worst of it. I came in a-runnin’ and hit the carpet with my knees at damned near full-speed ahead. Been years but MAN! Rug burn still hurts like a bitch. Especially with both knees & an ankle joining in on the fun.

We’ve decided that we are just going to have to deal with this on a as-served basis. They get along fabulously 99% of the time. After I got to them and they stopped fighting, the first thing they did was to start licking each other’s wounds. Like, almost surprised that one another were hurt, you know? “how’d this happen, brother? You OK? I gotta take care of you!” if they were at each other’s throats constantly, didn’t get along, fought every time one of them did XYZ or the other did ABC, then we’d have a different take on the situation. But as it stands, they’re brothers, they get along wonderfully and play together and love each other, but just occasionally, they decide they are just too pissed at the other to let it slide.

This time? I think one got off the couch and the other took all of the space. The other came back, tried to crawl up onto the couch-bound one, and anger ensued. Normally they all share the couch without problems. Last night? Someone didn’t want butt in their face, I guess.

Can’t say as I blame them.

Round 4: Chase vs Hunter

Yesterday when I got home, I was greeted by a limping dog, and a blood-soaked dog. Yes, again. This marks the fourth time we’ve had to deal with this, since about mid-August. This was also the worst thus far.

Chase got a good hold on Hunter’s left arm and left some pretty deep & long lacerations, and it looks like Hunter came down on top of Chase’s head & neck in return, and pretty much swallowed his whole head, rather ferociously I might add. Chase’s face looks like crap to match Hunter’s arm. He’s got what looks like a blood-filled swell under his right eye, and I will be keeping an eye on it (no pun intended) because I’m worried it’s not going to drain itself and will need to be lanced. But we’ll see.

Now the fight didn’t just consist of those wounds, however. Hunter also has scrapes & teeth marks on his head & ears, and we found some good-sized puncture wounds on chase’s elbow, so it seems at some point they traded spots to see who could do the most damage.

Turns out it was a tie. Who knew? Two 90lb brothers of the same age, same basic build & strength… when they fight it gets ugly fast. I mean, we doctored them up for an hour or so, to cleanse wounds that took maybe 20 seconds to make. They’re so damned equal that there’s not really an “alpha” when it comes down to the wire, ya know?

I wish this was an easy problem to solve. We love them both, and what’s more, they love each other. They’ve done nothing but lick each other’s wounds clean in the time since. It’s not like there’s some known trigger, it’s not like they don’t get along, it’s not like there’s something they just can’t stand but to fight over. They love each other and protect & defend each other! It seems that occasionally, they start to play a little rough, someone gets a little rougher than the other thinks they should, and it escalates, fast, and with weeks-long consequences.

I don’t want to have to crate them when we go. Seems cruel. Plus, how are they gonna defend the property from inside a box? No I don't think that's the solution. They love each other too much to be separated like that. We'll just have to make do I suppose, and hope the figure it out before they really do some damage. Here's to hoping that this one hurt them both enough that avoidance sounds like a good plan in the future.

The Cheez-It Recipe

It happened that I ended up getting a good whiff of Hunter’s ear. Curious, I sniffed his brother’s ear, too. Yep. Guys, I’m almost 100% positive on this — I think I know how they make Cheez-Its. Guys, it’s not all that “air-drop a hunk of cheddar” like they show on TV; they simply shove plain little crackers into dogs’ ears, and BAM! Cheez-its. 

Got a dog? Try it yourself. And then call me, let’s see if we can’t start up our own business on this, eh?

Adventures in de-carpeting

So yeah, there was more to the “Miles was put down” story yesterday than I told you about initially. Now, I don’t want you to hate me or think that he made a bad so I killed him: I swear to you, he was very very ill, in mucho pain and just generally hanging on so as to sleep uncomfortably and sh!t himself to death anyway. So, yeah. Really.

But anyway. He had been sleeping with us for awhile before the day came, because the boys were loving on him so much as to not ever let him have a moment’s rest, right? I was initially concerned about this arrangement, because I like my sleep, and I was envisioning having to constantly get up and let him out to go potty (piss & sh!t). Surprisingly, this didn’t happen. Much. Well, at all, until two nights before his scheduled “appointment” at the vet. Sunday he had started to crap (sh!t) out his insides. Explosive diarrhea? It exists, apparently. I had no idea. The stuff comin’ out of him? Wasn’t poop, it was liquified death. Straight out of his butt.

Yes this is gross. And it gets worse.

So two nights before his “Appointment” at the vet, he had to go. Luckily I was roused enough to hear it and figure out he wasn’t just looking for a good spot to lie down, he was hoping to god that the door would magically open so he could go outside and spew liquified death from his nether regions. Not once! Not twice! Three times that night. After going weeks without having to do potty breaks during the night, suddenly he couldn’t hold himself. The night before his “appointment” at the vet, it continued. Except this time, I wasn’t fast enough. Despite being faster because I was half-expecting it, he didn’t make it out of the bedroom before he unleashed his liquified death upon the carpet.

So at 2am in the morning, there we were, trying not to puke as we boiled water and mixed pet stain odor destroyers together to form a concoction so powerful the world damned-near knelt before us, quivering with fear. Turns out? Still no match for the liquified death that had been slathered richly over the entry to the bedroom. We struggled in vain for a full day to try and get the smell gone. And then we gave up on that, and got smart:

So we were gonna rip up all the carpet anyway, right? Why not start right now, then? Right. So we put our magical rings together and formed Voltron or something, and got to cutting the carpet out of the bedroom. For the night we just started with the strip that contained the — yeah, you get it — stuff. It was the best idea. That smell permeated the whole of the carpet, the padding underneath, and possibly the first three layers of the earth’s crust.

I’ll be back with more of the carpet adventures. For now, enjoy the picture of the finely-crafted wood floor that some stupid f*ckers oversprayed the hell out of because they’d never heard of drop cloths, the mother f*ckers. Oh, and the f*cking staples everywhere that they stapled down the crappy-ass carpet padding with in the middle of the f*cking floor… 

Ahem. Not bitter. Not at all. Why do you ask?

And then there were Three:

So the day finally came: Miles has left us. It came fast, from being happy & content, to being gimp & sad. He wasn’t doing well his last couple of weeks; in fact, Miles didn’t just randomly pass, I scheduled this day late last week. It seemed bad of me at the time, and in fact the day after I thought to myself that I might have jumped the gun. Butd Sunday solidified it for me, it was the right decision, if a hard one.

He couldn’t got potty. OK fine, laugh, you want me to not say it kiddie? Fine. He couldn’t SH!T, OK? He danced around four or five times before he could even get into position to do it without falling over first. And then, it took him three passes after he started to get to the finish. And then with just a day or two to go, he started pooping out his insides on top of it all. Never a good sign, right? I mean, typically, you want to keep your insides inside & vice versa.

It was time. Clearly. Miles will be missed. My first ever Favorite Dog.

Ding Dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead... ;-)

Back to normal

After a week of mother-in-law in town, we’re back alone, back to normal, and back to sex! No, not really. Too damned tired for that right now. Which, I guess is back to normal! Yay!

Sleepy because: bad news

Miles isn’t doing hot. Luckily he has made it long enough to see everyone he knew from the old days that he’s going to get to see before he goes; I think the time draws near, unfortunately. 

He’s been sleeping in my room for the last three weeks. We started this because the pups were just all over the guy trying to take care of him and basically just caring so much that it was an annoyance to poor ol’ Miles. Sleeping behind a closed door with his daddy had been a nice, peaceful break. However, that seemed to stop a few nights ago, as he’s now too uncomfortable to make it through much of the night actually sleeping.

Instead, most of our nights together consist of him dragging his self around and panting loudly, and us (me especially) sitting up to make sure he’s doing “OK”  — as OK as a cancer-stricken 13y/o dog with a broken him can be — and doesn’t need to go out to use the bathroom. And I mean it, too — this is most of our night. I felt bad, but at some point this morning I had to kick him out of the room, because I needed more than 45 minutes of consecutive sleep, dammit.

I put his bed out in the hallway corner, let him out to pee, and when I eventually got up two hours later, where did I find him? Outside still.

And I’ll mention too that he didn’t eat this morning. I poured him some food, he just laid down and looked away instead. Miles, okay? Miles doesn’t turn down food. This is obviously serious business.

Quick movie update

While mom-in-law was here, we watched something called National Geographic: Extreme, which was supposed to be Hi-Def heaven, following around extreme sportsmen (and women!) into the wilds of our planet, thrill seeking. Let me save you the trouble: it sucked. The music was corny 90% of the time, I didn’t care to hear voiceovers from the lame as though they were great wisdom sources or something, and I can only watch a snowboarder carve a mountain path so many times before I a) can’t tell the difference between the cutscenes, and b) just don’t care anymore.

Also watched The International last night. Stars Clive Owen. How was it? Well, I had thought that perhaps it would be a suspenseful movie full of suspense ‘n’ stuff, what with the look on Clive Owen’s face on the trailers and such. Little did I know beforehand that Clive Owen always looks like that, apparently. It, too, sucked, and actually sucked much harder, because it was a) longer, and b) I still didn’t care anymore.

I didn’t bother giving either of these movies their own blog, because? Well, they don’t deserve it. They’re both b-rate entertainment that isn’t bad enough to warrant their own narrative nor were they good enough to deserve praise. They are b-rate mediocrity and proud to be.

Battlestar Galactica Finale

I watched this and just wanted to let you know I did. I have an opinion on it and plan to share, but for now just wanted to say: I can’t wait for Lost to come out on disc so I can continue watching. Love these types of shows, Lost especially. 

OK, Peace out.

Ding! Ding! Round TWO: Hunter & Chase Square Off

Apparently they went at it again. I say apparently because no one was home; we were both at work but when we got back and sat down to eat some brownies & ice cream, after I got the lights turned on I glanced down and saw SKIN on Hunter’s forearm. You’re not supposed to see Labrador skin, so I knew something was up.

Payback’s a bitch, ain’t that right Hunter? You chewed up Chase’s arm, and now he’s returned the favor.

I’m kind of pissed and saddened and confused all at the same time. They're good dogs they really are, and it’s not like they’re walking around the house snarling and growling and biting. It happens are rare occasions – two rare occasions inside of two weeks here now – that they get up in arms over some particular thing. They’re brothers, they’re dogs, it happens, right?

But the problem is that we’re talking about 90lb dogs that are built like tanks, and rather equally matched. Since no one was home to break it up this time, Hunter got more good lashes upon him than Chase had before. Here’s some of the carnage:

That’s just the front side, there’s two more on the back side as well, though they are pretty tame in comparison. We're not making any Vet appointments yet. Chase seemed to heal rather well from his wounds with just our care, and though Hunter's are bigger, it's mostly "bigger" as in "longer." which may in fact prove to make them easier to keep clean. We'll see, but the Vet's # is in the address book on my computer for a reason: we'll make that call if it looks like he's getting a bit infected.

The larger problem is, what if this continues? The way I look at it, they're brothers and brothers get into tiffs over things sometimes. They're not overtly aggressive or anything as I said earlier, but I don't want them to hurt each other. I don't want to even have to consider separating the two, and having to decide which one to keep. I don't want to, they love & need each other. You should see how they act when you take one and leave the other, it's pitiful, it really is.

Right now they're laying together, licking each other's ears. These are not dogs that hate one another. But when their play escalates and someone takes it personal, the above happens. I'm hoping now that each of them has felt the aftereffects of that, perhaps they'll rather back down and use their words as opposed to their teeth. Because I love the little f*ckers dearly and want to have one standing on each side of me. I'm selfish like that.

EDIT TO ADD: around lunch time, found some matted bloody hair on Chase's neck. Turns out, Hunter got a tooth into him this time, too. It's cleaned up and antibiotic'd now, but dammit, now we have to keep on eye on two dogs. Well, actually four. Miles is still Cancer-stricken though I'm starting to wonder (more on that later), Zoey has a rash on her leg, Hunter has lacerations to his right front forearm and Chase – recovering from punctures to his arm – is now also nursing a puncture on his neck.

Quick, someone call Animal Control, holy f*ck.

Canoe Excursions

On my vacation last week, one thing we went and did was rent a canoe.

We didn’t canoe with it. We just put it on the truck and drove around so people would think we were cool. IT worked.

OK, lying. Not about the canoe part or the “we’re so cool” part – we most definitely are (not) – but just the part about doing nothing but driving around. We canoed!

We had not ever done anything like it before, and didn’t quite know where to start, so a rental seemed like a good idea as any. We have been looking/thinking of some sort of boat for our adventures for a while now, but without a real house and real place to store it, we didn’t want to bother. Now that the house & storage are settled and we were on vacation, why NOT go and see if we can drown ourselves and a dog or three in the middle of a large body of water?

Turns out it was only one dog that got to go along, as our planned and only available day for the excursion was a day or so after Hunter put two holes in his brother defending Miles from that which needed not be defended. But that’s in the past now and brothers forgive. BUT, it did mean that Chase was not allowed to go and swim in potentially unclean waters with gaping wounds on his leg. I mean if it was just some surface wound? No problem! But these things were freakin’ down to the muscle OK? I could pull the skin and see darkness, and I could just envision him going swimming and his leg filling up with water and sinking.

Yes, I envisioned this. No one said I was a prophet. Ahem.

Worked out for the best actually. We rented a 15’ canoe and we had visions of us and at least two dogs paddling out along the lagoons, easy-going, moving fast in the right direction, the dogs jumping out and swimming and crawling back in and everyone having a Gay Ol’ Time, as the Flintstone’s Introduction singer might say. You know, pretty much like every Dawson’s Creek commercial ever. Visions are fun, right?

INSTEAD, it went more like this: we couldn’t paddle the damned boat straight to save our lives. I went left, she went right, the boat drifted off into a tailspin like in Top Gun but without the Star Power & turbines & jets and all that stuff & Goose lived in this version (he could swim. He’s a Goose for dog’s sake), it was a blast. We brought a dog. This might prove to be the Achilles' Heel in our vision overall, that we could do this with not just one, but two 85lb dogs. We hadn’t made it 5 feet from shore before we almost toppled over. Go ahead, ask me why there’s no galleries of the event in question up on the web. Answer? After almost drowning 5 feet from shore, I made the decision that perhaps the cameras – expensive little buggers that they are, filled with delicate precision electronics and being all wimpy around water, the wimpy electronic bastards – should stay in a dry, parking-spot-ridden truck whilst we attempt mass, slow suicide by water.

I’d like to say that eventually, we righted each situation, but we were only successful in one: we did eventually learn to paddle straight. Not fast, no! But straight, yes. The dog situation, however, did not go according to plan for more than 3 minutes at a time.

The canoe was made of some sort of plastic though I tell you I thought a few times maybe it was Play-Doh and we weren’t going to toppple over so much as fall the f*ck through the boat bottom. You could feel the water moving below your feet on the hull (is the canoe a hull?), and this didn’t sit well with our four-legged boat tipper, Hunter. He eventually got more used to it than initially, but he never quite said to himself or us “hey this craft is sound and trustworthy,” though he did get comfortable enough to start testing the limits of the boat by seeing just how far he could rock the boat over to one side by poking his body to that side and sticking his head out beyond to taste the water or stare down ducks flying by. How close to tipping? I was paddling and my elbows were getting wet. I kissed a fish.

Keeping a 15’ canoe made of Play-Doh from becoming a 15’ submarine made of Play-Doh with the helpful assistance of a dog proved more difficult than I had imagined. One dog was trouble enough, two dogs might be a stretch even with a more solid canoe, and THREE dogs is a crowd & a half on there. Dogs jumping out and swimming and making it back in the boat whilst we all smile and laugh and throw sticks and fish and other things that happen on the front of canoe brochures? Fat chance. There’ll be no mid-lake picnics with this setup, methinks.

Not sold on the canoe idea. Not sold at all. The people at the shop said something about some floaties you can put on the sides to stabilize the canoe against dogs and general tippiness, but as of now?

Not sold on the canoe idea. Not quite yet.

On the plus-side, I did get laid on the beach in the middle of the day. That's pretty cool, right? Sweet. Hey, maybe a canoe ISN'T A BAD IDEA AFTER ALL.

Hairless & better for it? Who'd have thought

One thing that has mesmerized me for some time has been the apparent almost backwards design of us humans. It always has seemed to me that we’re extremely weak, and in most respects not worthy of our place atop the food pyramid.

Don’t misunderstand me, I a) still think that’s mostly true, and b) recognize the importance of our higher-level thought, though more on that later. Anyway. Moving on:

One such thing that got me started on it was body hair. First it was the observation that our hair patterns are basically backwards from the rest of the animal kingdom and natural selection. Really, bear with me here, OK? Think about it, or hell, turn your dog or cat over on its back and pull up on its arms. What do you notice? That’s right, a significant density difference in hair in their armpits; animals have LESS hair in their armpits. We, however, have more. Why is that? Talk about a backwards design, huh? I mean, it’s warm & moist there, and what’s more – and probably the main reason other animals have tended to shed hair from that region – it’s a major friction location. If you’re going to get rid of hairs that might just interlock from somewhere on your body, the armpit is probably a good choice.

...Unless you’re human. Then it would seem that the best place to lose body hair would be from the large, flat, exposed regions of your body, where you’re probably most likely to have a need for hair, to protect your fragile skin and to retain body heat. Yes I know that sentence contradicts itself, PAY ATTENTION, MAN!! That’s my point – we evolved backwards, we lost hair from the portions of the body that needed it most, but retained it where it is most bothersome & problematic.

It always seemed to me that we’d be better off with a layer of fur ourselves, and that the reasoning used above was a good proof that we are indeed oddballs in the great Darwinian race. And watching my dogs go swimming in ice-cold waters that I’d need a wetsuit and a sauna to even attempt a dip into.

Until recently. There was a reason I came across awhile back that has sat in the back of my head. It sat back there so long in fact, that I forgot to write anything about it. And then yesterday, with the puncture wound story about the boys, I added reason #2 to the list of reasons our hairless body design may actually be more beneficial than not.

Reason #1 was ticks. We go out hiking a lot. And by “hiking” I don’t mean wimpy Southern California Hiking where you walk a concreted path, passing women pushing baby strollers, oh no! I mean up in the mountains, hiking down to the rivers below, with the dogs on the lookout for mountain lions (editor’s note: ha, I initially wrote “mountain loins”) and elk twice as tall as we are. We’re f*cking out there, man, we’re f*cking out there. Know what else is out there? Ticks! Damn! How’d you guess? Oh wait I said that earlier didn’t I? Sh!t. So much for the element of surprise.

The dogs have Frontline Plus. And thank god, because searching through their mounds of hair to try and find these tiny little creatures is a royal pain in the ass. So much so, that we just rely on Frontline working well, and in a few days anything that’s still alive is big enough to see easily and pull off. As for us though, we don’t have Frontline, and we don’t need it either. We just strip down, inspect each other for ticks, get all turned on and then have sex (was it good for you?). It’s easy because with the exception of our scalps, we’re pretty hairless and anything that doesn’t belong is quickly spotted. No dear, that belongs there. Trust me.

Reason #2 was the puncture wound suffered by Chase. We didn’t see it at first, it sat unattended for 30 minutes, and it would have been longer had he not sat against a white door and left a red stain; we just couldn’t see any wounds through the thick layer of hair. And once it was discovered, the first thing we did was grab some scissors and trim all the hair away, to keep it clean and easily flushable. 

What if I was wounded? Hell I’ve been wounded enough in my life, I know how easy it is to clean up after a spill or a puncture or a whatever. Wash rinse repeat. Having hair would definitely complicate matters for me. 

And suddenly, I see a great logic behind our hairless evolvement. It’s not that we’re bare and for the worse necessarily, we’re masters of our environment and when we need a fur coat, we make one and put it on. When we need to get to the skin, it’s right there, plain as day. We have the best of both worlds the way we are. And now I can’t look at the dogs and think “they’re better than we are,” I can only think “why then, do we still have hair in our armpits,”and for some of us, maybe “and why one or two in the crack (you know where I refer to)?” 

And on parting, a warning: take special precautions to avoid the dreaded mountain loin. They’re deadly :-)

Chase & Hunter square off

Not a day after we had company over, telling stories about how kind our two youngest pups were to each other even though they were brothers and both “ball-ified” – meaning of course, that they both have nuts – and that they hadn’t really ever had much of a serious tussle, they go and have a serious tussle.

Over Miles. Specifically, over who gets to be Miles caretaker. Right now Hunter has assumed this role and will not relinquish it. He follows Miles around and licks his wounds and just generally guards him from anything that might be a danger, or in this case, even his own brother, Chase. Chase wanted to come and say ‘Hi’ and Hunter was ready to lay the law down, that he is indeed in charge and visitation hours are not currently open, thankyouverymuch.

If you’re reading this and you know where I live: caution, do not ever jump into my yard. These guys are freakin’ crazy, man, you don’t want to be the source of their ire. Trust me.

Chase got the worst of it. He’s actually maybe an inch taller than his brother, and his Muscles bulge a little more than his bro’s as well, but this is not to imply he’s bigger. His muscle mass is more concentrated at the high-end of the bone, so it sticks out further. Hunter is more solid from tip to toe, and apparently, made of steel. I got them separated after they took to each other, maybe 5 seconds after it began, and Chase started with a little limp in his front left elbow. I figured it was sore from either being landed on, or maybe that’s where my kick landed that pushed them apart, I don’t know. But when we went inside and he sat against our white door in the kitchen, lo and behold there was a stain of red on it; Hunter had managed to get ahold of his brother’s arm and put two punctures in it, outside and in.

Good ones, too. We spent a good 30 minutes clipping, cleaning, and filling with antibiotic ointment:

Chase is big and strong, but it seems that his brother is definitely the ruffian of the two. Not a scratch. Well that’s a lie, he did have a scratch on the inside of his ear, but so minor that it could have been a fruit fly bite or something. 

So what have we learned here, Chase? You’re big bad and black, but for the sake of everyone including yourself, stay out of your brother’s way. There’s going to be a hierarchy, and it would seem that you’re going to have to be OK with being #2. Maybe #1.5. Or find some freakin' kryptonite or something.

The Unfortunate End of Miles' Reign

Well, I was wrong about Miles, though we’re not happy about this. I thought that perhaps his hip had slipped out of joint in his old age. A trip to the vet later (oh, and $300 out-of-pocket), and we have a diagnosis: Osteosarcoma. Bone cancer. 

The acute swelling on the hip? Because his hip had shattered, basically exploded from the inside out. As if there’s another way to explode, eh? But you feel me. 

And it explains so much too. I mean, there’s the reason why he slowed down so fast, right? It wasn’t just rapid onset of age, it was cancer destroying his bones, pushing his normal bones apart, replacing it with weak, non-organized bony tissue. A real mess.

It doesn’t look like he’s going ot make it much further. He’s closing in on 13, but that’s not until November and honestly I’m not sure that we’re going to make it out of the next week before he has to go down for the count, even though things are looking better this evening.

The Vet gave us some medications, one was a pain reliever/anti-inflammatory, and the other was an opiate-based pain reliever/sedative. This morning he was sleeping outside under a truck, and wouldn’t eat. I pouted (okay, cried) a bit, as it seemed that he was going to have to say goodbye soon – real soon. But just in case, I pulled the pain reliever/sedative out of the routine – it had a 12-hour effective window – and it seems that it’s helping him to feel more like the Miles of old, albeit with a bum leg.

SO. It would seem that Miles is going to be spending the remainder of his days limping about on 3 legs in pain, and generally living a sh!tty existence, so he can enjoy a few of those moments around the food bowl. And, so it would also seem that if you know the Miles personally, if you have some final loving words to lay at his feet, now might be the time.

Now or never, yo’s.

Miles Officially retired

There was  a ceremony & everything. did you make it? I brought a toaster :-).

He's not doing so well unfortunately. The venerable Miles, the go-everywhere, do-everything dog has finally done all he can do, and has paid the price for it with his mobility. It's saddening to see it happen so fast. I always figured he'd slowly get old, be one of those happy old dogs that's slow and just plain happy that the sun rose again this fine day (a rare occurrence on the North Coast, yes, but still). "Look at me, I'm alive!" he'd say in my visions, but the reality is that I think his hip has slipped out of joint, he can't walk but to his food just barely. Instead of a happy "I'm still alive today, daddy!" glee, he looks at me solemnly, like to say "I wanna go play, but I can't. Poo." And yeah, it sucks, and it's sad, and I wish I could make him young again. Sadly, I'm not as powerful as he thinks I am ("DID YOU SEE THAT!? DADDY JUST MADE FOOD HOT WITH A MAGIC BOX!")

Watched him try to sh*t earlier this morning, and it wasn't really all that fun. I mean of course watching a dog sh*t is not fun, but more specifically, watching a dog struggle to do it, especially when it's your best friend of 13 years, is especially painful.

Here's the gist of how i feel about this: :-(

I'm sincerely hoping that tough decisions do not follow soon. We have a vet appointment tomorrow morning. Wish us luck.

Random update time: Hunter hit by car (not a joke)

I know it sounds sad, and it is, though let me clarify, this was a long time ago now. Yeah. He's fine. Except for the slashes on his eye, BUT THAT'S A DIFFERENT STORY SO DON'T ASK, OK?! But yeah, about that car incident:

Apparently, living with me/us requires you to pass a test. This test is, can you survive being hit by a car? You have to get hit by a car if you want to live with me, it's the law or something dammit. First was Chase, then a few months later, his brother Hunter (this rule was enacted after Zoey & Miles had lived with us a long while, so they've been grandfathered in – no car tests for them). If we ever have a kid, god help him. 

So. We're packing up to move a couple of months ago, and we decide at some point that a new flat-screen Plasma TV (60"!) has become a necessity, not just a desire for us. No really, it makes sense. You see we had a 52" rear-projection LCD, but since they're larger, we didn't really have a place to put it; it wouldn't fit on the mantle and there wasn't a good wall for it to sit in front of, so we opted for a sleek new Samsung 58-incher to put over the fireplace, the only place we could see to hang a TV in the house. Since we didn't need a 52" TV any longer, we sold it to a friend of The Girl's. And one night after they got off of work, they both came over to load it up and take it to her (the friend's) place. They knock, I open door, hunter sees cat, darts across road to investigate.

Now it was 11pm at night. The streets are normally empty, but it so happened that as Hunter ran across, there was a car going across at that same exact time. Go figure, right? I mean, obviously, otherwise he wouldn't have been hit by a car, thereby making this post insanely irrelevant.

Hunter survived, and though he had the slightest bit of swelling and a scrape or two, he never limped and was at full-speed within two days. However at the time it was a scary situation, as you can imagine. Funny thing though, where chase was scared and ran home yelping and hid from everything, Hunter's A-personality shone through. He gets hit by the car, and starts barking at it. Then he runs around to the back of the rental property, barking at everything because he was pissed off, where he lets me hold him (finally). Then he decides that although The Girl's friend had been over before and been alright, since she wasn't me or The Girl, that she needed some barking too. BARK. "F-ck YOU, BITCH! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!"

So, yeah. The brothers are now a matching set in that regard, too. Found together, live together, both get hit by a car. It's just the way it is here, I guess. Future son of mine? you've been warned.

Upside to Miles' new Gimpiness

There is an upside to all of this, though, which is that now when I want to cuddle with Miles (OH MY GOD YES I CUDDLE WITH A DOG CALL THE ASPCA OR MAKE A WEBSITE THAT’S GROSS/AWESOME!), he can’t really run away from me. Is that wrong that I am finding a gem in this?

Also: he can’t get away when I’m trying to brush his hair.

Also: he can’t run away when I want to put lotion on his skin.

Also: he can't run away from the fire I set on his tail.

OK I’m a sick individual. Done now. Thanks.

Miles' heyday comes to an end

I can’t believe it. It finally came. I kept thinking that it was going to be sometime “in the future,” but it seems that the future, it haz arrived. Yesterday we took a small walk in the forest reserve. It’s a fairly well-manicured trail, nothing difficult, you don’t need more than tennis shoes or, hell, flip-flops to walk it (at least the first 3 miles out, which is well beyond where we stopped). Miles huffed and puffed since shortly after we hit the pavement walkin’, and last night I noticed him suddenly not putting weight on one of his back legs. This morning, I found him huddled outside sleeping under the truck (which one is not important here, OK? Stop asking these questions of me, people!), and I had to drag him out.

So Miles’ last day as an active puppy dog – it’s here. Only took 13 years, but it’s here. I guess we got this house just in time then: he now has a nice place to retire to. A porch to sit on and talk about how in his day, he had to make the tennis balls before he could chase ‘em, whittle them out of knotted pine, for christ’s sake, OK? Why back in his day, he had to run, uphill, both ways for 10 miles just to get the newspaper. And running away? Don’t get him started. He used to have to scale 20ft tall chain link, with barbed wire. Oh and people walked their dogs around with collars made of hot iron ore, still molten.

I may have gotten off track there. But the important thing to take away is, Miles’ heyday is dead; long live Miles.

:-(