Category Archives: Pets

Mystery Dog Update

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Pets, Randomness

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two dogs meet

Zelda, saying, “WTF, Mom? You can’t be serious!”

So no frantic owner turned up for Mystery Dog.

On Wednesday I took him to the vet to see if it was safe to let the dogs get together. I’d been keeping him in the guest bedroom and then R’s room, but that meant he was alone a lot and I felt bad for him. But if he was going to stay, I wanted to be sure he wasn’t sick.

Her conclusions were much, much sadder than mine. He has a bare patch on his back: flea allergy, she said. His eyes were goopy: dry eye, a chronic condition for which he should be taking medication every day for the rest of his life. He hasn’t been neutered, which I hadn’t noticed, but became more apparent at the vet’s, where he was marking every corner he could get his leg on. I managed to stop him a few times but he got the wall a couple. He’s fat–which I thought meant spoiled–but the vet says he’s been being fed table food instead of real dog food. And the slowness is the worst. She thinks he’s probably heartworm positive.

In other words, his owners suck. And since all my signs and all my neighborly conversations turned up no sign of anyone who had ever seen him before, they probably dumped him. I live on a corner, and the side where he would have come over the fence doesn’t have any windows that face onto it. It might have looked like a place where they wouldn’t be noticed.

I’ve been trying to find sympathy in my heart for them. I can usually make up a story that justifies almost any behavior. Someone cuts me off in traffic and I write them an elaborate scenario where they’re desperate to get to work on time because they’ll get fired and the sick child at home needs the health insurance. Repeat ad nauseum. But these people, not so much. I am angry at them. Really truly angry. I hope they get reincarnated into dogs that get abandoned themselves and get to see what it feels like. Well, no, I don’t really because abandoning dogs is just a horrible thing to do. But I do think that they’ve earned themselves some serious negative karma points.

Anyway, the vet was pretty pessimistic about poor Mystery Dog. She said that he will be a very expensive dog to own. The tech gave me a bunch of print-outs for rescue groups and told me that he has no chance in a shelter here. They’ll put him to sleep immediately. I checked out a couple of the websites for the groups, sent one an email, but they’re overloaded. Too many dogs, not enough homes to go around.

I was really sad about it for about twenty-four hours. I need a job, not a dog. I don’t have the money to own an expensive dog. And I already own a dog, one who gets jealous of my affection. It would be entirely impractical for me to keep Mystery Dog.

And then I said, the hell with it, he’s mine now, and started feeling much happier. This morning I ripped down the signs I posted. Later today, I’ll go buy him his collar and leash.

But now I really need to find a job (or write a bestseller) because I have an expensive dog counting on me to provide heartworm treatment and eye drops. Also dog food (he has grudgingly accepted that kibble is edible), vaccinations, neutering, and lots and lots of snuggles.

two sleeping dogs

Zelda says, “Okay, yeah, whatever.”

Oh! Name poll! Suggestions so far:
1) Mystery Dog
2) Mario
3) Link (to go with Zelda from the Legend of Zelda video games)
4) RJ (for R Junior — probably a joke, but eh, it’s kind of cute, IMO)
5) Louis (entirely random as far as I can know, my dad just thought he looked like a Louis)
6) Other ideas?

I’ve been calling him Mystery Dog for a week and he comes when I call him, so…Mystery Dog it might be, by way of acclimation. But if I get lots of votes for something else, I’ll try it out on him and see how it works!

Mystery

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Pets, Randomness

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I found this dog in my backyard yesterday.

2013-07-22 16.45.41

My backyard is fully fenced. The fence is six feet high–although now that I’ve typed that, I kinda want to go stand next to it and see if it’s higher. Suffice to say that, though, that it’s high enough that I can’t look over it. And this dog–this little sweetheart of a dog–was just placidly wandering around inside. No collar, of course, so no tags.

I did the obvious: took him out and encouraged him to go home. He didn’t.

I wandered my neighborhood, asking every one I saw if they recognized him. I talked to kids and grown-ups, neighbors I know and people I’ve never met. It was sorta nice, actually–people are quite friendly when you’re walking around with a lovable stray.

I took him to the vet to see if he had a microchip. I think he recognized the vet’s office. He was quite cheerful about getting there. And two people at the vet’s felt like they knew him but couldn’t come up with a name. No microchip, unfortunately.

I brought him home and made some signs and in absolutely miserable late afternoon, pre-storm humidity, wandered around putting Found Dog notices up. I got pretty cranky during that part. This is a small, slow dog. He could not possibly have wandered far. Why weren’t his owners out looking for him?

I looked online. Checked with one person whose lost dog was a remote maybe. He wasn’t hers. Posted a message and a picture on a local lost dog site. Called Animal Control and filed a found dog report.

And now I wait. It’s been 24 hours and counting now, and I have to believe that somewhere out there an owner’s heart is breaking because he is the sweetest, nicest friendliest little dog. Wherever he came from, he has been well-loved, because he thinks people are just swell, and strange dogs (I’ve got Gizmo again, so two) are new friends, and that snuggling up and getting his ears rubbed is simply his due. Not to mention that he probably ought to go on a diet, he’s well-fed. Plus, his teeth are fantastic–I bet his owner actually brushes them.

Still, wherever that owner is, she had better get her act together soon, because with every passing hour, the evil temptation to go rip down my signs and head off to the pet store to buy him a new collar and tags with my address on them grows stronger.

If he becomes ours, his name will be Mystery.

(I won’t rip down the signs, of course, but I might take the car and start driving around other neighborhoods looking for signs. I don’t understand how he could have gotten into my backyard, but maybe he managed to wander farther than one would expect.)

Existential dread

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal, Trill, Zelda

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I’m having a strange month.

The details don’t feel like my story to tell, but my stepmother is on the health roller-coaster, the one that goes slowly up and then much too quickly down, down, down. She’s been sick since we were in Belize and now she’s in intensive care again, or she was yesterday.

As a result, Gizmo is living with me. That’s been 90% pure pleasure. He’s a nitwit, but so sweet. The 10% is that as I have been falling more in love with him, Zelda has been getting a little more suspicious, a little more inclined to shove him out of the way and glare. He’s completely tolerant, he lets her be the boss, but I feel sad for her. Jealousy isn’t pleasant, even for dogs. I’ve been making sure she knows she’s first dog, but Gizmo does need to get brushed and loved, too, and she just has to put up with it.

Requisite cute dog photo:

two dogs

Zelda and Gizmo

One of the positives of having Gizmo is that he’s helped me stop missing Trill quite so much. Ironically, given how often she bit me, her loss has been the hardest pet loss I’ve ever experienced. My childhood dog would have been first, but when we lost him, I’d been gone from home for five years. I sobbed for hours, but he wasn’t a fixture in my day-to-day life, and two days later, it was a sadness, not an emptiness. Trill left an emptiness. A silence. It’s been almost a month and I still miss her every morning. (That’s an improvement, though, over the first week, where I cried every day and felt ridiculous almost every time. She was a bird. A grouchy bird! But she had such a big personality. Ugh, I probably have to go cry again.)

Moving on… worrying about C — and in relation, worrying about my dad, who seems older every time I see him, more tired every time I speak with him — plus all of last week’s horribleness, has got me hovering in a state of existential dread. I want to feel like the world has good things in it, positive outcomes, happiness. Instead, I’ve got that sense of generalized anxiety that grinds away in the back of my head, reminding me constantly that life is fragile, the world dangerous. I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that, because I don’t particularly want to be reminded of it two or three years from now or whenever I re-read this post, but it’s all a long-winded explanation for this picture:

a big bird

A bird on our morning walk

Seeing birds like this, views like this, when I’m just out walking the dogs, reminds me to be mindful of the magic around me. It’s a reminder I really need at the moment, so I’m going to be trying to post pictures of my morning walk for a while. Probably not a long while, because I’m not that organized, but expect to see some flowers and birds for the next few days.

Silence = sadness

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Trill

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our lovebird

Sometimes the worst part of a trip is what’s happening at home while you’re gone.

Our lovebird died while we were away. We don’t know why. I thought probably stress — too much change, too many different locations — but my dad said that she’d seemed perfectly happy for the first week, chirping and squawking just like always. I don’t know that it matters. People wanted to talk about it tonight (Easter, so family dinner), but I walked away, I don’t have the stamina to casually chat about what could have caused her death. I would have started sobbing again if I’d stayed.

I loved that bird. She was cranky and mean, she bit and complained and she hated that she was low creature on the totem pole. But she was also lively and spirited and smart and much more full of personality than any creature so small had a right to be.

The house is so much quieter without her.

I’m allowed…

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Food, Personal, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

R and I went out for dinner tonight. We had Korean food, as we did last Christmas day, and the restaurant was amazing. I had exactly the same experience that I did last Christmas, though, which is that the food was so good that I ate too much and then I was uncomfortable and by the time we got home, I felt vaguely hostile to the restaurant. But really, the food was terrific: we had their Korean version of sushi for an appetizer, which was yum, and then they do little dishes of vegetables, including a pickled radish, sesame seed green beans, spicy tofu, a sweet potato thing that R decided was too good to share with someone who doesn’t like sweet potatoes, fish cake, kimchi…and I’m not sure what else. But yummy food, which I say to remind myself, and which is not my story.

So this is my story: when we got home, the dog — the naughty, naughty, BAD dog — had gotten into a bag of Lindt truffles. R saw the ripped up bag first and he was scolding her and upset before I even got into the house. The dog is, as per usual, completely insane with delight that we’re home, madly excited, dashing between us, while R stomps around, mad as anything. It was his present to me, so he’s upset that his present has been destroyed, but he’s also upset because we’ve done this with Zelda before. This being the emergency vet visit, several hundred dollars, stomach pump thing.

I’m looking at the bag and trying to figure out the math. This will be the fifth time that Zelda has gotten into chocolate, which might say that we’re really bad dog owners, except that Zelda is a Jack Russell terrier who can get into anything. Seriously, she opens closed doors by standing on her hind legs and using her paws, she opens cupboards with her nose. She can leave the backyard any time she wants, through multiple routes, and the only reason she doesn’t (most of the time) is that she knows I don’t want her to, even if she doesn’t understand why. The only object in the house that she hasn’t figured out how to open is the refrigerator, which is a good argument for keeping all chocolate in the fridge, but it was a present. Who keeps presents in the fridge?

So I’m working on the math. Six ounces, partially dark chocolate, and three ounces is the magically bad number for dark chocolate for a dog of her weight, but there’s some left in the bag, and how many servings are there in the bag? Even as I’m trying to figure that out, I’m also trying to take her pulse. Racing heart beat is a symptom of chocolate poisoning for dogs — that’s how they die, really. But it doesn’t feel that fast. It’s fast, sure, but she’s excited that we’ve just gotten home and bouncing around and…it’s normal fast.

I lean in and take a big whiff of her breath. Her breath is not lovely. It never is. But it doesn’t smell like chocolate. Or like vomit. It was the vomit that I was trying to smell. On one notable occasion, she had her stomach pumped and only a day later did I find the pile of chocolate vomit under the bed in the spare room that would have told me the stomach pumping was unnecessary. I found said vomit because she went back to it for a snack–gah, dogs–and I smelled it on her breath. So I’m smelling but there’s nothing there, no chocolate smell, no vomit smell. And she’s settling down. We’re home, that’s good, and maybe she’ll just take a little nap now that she can relax.

But a dog in the midst of chocolate poisoning? Is not going to be taking a little nap.

I finish my math. Ten truffles are missing. Presumed eaten. I go into the spare room to look under the bed. I don’t get there. In the back corner of an arm chair is a Lindt truffle, half under the cushion. She didn’t eat it. She didn’t even break the wrapping paper. I start searching. Over the course of the next hour, I find eight of the ten missing truffles. One in her window dog bed, one in the dog bed under my desk. One in the couch in the living room, another in the arm chair. One in my bed, one under a pillow in the guest room. And so on.

A 9th is, I am sure, in my closet. I can tell from how she’s acting now. She keeps going into the closet but when I follow her in, she acts innocent and quickly leaves. She’s figured out that I’m stealing her treats. I have no idea what that feels like from a doggie perspective. She did some perfectly good hunting, gathering, and storing for later, and her pack leader has screwed it all up. Does she think it’s unfair?

Along the way I find a bag of pills — Vitamin C maybe? — that she has also stashed. The citrus smell reassures me that it’s nothing too scary but some guest in my house, I don’t know who, lost a lot of pills at some point. Oops!

By the end of the hour, I’m totally comforted that the dog hasn’t eaten enough chocolate to be dangerous and the dog is sulking. And R is not happy. In fact, he’s pissed at Zelda — she ruined his present. Not cool.

I point out to him that it was actually kind of fun in a way — like an easter egg hunt. Been a long time since I got to do that. I didn’t mind it and was amused by her creative hiding with the last couple chocolates. He says, “Oh, I should view this an as an entertainment value addition to my present?”

I say, “well…” and then point out the real plus. When we got home from dinner, I thought the dog might die. I was faced with the real possibility that Zelda had eaten enough chocolate that we would lose her. On Christmas Eve. On CHRISTMAS EVE! The relief of knowing that no, that wasn’t going to happen? Golden. The joy of realizing that the ridiculous dog had hidden chocolate all over the house? Priceless.

R listened to this and nodded. And then he said, “So the perfect Christmas gift is for me to threaten to kill the dog and then not carry through on the threat? Handy. And cheap. I’ll remember that for next year.”

I think he has not quite forgiven her.

But it made me laugh.

And I’m allowed to share it, because he told me just the other day that it was okay if I told stories about him online.

Capturing a memory

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Personal, Zelda

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Tomorrow ends my two dog weekend.

The most entertaining part of the weekend has been watching the two dogs negotiate. They are so incredibly different. I call Zelda “fluffhead” sometimes and it’s because she’s a long-coated JRT, so if I don’t chop off her fur, which I routinely do, she can wind up looking quite fluffy. Gizmo deserves the name for other reasons. The difference between them is the difference between a guinea pig and…well, honestly, a human being. A small human being. A preschooler. Or maybe a toddler. The kind of human being who understands some of what you say but is often confused by your choices and motivations. Versus…a guinea pig. Poor Gizmo might, in fact, be the dumbest animal I have ever met. Cute, yes, but completely oblivious to everything.

Gizmo doesn’t jump, Zelda does. So Zelda can get places that Gizmo can’t. I give them treats. Sometime later, I discover that all the treats are buried under my pillow. I scowl at Zelda. There are enough treats to go around. There is no shortage of treats. And then I lift Gizmo onto the bed, so that he can choose from the treats. Five minutes later, I’m watching Zelda try to sneak the treat away from Giz. She doesn’t just take it, she stealths it away. She’s like the pushy salesman, who steps a little too close so that you step away and then suddenly you realize you’ve moved halfway across the room and are looking at exactly what he wants you to be looking at. Manipulative.

And my lap–oh, so funny. Zelda demands her space like a cat. She doesn’t debate the rules with Giz like a dog should. She just squeezes him out. If he’s going to be near me, she’s going to be nearer. If he’s going to be on me, she’s going to be more on me. It’s nice for me, except for the few brief moments when I’ve had two twenty-pound dogs sitting on my chest (not a lot of room for air in that scenario). Then I shove them both away and say, “You’re dogs! Cut it out!” and Giz looks at me blankly, with his trademarked “the lips move, I wonder if that means something” gaze and Zelda looks shame-faced before starting to lick my hand and snuggling closer and closer until she can get her tongue onto my face, too.

Giz doesn’t care about rides in the car. Not at all. And when you come home, he’s like, “Oh, hi. You left the room a minute ago, didn’t you? How’ve you been?” Zelda knows exactly what’s happening when we head toward the back door and does her best ears up, eyes alert, plaintive plea to come with us. When we get home, she has an extremely finely tuned sense of time. If I’ve been gone for just a few minutes, she’s hoping that I’m changing my mind and am going to bring her, but she’s not going to get too excited about the unlikely possibility. If I’ve been gone for more than twenty minutes but less than an hour or so, she’s happy to see me, with an enthusiastic hello, paws up, tail wagging. But if I’ve been gone for several hours, it’s insanity. Dashing from room to room, desperately trying to get into my arms, must, must-must-must, have a chance to lick my face and have me rub her belly. It’s that returning-vet-greeting every time I’m gone for a few hours. When I’ve been gone for days, though, totally different story. It’s “Oh, you’re back, great, I need to go to sleep. Right now. Preferably on you, but okay if not.” I come home from a trip and she crashes as if she hasn’t slept in days. I’m wondering how Giz is going to react when he sees his people tomorrow. I bet he dances.

Two dogs is more than twice as much work as one dog. Walking them is not the peaceful, meditative, story-planning walk that I’m used to but more of a tug-of-war, constant attention scenario. I know that they’re both perfectly capable of walking nicely on leash, but together, they get distracted and excited. Still I really like having them both here. At the moment, I’m sitting on the bed with a dog on my feet, another snuggled by my side. Also on the bed are multiple stuffed animals (Giz really likes to sleep with his toys around him) and three rawhide bones. It’s almost like having a toddler again in terms of distractions and toys, except a toddler that can be left home alone.

C & Z

26 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Personal, Zelda

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Caroline has an only child attitude toward Zelda. It’s kind of funny, actually. Yesterday, we went out to pick up pizza, and they were both in the back seat. Caroline didn’t quite say, “But she’s TOUCHING me!” but she came close. I had to remind her that it’s actually Zelda’s back seat: since Zelda is the only one who ever sits back there, it’s not exactly a surprise that she’s not quite sure what to do about Caroline sharing her seat, and that seemed to satisfy.

Swimming, though, it’s come up again and again, and not because Zelda is doing anything. She’s just…a dog. Curious. Interested in what Caroline is doing. Willing to run endlessly around the pool so that she’s always next to where Caroline’s head pops up. If she was doing something wrong, I’d intervene, but she’s not, so when C. complains, I’ve said, “Yep, she’s a dog.” Finally this morning, when Caroline was complaining again, I said to her, “Honey, I know you’d like her to ignore you. But she’s a dog. You’re a people. If you can’t ignore her, how can you expect her to do more than you?” I guess that struck a chord, because for the last forty-five minutes or so, Caroline has been doing a beautiful job of distracting the dog with the ball, then running and jumping in the pool. It’s the first time they’ve ever really played together and it is seriously charming to watch.

Celebration of dirty laundry

11 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in Zelda

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Today should have been a celebration — I am 99.9% of the way done with the work project that has consumed so much of my energy and brain for the last few months. But it was more like waking up from an obsessed dream and discovering that the laundry was piled high, the dishes filled the sink, the dust bunnies had become more like dust wolves, and things were in a general state of chaos. I didn’t feel happy, I felt overwhelmed.

I watched the dog rolling in the grass and tried to remind myself that life is about the small pleasures. Then, when I put my head back down to the computer, she went and rolled in the wet sandy dirt. Her white coat turned gray and black, and I had to laugh. I swear she smiled at me. There’s meaning there somewhere — be happy with the dirt, too? But I’m not sure what it was except that in that moment, we both felt happy despite the messy house and work to do.

I’m going to aspire to a better balance as my life changes. A little house effort every day to avoid the misery of chaos. Tomorrow I think I’ll try to balance studying for summer midterms with cleaning the house. A little of each, and a little writing. Could be a good day!

Angel Puppy

11 Monday Oct 2010

Posted by in Zelda

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I hope that Jack Johnson won’t think this is copyright infringement. I definitely had no evil intent but every time I hear that song, it makes me think of this angel. Until I get to the last line about sharing souls, that is, and then I just think, no, how weird would that be, to share souls with my dog. Not that hers isn’t a perfect soul, but if we shared it there would be too much thinking about squirrels and basketballs and naps.

Basketball Take Two

07 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by in Zelda

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Basketball practice last night made me so glad not to have to endure it myself.

I think coaching must be a really tough job. Finding the right balance between encouraging the early-learners and pushing the competent is an art. I don’t think this coach has mastered it, but I think he’s trying to find it and that alone is worth commending. But still…I don’t know whether it was a drill or a scrimmage or what but for some endless eternity, they were all on the floor, all looking like they were playing, while pretty much three kids passed the ball to each other, took a shot, took it out, and started over. The other six mingled. At relatively high-speed.

And then a drill…oh, I cringed for one poor kid. He’s tall, advantage him, but seemed totally lost. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know how to play, he struggled to follow the coach’s instructions. He was never in the right place at the right time, never quite getting the next step. And I could tell that he knew it and hated it. He looked so miserable.

Practice ended well, though. Rory made a free throw basket–a beautiful, graceful shot that dropped so smoothly through the net that it was as if it was meant to be there. He surprised the coach, pleased his teammates, and delighted himself. And that moment of happiness will give us at least another two practices. I hope.