DOG HABITS

Before his rear end left, Nigel would get up about 4:30 and want out. So the fact that he is doing this now is not surprising. This morning he got up at 4:30 and wanted out. I rolled slowly out of my nice bed and my bleary eyeball happened to fall upon the thermometer:

1

Ahhhh. Sorry old man, but outside is out of the question.
He labored to the back door and sat, looking over his shoulder at me.
I said no. It is one degree. I am in my jammies and you want to go wander about the ranch. Not a chance.

We did not go out.

However, Cooper and Conley went out, albeit not for long. They may just be dogs and covered with fur or hair but stupid they are not.
How do I know they want in?
Cooper stands back a bit from the door and gives a sharp bark. Then he waits. After about 30 seconds, he will repeat the bark. But if there is no response, the wait-time becomes shorter, say 15 seconds. Then ten. Then a note of real impatience creeps in.
"Woman! Open the door!"
He learned this from Zelda. Mitchell would never have commanded me in this tone. And sure enough, I hustle over and open the door.

Conley is less circumspect in letting me know that he wants back into the house. Cooper and Conley are the two who will come in regardless of what the others are doing, in other words, independently. Nigel and Llewis used to wait for each other, now Llewis waits for everyone. Sometimes Llewis is so slow that Cooper asks to go back out and look for him. Seriously. He will go back out and stand at the turn in the sidewalk and look first one way and then the other, and if he doesn't see him gimping towards the house he will go out into the yard and bark at him. "Get in here! God you're slow!"

Conley leaves no room for indecision. He attacks the door. The door used to have a lovely screen on the bottom, but no more. It now hangs in dismal tatters. There are paw prints and mud all over the door for Conley rears up and SLAMS his front feet against the door, barking, over and over and when I appear to open the door he backs up, still standing on two legs, and then falls to all fours and rushes in the door, stopping immediately to see if I have treats (O when do I not?)

Llewis is the original Pokey Little Puppy. Possibly because of his leg he just almost never rushes. Once in awhile he will run. If I step out holding the dog bowls, he will run. If DadPerson goes out and has not been home, Llewis runs. When he does the Basset 475 (he cannot quite manage the Basset 500) he runs, and when he is trying to catch and kill Conley, he runs.
Otherwise he cannot be bothered. I hear him coming from around the corner: pad pad swish drag. Pad pad swish drag. It's like the sound track from The Night of the Living Dead. And here he comes, tail wagging slowly, eyes quizzical: "Yes? You called?" (ten minutes ago.) "There was a scent over by the shed, so sorry." But he isn't sorry, not at all. He stops half in and half out so even when it is 1 and there is a blizzard I cannot close the door, and he looks at me kind of sadly: "Is there a treat for this, or shall I stay here?"

All but Nigel, who used to jostle with Conley to be the first inside. Now he is the first for everything. Treats, belly rubs, tickles, walks and unsolicited hugs. He looks at Conley triumphantly from his place high on my bed. I see it all in his eyes:
"Ha you little Thug. Nyah Nyah."
And Conley does the only thing he can to drive Nigel mad: he walks over and goes in Nigel's pen, rearranges all the blankets it took Nigel ten minutes to get Just Right, and goes to sleep.

THIS BE COOPER

This be Cooper. Since MP has a cold she said I cood write if I didint do dogspeek. I do not spell so good. And she say thats ok.
I dont like it when she not feeling good because she grumpy but mossly because she parta the flock. See I a herding dog. I herd things. I keep order. It is a touff job what with Basset hounds. They dont herd so good and they dont keep order. You should see! Allygator mouff with horrible sounds. Wrassling in the living room. Why they call it a living room if you canit live in it withouht a bunch of Bassets grrring and sliding aroun on the rugs?

I have three legs. Or maybe I should say I have one less than I did.
I had something in my leg that hurt and made me limp. There is a name for it but we are not allowt to say it out loud. They (the dog doctors) say the leg has to go. I did not reely unnderstand what they meant. Of course it goes, it's a leg and legs go. What they ment was they gone make it go away forever. I went to sleep and they magikcally disapeered it. IT kinda scary they do this so eesy they disapperd my ...my....an I still miss them.

See? Count them. One too three. No fore.

I usta be a show dog. I went to dog shows. I got all spiffied up. First Aunt Annette the groomer would groom me to peeces. She very good and no exzactly what to not touch wif sissors. (Anything.) She get me all clean and pretty. Den MP trim my back legs from da hock down an my feets. At the sshows she put me on a teble and spritz me with stunky stuff, brush and brush and brush and fluff and rearrange my fur an trim my feets and put on a speshal leesh an we go trot aroun a place an some stranger touch my.... to be sure there are two and then there were but thats before they made them disappeer. Sometimes I win and sometimes not and then won day in Wisconsin I gots to be whut they calls a champion, maeke no differments, I still da same dog.

Whut I like best of all is when da whole flock here togedder and I nose where dey all is. What I don't like is when one is missing, even Mp or DP or even Bassets. MP used to say da best part ob the day when everyone else in bed and she nose rite where they is. Yeah. I get that.

Well Ise just babblin here. I not feelin reel good these days sometimes. Nobody seem to know exactly why. I tell em, I'm eleben, I had dat word nobody say, prolly got it agin someplace secret inside. Sum days I no eet. Some days I frows up. Sometimes I gets the odder end going. I no gots the zippy in my step like I used to but it's ok because MP still haul me onna bed and cover me wif kisses an hugs and rub me all ober and sing our special song:
you is my sunshine
my only sunshine
you makes me heppy
when skies is grey
you never nose dear
how much I love you
please dont take
my
sunshine
away

EATING STUFF

Over the weekend John and I attended a family gathering at a Greek restaurant. I have never eaten Greek food-- real Greek food. John says we have been there once before in the late 60s, but that period of my life is a bit hazy...
Anyway there were a lot of us there, and luckily the others had eaten there fairly often.
We had the required "cheese on fire" which was fun and made me momentarily wish I were a little more of a pyromaniac, but I am terrified of fires and was afraid the waiter was going to go up with the cheese. He didn't, of course, but I bet he doesn't ever have to pluck his nosehairs.

Their menu, which is very extensive (Chefs Ramsey and Irwin would have a FIT) includen Gluten-free and Vegetarian dishes. Most people had Gyros. John had Chicken something. I had pan-fried squid.

Ever since I once had Calamari cooked correctly, I have loved it.
Like Escargot, if it is done right it is very good and tender, and if it isn't (and the chances that it will be done badly are close to 100%) it tastes like old Michelin tires. Or maybe Goodyear. The point is, it is a touchy dish. But since Squid was included in many things on the menu, I thought they probably knew how to do it.

They did.
Except......it made me feel terribly guilty. It was delicious, don't get me wrong, but there were entire little bitty squid in there....babies. They had to be babies. Don't squid get like as big as that submarine in VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA? (Ok so I watched it. Big deal.)

And I felt like....vicious and mean and evil. But happy.

I have a friend who is not really a Vegetarian since about all he ate until they hauled him off to assisted living was peanut butter, who said he never ate anything with a face.

I am starting to think he had a good idea.

But I suspect if someplace began selling Squid McNuggets, I would be in line almost every day.

                                   or maybe not.

TOUGH WEEK

It's been a tough week for Cooper.
He has been puking off and on for awhile. Not enough to make me take him in, altho I have, a couple of times and we didn't find anything.
Then he got sick awhile ago and was vomiting so much he puked up some blood, the way they do when the little capillaries rupture from the force. And he had diarrhea. So I took him in for that and we did bloodwork and got him fixed up and he recovered but then he wouldn't eat.
He has always been picky but this was sick dog not eating, where you try all kinds of things and they are refused, and you end up with baby food and cat food and dog food and people food all open and partly tried and going bad in the fridge.
Then he started eating but throwing it up again.

And enough is enough. So I took him in yesterday and he had dropped another 3 pounds in about three weeks. They did a Barium series because I figured he had stomach cancer, which is all the rage among Belgians these days. He didn't. But Dr.T noticed his liver was very very small and his heart had shrunk a bit. She did an ultrasound and some more x-rays and said the only thing she could think of that made sense was Addison's disease so they did a Stim test since he had not eaten in about 2 days.

Test came back negative.

So now...what.
Without the liver to help hold things in place, (it is there but very small) organs are moving around. The descending colon is up high, the stomach almost under the ribs, etc etc. We have him on a low protein diet and Cerenia for now. I don't know if Dr T has any more ideas but I'm sure out of them.

He looks sad to me. Probably I am making that up but two or three times I have glanced at him and caught a look in his eyes that I have not seen before, and I do not like it. But he ate today, and kept it down. So maybe.....

BITS AND PIECES

When Nigel went into the hospital for his UTI, he could stand (with a lot of help) on his back legs and he could wag his tail, and he would let us know when he needed to poop.
Sometime after he got home, maybe a few days, we noticed he had lost all of those abilities.
His tail droops. It breaks his DadPerson's heart. Wagging tails are important to him because it indicates a quality of life. In this case, Nigel cannot tell us "My life is fine!" or "My life sucks."
Thinking about this of course drives me crazy.

It does not seem to bother Nigel....

However this tells me one of three things: either we somehow hurt his back further, or the Hospital did, or this is progressive.

I think he should have an MRI. The tricky part is convincing the head of household, the guy with the wallet, that this is important and necessary. I need to talk to Doc.
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For the past week or so I have been tearing apart jewelry. It started with sorting. This bead is red and goes here, this is green and goes there, this is black and goes over here, this is blue-ish-greenish-with-some-pink and goes....ah...ah...ah.....
Not only do I not know but I have run pretty short of over here's and over there's.
So I began getting into drawers already stocked with junk and sorting the junk.
Ok this is PMC stuf and can all go together in.....THIS box (as I dump out another box.) and THIS stuff is....not anything I need right now so it can go in a pile here. And that bead and all the beads that are funny colors go in the PMC drawer and THIS  drawer has
OOPs kinves. Shit. Blood everywhere....(Xacto knives, tissue blades,scalpels, like those knives...) (Never reach into a strange drawer without looking.) (Never mind that the drawer had a label that read VERY SHARP THINGS.)

Back to work. Have you ever picked up beads with a bandage on your finger?

FIXING JEWELRY

I used to make jewelry and then I got frustrated, discouraged and bored all at once. No one was buying. I used high-end materials altho semi-precious stones, not gems. Without customers, I had no income to buy materials. I see in the catalog that my little 3mm round silver beads that are the heart and soul of so many pieces are now up to $104 per 1000. Maybe that sounds like a deal to you, but not to someone who sold NOTHING not   one  thing last year (not 2011 the yr before) NOT ONE STINKIN THING at Christmas, when I usually laugh all the way to the bank.


Ok. So I giggle. Not thousands, but at least a couple of hundred.
And that year, nothing. Not even a pair of earrings.

By the same token every art fair, every gallery, every store had tons and tons of jewelers, all priced under mine. Not that mine were over-priced--maybe they were, but not much. I never made in bulk. You never bought one of my pieces and saw anyone else wearing the same thing. Perhaps something with the same stones, but not the same design or combination of colors.

I didn't do home shows. I didn't do weddings. That requires duplicates. I quit doing art fairs the year I had three tents destroyed, one that was not even mine.

So I quit.
And after awhile I began painting again. And I sold or gave away probably 1/2 of all my jewelry stuff.

Then, suddenly, I sold two or three necklaces--good ones--. And one fell on the floor and broke. The woman brought it back to me and asked if I could fix it. It wasn't me: she dropped it on a cement floor and some of the stones broke. That day I had sold her two of my finest pieces and she had 5 more at home. How do you say No?

With caveats firmly understood (I do not have those stones anymore: most of my equipment is gone: it will not be exactly the same...) Anyway I fixed it. I restrung it on heavier wire and actually found some small pieces of Labradorite and a good clasp. I re-did it maybe 8 times trying to get the design just right. Then I discovered the heavier wire was too thick so I re-strung it, re-designing as I went (two or three more times) on lighter wire, tested the clasp, attached it, finished. Tried it on: the clasp broke in half in my hands, a terminal glitch.

Got more wire. (That piece was now too short by a couple of inches). Restrung. Re-designed at least twice. Found another pretty but not appropriate clasp, not happy with clasp AT ALL. That's life. I can order another but she will have to pay for it.
Attached clasp, and poof! all done. A mere 8 hours of work.

And now?
I do not have her phone number........anywhere.
I do not have it in the phone--either phone under her name. I do not know where she lives. I don't know if she is married. I know nothing about her except that she likes my work and buys it.

So if you're out there, the necklace is done.