Grr.

December 15th, 2008

My company party was good.  Drinky, but good.  And then we got home and had been asleep for a while when the two girl dogs bust out in an enormous fight.  They did this about a month ago, when I was out of town and we had a houseguest, and I thought “well, there’s one for the year,” which I guess wasn’t correct.  And like I heard about the last fight, we couldn’t get them apart.  There was a lot of water involved, including the hose set to “jet,” and when they brought it in the house I dumped a couple of pitchers over them.  B cast about for anything to try and picked up the big plastic cookie jar we keep the treats in, and a rattle of that distracted them enough for me to get Roxy into the laundry room.

This is no way to go through life:  drunk, naked, muddy-footed, and wet, trying to dry off a soaking wet excited bloody boxer in your laundry room.

Neither of their ears will ever look quite the same again.  It’s mostly nicks around the edges, so they’ll look like well-loved stuffed animals.  Sophie took a small bite to the side of her face.  Roxy comes out worse because she has a ton of neck skin, which makes for good hanging-on, and I think Sophie must have gotten an entire ear in her mouth, because Roxy’s got matching holes on her head and under her ear.

It was Roxy we watched all day yesterday.  I got her cleaned up and didn’t find any injuries that could be improved by medical attention.  She slept a bunch and didn’t eat much, but started perking up towards evening and I think she was probably just exhausted.  Sophie was fine.

And then right about the time Roxy perked up last night, Sophie came in from outside limping and holding up her front left foot.  (And if you have pets and a recent expensive home repair, you just thought “well of COURSE she did!”)  We’d been sitting in the living room, she hadn’t made a sound and she’d been outside alone.  She would put weight on her toes but not on the full foot, so we checked her paw for cuts or a rock or something (including a bite from the night before that mysteriously didn’t bother her for 14 hours), but it’s clean.  And I said, well, okay, maybe she stubbed a toe or something, it’ll pass.

I wrote all the above this morning, and ended up taking Sophie to the vet this afternoon.  She has a mild case of mystery injury.  Of the elbow.  It is possible something bit her on the leg (something with smaller teeth than Roxy, and not very deeply), or she got her leg stuck in something.  Or she fell.  Or aliens threw rocks at her.  There’s a vague scratch or puncture or something, and the x-rays just indicated some swelling.  She’s comfortably whacked out on a painkiller I don’t think I’ve used before, and she has antibiotics.

Sophie doesn’t really like people getting up in her business too much.  She’ll tolerate a lot from me, unless she doesn’t want to, in which case I get the big Elvis Lip pretty fast, and I told the vet tech that they’d probably need to do something about that.  At which point the vet tech tried to take her temperature anyway and saw what I meant.  They muzzled her, and then they had to lay her down on the floor to palpate and rotate the leg.

It was not unlike some of the more memorable scenes in The Exorcist.  Oh my god, the noises that came out of that dog.  It was all muffled because of the muzzle, but I am fairly certain she had some pretty straightforward instructions regarding both Jesus and your mother.  And then, when they were done with the leg and had flipped her over and felt the other leg for comparison, they took her temperature.  If you suffered a brief power interruption this afternoon, sorry about that.

And I did laugh, because I wasn’t anywhere near any of her business ends, but then on the other hand it’s that same rage that fuels these fights, and yesterday was just in general a low day because we don’t want dogs that fight.  We don’t want to have to worry about leaving them at home during the day and coming back to a bloodbath.  I don’t like Roxy’s ears all nicked up.  So it’s probably time to pick back up with the Cesar Millan stuff, making them walk together and wearing them out and things.

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Wasted day

December 13th, 2008

My company holiday party is tonight, which means I have essentially wasted the entire day running errands and doing crap like tweezing my eyebrows and giving myself a French manicure (the real kind, with the white pencil).  I shot over to the outlet mall in the extreme suburbs (like, I live on the north edge of Dallas and Not-Dallas, and I had to drive half an hour) and scored a kind of ugly but servicable and well-fitting dress and shrug for $36, and then spent another $46 on a bra and tights.  Then I had to buy hairdo gadgets, tried and failed to buy shoes (dear buyers: I know some people go to work, or anywhere, in 5″ heels, but I cannot and will not, but I don’t want to wear flats either.  Have 1.5-2″ heels really gone out of fashion?), and went into Target which was the worst decision I’ve made in months.  I felt bad for all the parents of melting-down toddlers, because it was probably not yet naptime when they first got in line to check out.  There were only 4 registers and one express line open, which is ridiculous.

We’re in hurry-up-and-wait mode here, now, lest we end up all dressed up and unable to sit down (dog hair) an hour before we need to leave.  Now I’m off to deal with my hair.  Happy Saturday!

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Some things for you

December 12th, 2008

To watch:

This is a FANTASTIC short film about some of the stranger requests for photographs received by the Hulton Archive/Getty Images.  I thought it was going to be a tidy little documentary with amusing anecdotes (the title of the film is “Photographs of Jesus,” after all), and it’s this amazing stop-motion photo-animated romp that is very clever and has totally brightened my day:

To do:

Also, make sure you get mooned tonight.  Tonight’s full moon will be the brightest of the year, with the full moon at its closest lunar perigree since 1993. Last night was trippy enough - you very nearly could have read comfortably by the moonlight.  I have two 8′ long raised beds covered with white frost cloth, and they looked like giant fluorescent tubes laid out in the yard.  I might try to take pictures tonight.

To read:

You’re probably already reading Cake Wrecks, but have you seen the real-estate-photography equivalent, It’s Lovely I’ll Take It?  For as long as we slogged through our house-hunt, we never saw anything this wacky.

Where do your donated clothes go?  Many of them go to Africa to have a really complicated relationship with the economy, politics, agricultural competition, and cultural identity.  I finished this article unsure of what exactly I should do the next time I clean out my closet.

Sappy happy ending story about a dog, a parking lot, a rescue, and a reunited family.

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