Random cuteness

Wally has really been stepping up his game in the adorable department lately. He’s been supplying me with some quality Instagram material and generally just making me laugh. This was from my work at home day. I came into the living room to witness this ridiculous spectacle:

The couch is apparently a very popular place! My other favorite is this one, again of Wally on the couch:

I just love that he’s holding his red ball and has that “Won’t someone please play with me?” face on. I’ve got to say, he may be a big knucklehead, but at least he’s a cute one!

The ballad of Toenail and Stitchface

Wally left his last trip to doggie daycare with a cracked toenail. Not a big deal, but it did require a trip to the vet to remove what was left and of course, the cone of shame:

(We got him a softer cone than the hard plastic ones because he has a tendency to bash them into door frames until they break.) The problem is that the cone didn’t really prevent him from licking the toenail, which kept it from healing. And earned him another trip to the vet and more time with the cone. He’s very adaptable though, he could even beg for toilet paper tubes:

Eventually, we started putting a sock on that foot to help protect the toe from him and hopefully let it heal faster. Meanwhile, with the possibility of T starting a job in Austin, we scheduled Smokey Joe for some work that the vet had recommended: a dental cleaning and removal of some fatty lumps. Which meant a transfer of the cone of shame (and a very nice Christmas for our vet… )

And a new nickname for Smokey Joe a.k.a. “Stitch Face” or “Jigsaw”:

Meanwhile, Wally has his own indignities to suffer:

Both boys are well on their way to recovery now. I wish I could say the same for my checkbook… ;-P

 

Boy cat

Since the cats get very little representation on this blog, I had to share these awesome pictures of Georgie that Martha took. Georgie has a box that he loves to sleep in that we call his “chill out box.” He’s done this (with different boxes) over the years and I think it’s adorable. My very favorite thing is when just his ears are visible over the lip of the box, but he’s successfully thwarted my efforts to get a good picture of it. Luckily, M is a professional:

Such a good boy cat.

Honorable mention

I would be remiss as a dog-lover in not mentioning Miss Oatmeal’s progress.

I’m not sure if I’ve written about Oatie before, but she was a rescue from a puppy mill where she spent the first four or so years of her life in a cage. She’s progressed amazingly over the years that Heidi’s had her. This time she jumped up in my lap within an hour of my arrival. She was absolutely in love with T:

It was wonderful to see her looking so well!

Saying good bye

Today was a very sad day. We made the very difficult decision to put our oldest cat Dewdrop to sleep. She was an old cat (we adopted her off of the porch of some of T’s old college friends 15 years ago and can best guess her age to be “at least 17.”) The first time I saw her, sitting on the aforementioned porch, looking like something out of Dickens with her gigantic eyes, I was determined that we were going to rescue her, stealing her if need be. Luckily, the friends we were visiting were looking for someone to take her, so it worked out perfectly.

(This is my favorite photo of Dewdrop in the backyard of our Portland apartment. I like the mix of cute and “don’t mess with me” in her expression)

Dewdrop was a funny mixture of badass and bunny rabbit. She didn’t like any cat near her, but would lay the smackdown on any dog foolish enough to question her authority. She had an unusual purr that sounded like a pigeon cooing and for the first few years we had her, it was pretty much a constant sound. Even later on, house guests would be warned not to get her started unless they wanted to fall asleep to the sound because she wouldn’t stop for a few hours. She also had a surprisingly loud yowl for such a tiny cat.

My final reminiscence about her was the fact that we took her on many car trips – moving her from Seattle to California (plus a few trips up to Portland to see my folks) and then across the country twice. She was a great traveler and would usually curl up in the sunshine either in the backseat of the car or on the large dashboard of the Saturn.

Farewell little Dewdrop. We will miss you!

 

Silly boyz in the hood

Does that title date me or what? A typical Sunday morning in our house usually involves a fair amount of lounging before we get started on our day. This morning, T was fooling around with a bandanna that I’d gotten in a goody bag at an event earlier in the week that was sitting on the coffee table. T can’t resist fooling around with random objects, and I can’t resist taking silly pictures of him. It’s the glue that makes our marriage work…

Then he moved on to harassing Wally:

Such silly boys…

Working from home

I’m fortunate enough to have a job situation that allows me to work from home two days a week. Lately, this has been a familiar sight:

Clingy George waiting to snuggle on me while I work. Such a lazy bum.

Is it the end of the world?

First, Seattle is hit with a freak snowstorm in November! Then, this:

Dog & cat snuggling on the couch? The end of the world must be nigh…

Naturally, when they saw the camera they assumed their typical “we weren’t doing anything” expressions. But still, very troubling…

Fall follies

To take a break from the inevitable posts about swimming (or equally fascinating topics of riding the bus or my fascinating exploits in cubicle-land… ) please enjoy some random fall photos:

This was the view out of our living room sliding glass door for a few glorious days:

(At least until the wind came up and blew all of the leaves off the tree, such is the transition between seasons here in the Pacific Northwest… ) Wally likes our little balcony and frequently lays on it, longingly surveying his domain:

Meanwhile, T continues his campaign to get a dog and cat to snuggle together. Dewdrop is old enough to be a good candidate for this experiment. As is Wally, who just wants to sleep on the bed she usually commandeers:

Behold the puppet master:

Wow, what a random post. Happy fall, everyone!

Bad doggie!

As anyone who owns pets knows, they are lovely companions who give unconditional love and affection in exchange for food and a spot on the bed/couch/what-have-you. They are also ticking time bombs of stupid vet bills. This goes double for labs. When you own a lab, you have unwittingly signed up for an unknown number of visits to the vet for something stupid that they’ve eaten. Since labs seem to evaluate whether something is edible on the “Eh, let’s see what happens.” school of thought, this can get expensive. They also have impeccable timing, preferring to wait until after you’ve dropped a ton of money on cat vet bills and other miscellaneous expenses. They’re cool like that.

Yesterday afternoon T picked me up from work so that I could drop him off at a networking thing and then go do my usual post-work swim. (Usually, I walk to the pool and he picks me up from there after school.) Smokey Joe was panting a lot and acting neurotic, but I figured he’d gotten hot in the car and decided to just take the dogs home, since the weather was pretty warm still and I didn’t want to make them sit in the car for another hour. As I was driving, Smokey Joe’s panting was really excessive and I was getting more concerned. I fed him some ice cubes out of my water, but he still seemed agitated.

After we got home, the panting continued and he was just acting weird. Now it was decision time. Do we wait and see? Do we take him to the vet? Crap, our normal vet is closed – so that means the emergency vet. Crap. I decided to look up his symptoms online and see if I could get an idea of what it might be. The sudden onset of the symptoms was particularly worrisome. Not surprisingly, the internet was supremely unhelpful and gave me a range of possibilities from “He’s afraid of thunder” to “He’s having a heart attack.” There were a fair number of “dog ate something poisonous/bad” mixed in there, which seemed the most plausible explanation given the dog in question. This unfortunately meant going to the vet right away.

So, I called T to tell him that I needed to pick him up early, (I wanted him to be able to fill in the blanks of Smokey Joe’s behavior before he’d picked me up.) loaded Smokey Joe into the car and off we headed to the emergency vet. They of course had already met Smokey Joe from his “Puffy head/probably ate a bee or spider” incident. After examining him, the vet came in and said he was acting as if he were “high” and asked if he could have gotten into something. T recalled that he’d eaten “something” in the parking lot at school, which narrowed the options down to “anything college kids would drop in a parking lot.” Sigh. So, she outlined the treatment that she recommended: an overnight stay, ($) where they’d induce vomiting ($$) and fill his stomach with activated charcoal ($$$) and give him IV fluids ($$$$) and a tranquilizer so that he’d just sleep it all off. ($$$$$) $1300 later, we were on our way.

Smokey Joe is a part of the family and worth every penny, but it would be nice if he could wait to test this theory until after the boy is out of school and we have a little more in the savings account. (Okay, buddy? That’s a good boy! Now go get a job!) Meanwhile, I’ve got to overhaul the summer budget and figure out how to make up that difference. Looks like we’ll be camping at Pacific Crest this year…