Ruby the Corgi is vacationing at my son’s house, keeping Charley the Golden Retriever company and taking a break from Cassie the Corgi. And I feel like a boulder has been lifted from my shoulders.
My poor little Cassie has been totally harassed by this puppy. Really, I think at seven she was probably too old to have a pup come into her doggy life, which was happy and settled. It’s not that she seemed unhappy about the puppy…most of the time. But…
Ruby proved to be the more assertive dog and, after a year or two, displaced Cassie as Queen of the Universe. Cassie moped but seemed to adjust. I guess.
More recently, though, they’ve taken to engaging in what can best be described as sparring matches. You know how little kids play “swordfight” with a couple of sticks? Well, these dogs would have schnozz-fights…just like that. whack whack whack whack whack! Only with their muzzles, not sticks. Teeth would be bared, but they weren’t exactly fighting; not in a serious way. Yet.
But now Cassie shows up with a gouge on her face, just barely missing an eye. I didn’t see this happen, but I believe it to be a dog bite.
If it’s an injury and not a hot spot, it could be one of two and only two things:
Dog bite
Twig poke, incurred while rummaging under the citrus for the precious mummified oranges
Either is possible. Dog bite seems most likely to me, since Cassie has been rummaging for many a year and never poked herself in the face.
Meanwhile…
I have been sick for six months. Whatever I came down with in March has never gone away! After much consultation, three docs suspect allergies. One is the alarmingly commonsensical Young Dr. Kildare; one is a gastroenterologist who believes it is not a recurrence of GERD, and one runs on high-test fuel at the Mayo. And in all cases, as soon as they hear “…and yes, the dogs sleep on the bed,…” they can be seen visibly restraining themselves from rolling their highly-trained eyes heavenward.
It became more and more clear that one or both dogs were going to have to go.
So I emailed my son, who has conceived the idea that Charley the Golden Retriever is so lonely he needs a companion, and asked if he would like to have Ruby. Otherwise, she was going back to the breeder.
Well, that was like plugging him into an electric outlet.
Forthwith he showed up to pick up the dog, all the while assuring his neurotic mutther that if she had second thoughts, all she had to do was say so.
Hm. I felt a little sad to eject Ruby, who is a cute little puppy as long as you don’t mind being dominated by a dog. But…
But…
Y’know, when the kid went out the door with that dog, I felt like a three-hundred-pound weight was lifted from my shoulders.
§ § §
Spent the entire rest of the day cleaning and dusting and laundering and laundering and laundering.
Under the bed, I found a lake of dog hair and dust, a good two inches deep. You never saw so much dirt and dog hair mixed together in your life! No wonder I’ve been sick!
What can a little corgi or two do? Well…hang onto your hat:
Thats’ just five days’ worth! This shack was cleaned from stem to stern last Tuesday! Now admittedly, it includes the dog dunes under the bed (which should have been eroded by the weekly dust-mopping). I’ve cleaned all the floors, swiffering and vacuuming and then swiffering again. Especially in the bedroom. Pulled all the bedding off, washed the blanket, washed the dog pads (twice), washed the mattress cover, washed the bathroom rugs, changed the sheets, laundered EVERYthing. Pulled out the bed, cleaned behind it, cleaned the wall behind it. Climbed up and cleaned the ceiling fan’s blades, carefully.
As for Cassie: can’t tell whether she’s depressed or relieved or what. In the absence of Ruby, she has almost completely stopped the incessant gawdawful barking. Granted, it’s only been a few hours…but my gosh. It’s so quiet in here my ears hurt from the silence.
Cassie and I went for a doggy-walk this evening, the first we’ve had in several years that wasn’t a mile-long contest and the first enjoyable doggy-walk since the weather has begun to cool. She’s out of shape, so was tired by the time we got back to the Funny Farm. Just now she has resumed her position, at long last, as Queen of the Universe. And she’s sleeping in the direct line of the doctor-ordered steamer. I hope she’s feeling less allergic…
So this morning my son reports that the hound appears to be “about 80% better; largely acting like his old dog self.” The hot spot has completely healed (reminder to dog owners: acquire hot spot spray from the vet…it works!), and though he still has a little difficulty getting up and down, mostly he’s walking normally and has returned to bossing the human around.
It’s amazingly good news. If you’d asked me ten days ago how long it would take the dog to recover — or if he’d recover at all — I’d have guessed it would take 6 to 8 weeks for him to arrive at the stage my son describes. And I’d have guessed he’d never get much more than 80% of his functionality back.
But if he’s that much better now, it looks like there’s at least a chance he’ll return to normal.
He must not have had a 107-degree core temp for very long. It’s a five-hour drive from Phoenix to Show Low, even if you fly low on the open road. But they didn’t do much aviation: the road was closed in the Salt River Canyon, and they were stopped dead for an hour. At 107.4 degrees, if he’d been in that state for even 45 minutes or an hour, he surely would have died.
Okay. So it’s good news and bad news. If my son is right that the dog worked himself into a state of hyperthermia because he’s that terrorized by a car’s interior, it presents a problem: you can’t even get that dog to a vet without taking him in a car. And when Charley is under the weather (he’s given to unexplained collywobbles), my son will usually bring him to my house on the way to work. Same if he’s going out of town or has some other reason to have the dog babysat. All of those escapades will now take two people — one to drive and one to sit with the dog and try to keep him calm. My son likes to go camping and fishing, and he’s always taken Charley with him — after this, the minivacations will have to be dog-free.
And why would a man go fishing without his dog, eh?
A Man, a Dog, and Its Neurosis:
The Malignant Hyperthermia Soap Opera
…park selves at back door and arf. Human gets up (having just barely brushed the seat of its easy chair with its fanny) and lets the dogs out. Dogs go out onto the patio and stand there, staring expectantly at human.
Human: It’s 105 and overcast out here, and you want to go outside and stand?
Dogs: Well, yes. Yes. Of course.
{sigh}
Phone Solicitors…
…apparently are having a phone-solicitor jamboree.
Despite the wonderful call blocking device, quite a few still get through. They do this by spoofing phone numbers that are not in service (reinforcing one’s suspicion that Cox is in cahoots with them: how else would they get such extensive lists of out-of-service numbers?), or simply by calling from numbers that the device has yet to block.
Even the calls that get blocked still jangle my phone: they ring once and then are cut off. This has to do with the way the gadget has to be connected, because of the number of computers and phones and crap that are attached to the incoming cable. In one way, this is annoying: whatever you’re doing still gets interrupted, albeit very briefly. In another, it’s kinda gratifying, because you know the bastards are getting hung up on. The ones that do get through, though, set off your answering machine, so you have to listen to that thing yap. Sometimes they stay on the line long enough to cause the answering machine to pick up the “busy” signal that ensues, so you have to get up, walk to the machine in the back of the house, and delete the voice message that’s going beep-beep-beep-beep-beep….
Today I’ve had at least eight calls, about half of which have gotten through. That’s just while I’ve been here: left the house at 6:30 a.m. and didn’t get back until sometime after 11.
Whoops! There’s another one: the third from “Bountiful, Utah” today!
Mosquitoes…
…definitely are having a mosquito jamboree.
Don’t know when I’ve seen so many skeeters around. I think it’s probably because I left a dish of water out for the dawgs while it was excessively hot, because I was afraid Ruby would slip out unnoticed, as she’s inclined to do.
Cassie prefers to lurk indoors, but Ruby will go out and lurk in the yard even when it’s hotter than the proverbial hubs of Hades. I do try to check to be sure she’s inside, but given my growing level of incompetence, the chance remains that she’ll get herself stuck out there in the heat.
Even with water, she wouldn’t last long at 115 degrees. It’s cooled down to 105, so I brought the mosquito habitat inside. But that left, of course, a generation of little biters flying around.
There’s a chemical-free way to keep them from chewing on you, though: turn a reasonably powerful fan to “blast” and point it at yourself. Interestingly, mosquitoes are not very strong fliers, and they can’t navigate well in a breeze. Right now we have a large box fan roaring away. Whenever I work up enough energy to get up, I’ll turn on the other three table fans in this room. The box fan is sitting here next to the sliding door, because I take it out onto the deck at breakfast time by way of discouraging the little biters in the morning.
Incompetence…
…Really? Is it really possible that I could get the date of a Mayo Clinic appointment wrong not once, not twice, but three times?
Entre nous, I begin to doubt it.
The journey from my house to the Mayo is halfway across the galaxy. I just simply HATE driving out there. So when I needed to traipse across town by way of finding out why whatever ails me has been hanging on for the past five and a half months, I was not pleased.
I had a meeting in Scottsdale this morning, which would put me about halfway there. So I arranged an appointment at 9:10. This meant that the errands I needed to do while I was in the area where the group meets had to be deferred until next week, and some of them are things I would like to get done this week, not sometime in the far future.
So I leave the meeting early and fly across Scottsdale headed toward Payson — for reasons I can’t imagine, the Mayo built its office complex damn near out to Fountain Hills, which borders the freaking Beeline Highway. Naturally, Shea Blvd, the only way to get out there, is all dug up with “lane closed” signs all over the place. But I hit the campus just in time: run up the parking garage stairs and race into the reception area, only to be told…
“Oh, that’s not today: that’s next week! :-)”
Son. Of. A. Bitch!
This is the third time I’ve trudged way to hell and gone almost to freaking Fountain Hills and been told the appointment I had on my calendar was not for that day but for a week hence.
•The first time, I put it down to my usual old-lady incompetence.
•The second time, I was really pissed.
•But this time? Now I’m beginning to wonder.
Does it really make sense that I would get the date wrong for a trip I truly hate loathe and despise three times?
I go to a whole lot of doctors, dentists, veterinarians, car mechanics, and whatnot. Why would this keep happening only at the Mayo? It never happens with Young Dr. Kildare or CardioDoc or the glasses guy or the dentist or the hair stylist or the vet or the business meetings or choir…so why would it happen with the Mayo and only with the Mayo? Why would these errors consistently be exactly one week off, when they’re usually made pretty far out in the future? (This one wasn’t: I made it a few days ago, but mostly you’re scheduling three or four weeks down the line.)
(Wow! Here’s the fourthcall from Bountiful! This guy just does not give up! Now we’re at about 9 nuisance calls today.)
So, yeah: does it really make sense that this kind of scheduling error would happen only with the Mayo?
If they’re deliberately mis-scheduling, why? Could that make sense in even the wildest scenario?
The only possible reason I can imagine is that the Mayo doesn’t like to deal with Medicare patients. Medicare doesn’t pay enough, and collecting is a hassle for them. The Mayo prioritizes private patients over Medicare patients. They may be quietly trying to discourage me from making appointments at all. If a person makes enough wasted trips — especially if the person is elderly or disabled and it’s hard to get out there at all — maybe she’ll just give up and go someplace else.
And I certainly would, if they weren’t about the only game in town.
Overall hospitals and medical care in Arizona are pretty piss poor. In the Phoenix area, only two hospitals are rated excellent; one is the Mayo and one is a facility way to hell and gone out in Sun City. I don’t know anybody who practices in Sun City, and I sure as hell don’t want to drive as far to the westside as I have to drive to the eastside to go to a doctor.
It’s late. I’ve got to get up and start preparing the walls for the upcoming paint job. And so, away…
Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.
So yesterday afternoon we schlepped the ailing dog out to his Regular Veterinarian, way to he!! and gone on the northerly reaches of Paradise Valley.
Charley is much improved, and yesterday made a Great Leap in terms of recovery. He’s certainly not cured by any means, but yesterday was walking around a little more normally, despite having to struggle to get up and down. He’s even getting up enough zing to take up one of his favorite activities, counter-surfing.
Day before yesterday, M’hijito discovered a large, strange wound that seemed suddenly to have appeared on his back. Son was beside himself: we did not know where this came from or what it could possibly be.
Actually, I had a theory: First day back from the vet hospital (a.k.a. hole in the ground into which to pour money), Charley levered himself to the floor in the kitchen while we were fixing food. When he got himself down, he was laying with his back jammed up against the sharp corner of the cheap Home Depot cabinetry we had installed in that house. I thought at the time he must be getting jabbed, but elected not to try to drag him away from it for fear of injuring him more. So he could have scraped himself while in that position.
We cut away as much hair as we could and washed it, but since we already had a vet appointment there wasn’t much else to do.
The vet did a much better job of removing fur all the way around the thing, cleaning, and applying a med. He opined that it’s a hot spot.
I said “how can he have a hot spot, since he can’t reach the middle of his back to lick it?” My dogs love to create hot spots, but these always appear on their legs, which are convenient venues for lick-fests. These create fine festering wounds.
He said a hot spot can start as a bacterial infection. He says they’re very common in goldens.
So now poor Charley is bald on the belly (where they shaved him to do an ultrasound of his abdominal cavity), on his front legs (where innumerable IVs were inserted), and on his back.
However, the vet said he appears to be significantly better and held out some hope for a complete or near-complete recovery.
He also discovered that in X-raying the dog’s chest, the 24-hour veterinary had found a couple of ruptured vertebral disks.
Well, holy sh!t, would that ever explain a lot. As you may know from your own experience, disk pain is pretty damned excruciating. It certainly can cripple you up. And it can cause you to feel extremely stressed.
So if he was already in pain when he was placed in the Hated Car, the combination could have stressed him enough to give him a neurotic fit, as it were.
And you simply would not believe how this dog behaves inside a vehicle. He truly is totally panic-stricken.
Yesterday I rode in back with the dog while my son drove the car. All the way across town, Charley huffed and puffed and gasped for air and tried to burrow in behind my back to hide. There’s no question at all that he was terrorized.
The vet thinks the Thunder Shirt idea is a good one. He says a lot of people swear by them. If you read the reviews, about 75% of users feel they work well or at least adequately to calm their dogs’ anxiety. So my kid is going to order one up. But we’ll have to wait until the hot-spot wound on his back heals up before wrapping him in Velcro and nylon. Also the maker’s site says not to put one on a dog when the weather is over 90 degrees — it’ll be a month or two before temps get back down into the 90s hereabouts.
Anyway, this guy is really a great vet: like Young Dr. Kildare, he combines a great deal of expertise with that rarest of all commodities, common sense.
2. House
So I bought a gallon of gray paint to re-do the orange hallway. I’d very much like to get started on that, but it ain’t gonna happen today. Or tomorrow.
This morning I’ll run up to the Depot, where I figure I can get the rollers and a couple new paintbrushes cheaper than they sell them at Dunn Edwards.
However, it must be said that when I rolled into Dunn Edwards the other day with no paint on my face and engaging my usual long, space-covering hiking stride (had to park on the far end of the lot to get the car in the shade), I looked pretty lezzie. The lone clerk personing the counter was a distinctly mannish-looking woman, and she instantly took a liking to me. Amazingly, that led to her establishing a tradesman’s account for me! ♥ So I got the paint at a deep discount.
Ordered just a quart of the white trim paint, since I figured all that would be needed would be some touch-up. But when I arrived to pick up the paint, I learned they couldn’t get the color (which is long out-of-date in the style department) unless they whipped up a gallon. Incredibly, the guy dispensing the paint gave me the whole gallon for the cost of a quart!!!!!
Hot dayum!
The trim in my son’s house is the same color white. Our honored painter screwed up quite a few things in that house. Among these: he painted the hall cabinet without sanding the high-gloss lead paint already on it, and then — get this — after he finished painting he pushed the drawers shut! Not surprisingly, the paint just peeled right off the first time my son opened the drawers.
Painter dude also applied some of the wall paint carelessly and slopped it on the trim around the kitchen doors.
So with this excess of white paint, I’ll be able to repair the paint at M’hijito’s house, whenever I get around to it.
3. Docs
But that will not be soon: I can’t even work on my own house today.
Have to prepare a presentation for tomorrow’s 7:30 a.m. meeting, and from there go straight out to the Mayo, there to begin the (undoubtedly freaking endless) process of figuring out why my body is still afflicted with whatever struck on March 1. Still coughing and gagging, though it’s slowly getting better. But…this is August: whatever the ailment is has hung on for five and a half months.
Young Dr. Kildare referred me to a lung doctor.
I called this guy’s office during office hours and was instantly shunted into an aggravating punch-a-button phone tree. Okay…so get used to it, right?
Don’t think so. This was an aggravation on steroids. By the time I got to the sixth level of “listen carefully for our menu has changed,” I thought oh fuck it! and hung up.
Now this outfit keeps calling me on the phone and leaving messages for me to call and make an appointment. This after they sent me a letter to that effect; I wrote them a note in reply explaining that I gave up after reaching the sixth punch-a-button put-off and that I feel a business that treats its customers this way reveals its lack of consideration.
And I believe that is exactly so. In any setting, when you put off someone who wants to do business with you by sending them through a long, annoying run-around, you’re really saying you care so little for your customer that you won’t even be bothered to hire a minimum-wage clerk to listen to messages left on a voicemail that answers at the first or second level. When your callers are sick people, for chrissake, that is true in spades. How hard is it to plug in a voicemail system that says “Please leave your name, your number, and a brief description of your concern and we will get back to you soon”?
So this is not a medical practice with which I wish to do business.
Called the Mayo and reached a human on the second hoop-jump. Made an appointment. Unfortunately, it’s for 9:10 in the morning tomorrow. So that is going to make tomorrow a bitch of a day: starting out with a 40-minute drive into the rising sun and a presentation whose subject I have yet to dream up; then racing to the Mayo (another 30- or 40-minute drive from the meeting). And presumably, knowing the way my life goes, downhill from there.
4. Like Mother, Like Son
{chortle} I was tickled to learn that a certain retrograde cast of mind runs in the genes. After we returned from the veterinary expedition, M’hijito went off to a favorite Thai restaurant and retrieved a bunch of take-out.
So we’re sitting around after dinner finishing our beers and reading. M’hijito has turned on the lights…and he apologizes for their dimness because, says he, “I hate those new lights! I hate that blue cast they put out…they hurt your eyes!”
Heeeee!
So I was moved to make a confession: when the last administration decreed that incandescent bulbs would be taken out of our sticky little hands, I hoarded boxes of real light bulbs.
Heh heh…if he’d heard about that when it happened, I’d have had to listen to any number of lectures about how foolish that was.
But like his muther, he tried the fluorescent bulbs and tried the LCD bulbs and found them…amazingly wanting.
So when I croak over, he’ll inherit a lifetime supply of lightbulbs that don’t hurt your eyes or make you grit your teeth.
😀
Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.
Notice I don’t say how much will you spend on your pet; only how much you imagine you’d be comfortable spending. Chances are what you will spend, one day, is a far cry from what you think you ought to spend.
In 2017, Americans will spend — hang onto your hat — some sixty-nine BILLION dollars on their pets! This counts expenses all across the “pet industry,” from kibble to collars to that pricey stay in the doggy ER.
The average cost of a visit to one of those high-powered 24-hour veterinary hospitals is not easy to find: apparently this is a closely kept secret. If you look at Yelp reviews of the many such facilities in Phoenix, you see, more than once, people stating they were asked to front $1,300 just to get the animal in the door.
Diagnostic costs alone can run a couple thousand dollars, AARP observes. Prices accrue from there. Treating your cat’s bladder stones will set you back a mere $1,850, as nothing compared to the $3,290 for a dog’s ruptured knee ligament or the $7,000 to fix a busted-up leg.
Americans will start out, this year, ponying up $2.01 billion just to purchase their 2017 pets. Food will cost us $26.7 billion, followed by a distant $16.6 billion for veterinary care.
And that doesn’t count the lawyers. Did you realize some law schools now offer courses in animal law, wherein budding attorneys can learn how to handle pet custody in divorce cases? This doesn’t even touch the dog bite cases, the dog excavation of the neighbor’s property cases, the dog assassination of rabbits, chickens and sheep, the HOA squabbles over the hordes of loose cats…
And lest you think Americans are the only pet-happy nut cases out there, some 41 percent of Australians say they always take their dogs on vacation with them.
So the question is, when your dog or cat or bird or goldfish is dangerously ill or injured and may very well not recover, are you willing to bet on the come that maybe if you throw enough money at the problem the animal will recover?
When is it better — or is it ever better — to throw in the chips and put the critter to sleep than to persist in the search for a cure?
Got no idea, I’ll tellya, how much my son spent on the present episode with Charley. He refused to tell me, but knowing regular vets, I’m guessing $500 to $800 for the vet in Show Low, about $200 for the ordinary vet down here, and something upwards of $4,000 for the four days in the 24-hour doggy hospital. A great deal of drastic effort was spent on treating Charley the Golden Retriever. But IMHO the vet who saved his life was the guy in Show Low. All the rest of it has been additional acts in the opera. I suspect that if Charley had simply been brought home from the Show Low encounter and allowed to rest, the outcome would have been similar or identical.
On the other hand… Probably unnoticed by my ultra-stressed son, it’s pretty clear the Show Low vet did not believe Charley would survive, and in repeatedly expressing that concern to M’hijito, he was signaling (in coded language) that he thought they should put the dog down. When the outcome in fact was survival, he admitted that he was very surprised. And when you look this stuff up, you have to allow: the guy was right.
Except that he was NOT right about the etiology of what ailed the dog. He thought the cause was exposure to high heat and suspected my son had left the dog locked in a hot car.
This was not true. In fact, what he was dealing with was fear- or stress-induced hyperthermia. While the potential outcome is similar, possibly the same, what was really going on was different. The animal was never exposed to unduly high heat: in fact, the interior of the vehicle was rather cold. So you could look at it this way: rather than an assault from the exterior by heat and sunlight, the animal was generating heat from the interior, which must have been dissipating into the highly air-conditioned chill of the vehicle. So, while obviously hyperthermia was stressing the animal’s system, it probably was taking longer than the vet calculated to inflict damage.
That is why, without a doubt, the dog survived. He survived something different from what the vet thought was afflicting him. Whatever the etiology, though, the only known treatment was the same, and in applying it, the Show Low vet saved the animal’s life.
Will Charley fully recover?
That remains to be seen. Each day he is a tiny bit better: he gets up a little more easily, he lays back down a little more easily, he walks a tiny bit more normally. He’s eating well, drinking generous amounts of water, and excreting normally.
If this continues, my guess is that over time he will recover most of his functioning. I doubt if he’ll ever be normal again — though yeah, miracles do happen. More likely after six, eight, ten weeks he’ll come back more or less to normal, and then he’ll spend the rest of his life as the equivalent of an elderly dog. But that’s better than being dead.
I guess.
A dog that will live to sponge food off the table again…
So my son called in a sweat late this afternoon, having discovered a mysterious wound on the crippled Charley’s back.
I drove down to his place and helped inspect. It looked like a scrape that had started to suppurate. We cut the hair out of the area, washed it, called the vets at the emergency hospital. They advised taking the dog to our regular vet.
On reflection, it appears this injury probably happened when Charley laid down on the kitchen floor, pressing himself tight against the corner of a kitchen cabinet. I observed his doing that last night but figured if he were uncomfortable, he would move.
That, obviously, was wrong: it appears large areas of his back and probably his shoulders are so numb he can’t feel much.
He can walk a few steps at a time; haul himself to his feet; with great difficulty lever himself down to the floor. But he’s badly crippled. The Show Low vet opined that he had suffered neurological damage, which may never clear up.
To make everything perfect, the emergency vet hospital did not understand that M’hijito does not live in Show Low, so faxed all their records up to that guy! This despite having been told who the local vet is and that the local vet referred him to them!
Jeez.
So tomorrow we’re probably taking the dog to the local regular vet. Assuming we can get an appointment. I’m going down to M’hijito’s house to babysit the dog, since he really has to go back to work, having taken several days off on the pretext of “working at home.” He’s found that working at home isn’t working for him and says he needs to go back to the office so he can do his job.
Charley can’t be left alone, and he can’t be driven around in a car — so he can’t be delivered to and picked up from my house, meaning the dog will have to be babysat at M’hijito’s house.
He seems a little better to me today, but my son doesn’t seem to think so.
My feeling is that if he’s going to get better, it will take five or six weeks (at least). I hope that will happen. But I think we have to bear in mind that he may never recover.
Ruby the Corgi is vacationing at my son’s house, keeping Charley the Golden Retriever company and taking a break from Cassie the Corgi. And I feel like a boulder has been lifted from my shoulders.
As for Cassie: can’t tell whether she’s depressed or relieved or what. In the absence of Ruby, she has almost completely stopped the incessant gawdawful barking. Granted, it’s only been a few hours…but my gosh. It’s so quiet in here my ears hurt from the silence.
