Cleo Sleeps With the Fishes

That's a positive statement. If cats have an afterlife, hanging with a bunch of fish is probably the best thing to hope for. I know that's where I'd want to be. Hanging out in a field of catnip in the sun next to a pond with so many fish they occassionally have to force one to jump out to make room. Although Cleo preferred turkey. If she smelled it, she'd do her darndest to crawl into the trash can. That and a groccery bag were her idea of a good time. But the cat afterlife would be scary if it was full of great big turkeys and you were a cat, so hope for fish.

Pooteewheet took Cleo to the vet for euthenasia today. She'd lost so much weight. But more than that, she'd started to leak all over everything. Back of the couch. Arms of the couch. Footrest of the couch. Eryn's rocking chair. Three layers of Eryn's covers and sheets. The floor. Probably our bed. She was in pretty rough shape from that perspective. Pooteewheet held out a long time, cleaning up after her wherever she found a smell.

She has some pictures on her blog post. My favorite picture of Cleo is this one. That was some good Pale Ale!


Pooteewheet has gone off to a mindless movie so she doesn't have to think about anything. Eryn composed songs on the piano about not seeing Cleo anymore and petting her for the last time to get some sadness out of her system. A sad Good Friday at the Scooter household.

The Upside To Restless Legs

There's an upside to restless leg syndrome. Specifically, as I'm not in the same bed as Pooteewheet until after my checkup with the doctor later this month, tonight the cat pooped and peed on her bed, not mine.

Bailey Moves In

When I got home on Friday, we had a new member of the household. Pooteewheet and Eryn had been to the Humane Society, and I'd gotten a call at work from Eryn providing me many details about the really nice kitty she'd met, and how much she liked the kitty, and it was a wonderful kitty, and would it be ok if we had two kitties? I've always had a two cat rule, and although I prefer manx and munchies because weird cats have more character in my opinion, it's not a given that it has to be deformed in some way, and we were currently running at one pet if you don't include the fish.

So Bailey has joined our family. Here Eryn has left her a welcome message.


She's been living on the porch while she and Cleo (the Manx) become acquainted. Most of the time they meet, it involves ineffectual slap fights through the glass door to the porch. Bailey thought Eryn's play house was interesting, and she's been spending her time there, on the little couch on the porch, and in Eryn's room.


Bailey checking on her food dish to make sure it's not going anywhere now that she has new digs.

Grease

I spent the last three days trying to wash grease off my arm. I've been swapping out a garage door opener at a rental house, and was the victim of twenty years of overgreasing. I had grease on my arm, shirt, leg, and face. So much, that when I bumped into a fellow employee at Chipotle, I was nervous about shaking her hand because I thought I'd leave a smudge. Today I realized that the last remaining bit I've been trying to scrub out on my arm is actually a large, deep bruise. I can't imagine that scrubbing vigorously at a bruise with soap and a washcloth is in any way conducive to the healing process.

On another note, it's very quiet around here with Sandy gone. It's almost as if there's no one in the house in the morning, because for the last five years, it's been just her and me up together before I go to work. She had a plastic kennel she liked to sleep in inside (where we had to put her for a while after she learned to poop in the house from my sister's dogs), and it's currently outside, so the corner where it sat is now completely visible, including over a year of dust on the wall. It has smudges in it that give it the look of what you might expect if she had died in a nuclear blast and been turned into a wall shadow. Creepy. Eryn hasn't buried her bag of Sandy fur yet, although she has been toting around a stuffed otter she named Sandy and telling all her kindergarten teachers about how her dog died.

Thank you to everyone for all the well wishes and condolences.

Sandy

My dog's back legs quit working on Saturday morning. We took her to see the vet, and he ran blood tests and x-rays, and came back with a.) she was old (13 is old for a rottie-lab mix), b.) the hip that wasn't working at all was the good hip, and c.) she might be having kidney failure, on top of other things. My mother the R.N. later noted that Sandy smelled like people did who were going through kidney failure.

We fed her pain pills and stomach pills, and over two days you could see her getting thiner, and drinking less and less, and hardly eating - at least nothing that stayed down. But the worst part was that I got rid of the bricks at the front of her pen, so that in case she got back on her feet, she wouldn't have to step over them (they were there to prevent her from burrowing out when she was younger). That prompted her, while she was resting in the back yard alone, to crawl into her pen, dragging her legs behind her, as she pooped, leaving a trail behind. She was trying to be a good dog. I carried her back and forth to the pen for the weekend, so she could try to pee where she was comfortable, although mostly she just peed on my legs and feet once we got into the pen.

But she was happy and (mostly) alert, and we kept her outside with company (Pooteewheet and Eryn read out loud in the lawn chairs) for most of Saturday and Sunday and part of today. But she was just getting worse, and surgery isn't really an option for a 13 year old dog, and what do you fix? the kidney? the legs (and surgery for a dog right before winter is like surgery for a person right before winter)? the swollen heart? So later this morning, while Eryn was still gone with Grandpa and Grandma and we didn't have to take her with us, we took Sandy in to the emergency vet for euthanasia. There was a lot of crying in the Scooter household. She had been a member of our family for ten years, even if not always a well-behaved member (I don't have a link to how she unlocked her pen and ran across 66th Street in Richfield and ended up in Bloomington, or poked herself in the eye by chewing threw a wire cage, or how she broke Melissa's nose, or Dan'l's lip right before his wedding - but those are all fond memories in retrospect. She definitely had a stubborn streak), and I'll miss seeing her sitting in the backyard grass in the sun, panting happily and cocking an ear whenever she heard something interesting.

Here's a picture from the weekend. Eryn and Pooteewheet made Sandy a fort out of the sawhorses, slide and sleeping bag so she could stay in the shade without having to drag herself to a new spot.


Sandy and I as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox for Halloween 2000. She was very proud of the t-shirt and all the attention she got and didn't want to take it off after the party was over.


Sandy at 3, when we picked her up from the Humane Society.

Zap!

An interesting discovery. If my Blackberry is within a foot of the dog's shock collar (humane sort, the kind that gives a warning beep, and then goes off if she doesn't quit barking) it goes off. Doesn't even have to vibrate. That's got to irritate the hell out of Sandy. Good thing she's not on call.