Lonesome

My dog is spending his second night in the doggie hospital (also known as Lynden Veterinary Hospital). His liver enzyme count is high.



When my alarm went off this morning, no fuzzy face thrust near my own reinforced the message that it was time to get up. When I came home from work, no hysterical barking met my ears. No dog leapt madly about me until I leashed him up and took him for a walk. When I get up and walk around the place, no little dog comes tickety clicky with his little toenails following me from room to room. When I lay me down to sleep, no warm, furry little body nestles next to mine.

I miss him.

Laughs and titters

Last night, after posting, I was still amusing myself with the blogging/blobbing typo and I thought I would like to ask people, "Have you perused my blob?" I thought this was truly funny.

Later in the evening I literally (and I know what that word means) laughed out loud when I read the following in the Wimpy Catholic's blog about attending a discernment retreat (to see if one is called to enter a religious community):

The retreat ran from Friday evening through Sunday morning. I bunked with the recovering addict and the drooler. Both nights, I was the last to fall asleep. Both nights, as I lay awake in that dark room, farts like a camel’s lowing blared from the drooler’s bed, filling me, to my surprise, with an almost paternal tenderness.

I am in my early 50's, but my sense of humor has never matured to the point that I can refrain from prolonged laughter at flatulence (also belching). Any by prolonged, I mean much longer than anyone else would continue to laugh, even 6-year-olds. I just can't stop.

The unbearable lightness of blogging

Well, my blogging has been light lately, so light as to be weightless, due to its non-existence. I am resolved to be more diligent.

I almost typed "blobbing" instead of "blogging." What would it be like to have an online blob and post new blob entries? I've been blobbing about my life.

It's a whole new paradigm, as Dilbert once said.

Ad infinitum

Today I bought my dog some flea-killing medicine (rather spendy, by the way). The poor thing has been scratching and biting himself excessively lately. We had a mild winter and are now in the hot days of summer, so it's a flea-palooza extravaganza.

When I asked at the vet's office for a flea treatment, I was expecting the oily stuff in a little tube that you put between the dog's shoulder blades (so he can't lick it), making sure it gets in contact with the skin and doesn't just sit on top of the hair. But this time they sold me pills -- one per month, and they sell six months at a time.

In the past, when my dog was supposed to take antibiotics, I never could get a pill down him. I'd put it in his dish with his food, and he'd eat the food but leave the pill. I'd try to jam it down his gullet with my fingers and, after considerable struggle, just when I thought I'd succeeded, I'd find the pill, half-melted and covered with slobber, on the floor somewhere.

So I was a little dubious about the flea pill; however, the young women staffing the vet's office said it was not a pill but a chewable tablet, and they recommended putting it in with his food, perhaps even breaking it up in the food. They said he did need to take it with a meal.

This evening I put half his food in his dish, then crushed the pill between two spoons and added it to the food, then put the other half of his food in the dish and fed him. He gobbled it down and licked the bowl, as is his usual practice, so this time I think it worked.

I'm so cute, even vermin love me.

Supposedly within half an hour of his taking the pill his fleas should start dying. He's poison now to fleas -- for a month.

Since I had fleas on the brain, I hunted up the famous couplet:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Lord love a duck

In the evening when I get home from work, I take my dog for a little walk around our back yard, where there are plenty of trees for him to pee on. I like to look at the creek, so we head there first.

This evening, I was fortunate enough to see a duck in the creek. She was floating/swimming downstream and simply passed me by.

Ne'er so well expressed

So on my lunch hours, I'm working my way through The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry. It's great. He's humorous and witty, in that great British style, and he really does explain things clearly, then gives an exercise that lets you write practice lines of poetry using the concepts he just taught.

Strawberries

Last year I put together a hanging basket of strawberries for my dad, with four strawberry plants in it. Two made it through the winter, so I hung the basket up again. A week or two ago, I added some pale blue bacopa, just to fill in the basket a little and make the arrangement pretty as well as fruitful.

One berry is very ripe, another is pretty ripe, and other are ripening.



As the summer progresses, Fishtrap Creek drops in depth. A sandbar (is it a sandbar?) appears that is covered by water in the winter.



Yesterday my great-niece was down there, doing "catch and release" with water bugs, when she started screaming in terror. Her older sister ran to the rescue and I heard the little girl say that a lobster almost got her toe.

If there's one thing more sure than another, it's that there are no lobsters in this creek. Her older sister reported that it was a "crawdaddy." I didn't think there were even crayfish in this creek, but then I'm no naturalist.

Buy this book!

I'm loving it.

Nicotiana