Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: pets

  • Cars that pass in the night

    Late last night I was driving home on a surface street, but one with a 50 MPH speed limit.  As I approached an intersection I could see that something was going on.  There were cars pulled to the right, and several people standing in the fast lane, some waving their hands to signal cars coming right at them to move over.  As I slowed for my turn, I could see the problem, a dog lying in the road.  I turned so my car was perpendicular to the lane, blocking it from oncoming traffic and putting on my hazards.  Pissed off oncoming traffic was slightly more interested in moving over to avoid slamming into my car than they were in just moving around the people waving at them.  The young woman was frantically calling animal control.  I tried telling her they wouldn’t help, but she didn’t understand.  She though that they would send a doggy ambulance of sorts.  I got out, wanting to encourage somebody to give the dog a ride to a 24 hour emergency clinic I knew was nearby.  I couldn’t put the dog in my car, it already had a dog in the back who did not have the temperament to make that workable.

    Unfortunately, the dog stopped breathing, before such a plan could be put into action.  While the young crying woman had a more and more frustrating conversation with animal control, who was, of course, not set up to do anything quickly about this problem.

    I got out of my car to find a beautiful female German Shepherd lying in the road, a motley crew strangers standing around her, several crying. I turned her collar until I could find tags, so the owner could be called.  A couple of the people had seen the dog running in the road, terrified.  They pulled over and tried to get her to come, but she was panicked.  They were there trying to save her when another driver didn’t see her in time, and despite slamming on his brakes, hit her.  Another was walking his dog and was standing there with his dog, helping to block traffic.  Soon a person from nearby homes joined us with a STOP/SLOW roadwork sign and a reflective vest to put in a little time to making things more visible.  Cars continued to speed past us, faster than the speed limit, aggressively swerving at the last minute but making it clear they were not pleased at being inconvenienced.

    We got her name off the tag and talked to her about how good and beautiful she was, and waited for the owner who had been reached with that number on her tag.  He had just walked in the door and discovered her missing, and then the phone rang…

    He pulled up to the intersection and came over, already crying, but hopeful.  She was gone, but it didn’t stop him from falling to his knees and begging her to get up.  He was lost and didn’t know what to do.  The young woman explained that she had tried.  That they’d stayed with her.  We helped to load her into his trunk.  He apologized to her for having to lift her unceremoniously.  I told him that we could still take her to the emergency vet nearby, that they could arrange for cremation.  He asked if I was sure they were open, so I called them to verify.  They were.  I described where it was. He thanked me. He still looked shell shocked, so I asked if he wanted me to meet him at the vet so he wouldn’t be there alone.  A look of sheer confusion passed over his face.  It was clear that he wanted to take me up on that offer, and that every bit of social training had taught him to say, “No, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.”  “I’ll meet you there,” I said.  “I’ll pull around and you can follow me to the hospital.”

    She had jumped the fence of the 4th of July, panicked by illegal fireworks.  He recovered her on the 4th, but something had made her jump again.

    The group of strangers dispersed into the night, and I pulled my car around in front of him and led him to the pet hospital.  We went inside to get employees to come help us.  I got some paper towels to do a little bit of cleaning of the blood on his car, just so that it wouldn’t be staring hard at him in the light of day.  I waited while he filled out paperwork, and told them he wanted a wooden box for her ashes.  He told me of the three wooden boxes he had at home, all German Shepherds, but the others had all passed from old age.  There was another German Shepherd waiting at home, who would be so confused when she never came back.  He said goodbye to her, and then said goodbye to me, hugging me tightly and thanking me.

    Then I drove home with Mindy in my car, to be greeted by Watson at the door, and soon the sound of foster puppies wiggling in their crates filled my ears.

    RIP beautiful girl. I’m so sorry you didn’t make it home safely.  I know you were loved.

  • The Deed is Done

    Friday was the day. Our only child moved into her dorm room. The mixture and intensity of emotions is overwhelming. There is mental conflict and turmoil.

    We spent 18.5 years working toward this goal. We did not have her in order to own her. We raised her with the goal of sending her out into the world to live her own life successfully, and this is a very important phase of that eventual goal. It is a Good(tm) thing, so why does it feel so craptacular?

    The voices inside my head are fighting. There is one that keeps wailing, “This is the worst thing EVER!” while the other voices stare with disdain and correct the wailing voice harshly.

    It isn’t a bad thing. Not at all. But it is a big, big change, and I am not very comfortable with it yet.

    It took 18.5 years, but it also only took a minute, and my entire life.

    Now we are at home, and she is in another city, 300 miles away, and life feels unsteady for all of us. It is a new frontier.

    Willow is not amused.

  • Indy

    Indy and the Kid and London

    16.5 years ago we brought home a puppy from the German Shepherd Rescue. She was my husband’s first dog ever. We got her before our daughter could walk, and she helped to raise our daughter. Indy was a very sweet and a little neurotic. She was family, and we loved her very much.

    This week we had to say goodbye to her. She was damn old for a dog of her size, and she lived a very good life, but I still am very sad. Our daughter, who doesn’t remember a day without her, until now, is totally devastated.

    Indy and the Kid

    The house feels so different without her. I miss her. She was such a good dog.

    Hearth

    I’m so fucking busy this week, I don’t even feel like I have enough time to grieve. It’s just a tight ball of pain and loss and sadness sitting like a rock in my gut, and I just need to keep on keeping on.

    Really, it isn’t even about the time to grieve, it is about having the space to grieve. It is about having the space to just be left the fuck alone, collapsed on the floor sobbing and snotting until I am a desiccated lump. Maybe next week.

  • When It Rains

    Today I took Indy and Watson to go visit a friend. The friend has a big interesting yard with lots of things to smell, and since Indy spent time there before she developed CCD, she still recognizes it and gets a lot of stimulation out of being there, without any anxiety from being someplace unfamiliar. It is a nice safe dog park experience for her, where we don’t run the risk of running into a dog who might knock her over.

    She even has a boyfriend next door. There is this sweet looking husky mix who lives next door, and they interact through the chain link fence, and he likes her and whines for her attention and she plays flirty little games with him, as if she is young again.

    Today Watson wandered over the the chain link fence to meet the strange dog. He made friendly puppy body poses, but the other dog was suspicious of Watson. The other dog felt a bit territorial. So, he hiked up his leg and peed on the chain link fence. Except, you know, chain link fences are more air than substance, so mostly he peed on Watson.

    “Eew, no. Watson, don’t just stand there. Stop peeing on my dog. Come on.”

    Watson sniffs the chain link fence, and takes a step back, so the dog circles and lifts his leg and pees on the fence, and Watson, again.

    “Nooooooo. Don’t pee again! Watson…”

    Unluckily for me, dogs don’t mind being peed on as much as I might hope they would, so Watson had a great day, despite, or perhaps even partially because, he was peed on three times.

    The afternoon was spent with dogs running and playing and sniffing and exploring, and finally I made my way home, to walk right into an educational clusterfuck.

    See, one of the things about the online charter school is that they help educate students by locking the students out of their curriculum whenever the student does something it deems a lockout offense. For instance, if they fail a quiz, they are unable to move forward until they’ve spoken to a teacher and figured out what the problem is. In theory, this sounds kind of reasonable, but since the teachers often take a long time to respond, it really slows things down.

    On Wednesday evening the kid spectacularly failed a chemistry quiz from the future. She finished her lesson, and the online program served up a quiz for a completely different lesson, that she had not yet been exposed to, so she didn’t know any of the answers. She guessed her way to a 42%. She couldn’t NOT take the quiz, because once you start the quiz, you have to finish it and submit it, or you automatically fail it anyway.

    She immediately sent an email to her mentor teacher and her in person science teacher, because she already knows that they respond more rapidly than the online teachers do. She sent screen shots proving that she had not been given the correct quiz (in case it was a one time glitch), but of course, nobody replied until Thursday morning. The local teacher reported the problem to the online school, looked at the content of the lesson, and gave her a quiz that actually quizzed her on her current lesson material. She got a 100%. He then submitted the corrected grade to the online people.

    By this morning, the online school still had not unlocked her chemistry class, so she still couldn’t do her chemistry work. At that point the local teacher stepped in an unlocked it for her, even though that is not the “procedure”. She was left unable to work on her class for more than 24 hours.

    When I arrived home today, she had been locked out of ALL of her classes. Her teacher sent her an email telling her she would be locked out because she hadn’t turned in a form (where we initial a calendar saying what days she was doing schoolwork, even though the online program actually keeps track of all logins and the amount of time spent), but she had turned in the form on Monday. She was working on schoolwork, so she didn’t get the email until a half hour later, at 4PM, and by then nobody would reply to her phone calls or reply to her emails. This leaves her unable to do any schoolwork for the entire weekend. She started the school year late, so she is “behind” on schoolwork. Meaning, she is doing more than the required standard student minimum each week, but she is not currently at the point she should have been at had she started on day one and been completing the minimum each week. She is on track to complete everything by the end of the semester. Each day she is locked out makes a big difference, because then she has less days to cram this extra work in to. Plus, she has a friend coming in from out of town on Monday, whom she hasn’t seen in more than two years. Without being able to work this weekend, she basically cannot spend time with her friend on Monday.

    It sucks.

    That is what I walked into the door to discover, as I directed her to try emailing different people, and I emailed and tried to call people, and basically just frantically tried to get her back into her school program before the day was totally gone and there was no chance.

    We had no luck, and finally she sat dejectedly down next to Watson for comfort. She snuggled her puppy and told him how frustrated she was. Then she said, “You always come back from his house smelling so doggy.”

    “Oh,” I said, “he got peed on.”

    “What?”

    “Yeah. Three times.”

    “You couldn’t have told me that before I hugged him?!”

    “I was distracted by all your school stuff.”

  • Sleeping Arrangments

    I’ve started sleeping downstairs. I’m not sure how long I’ll be doing it for. It isn’t very comfortable, so I am looking into a sofa bed, or some other setup that works better mid-term than our curved sectional.

    Indy is okay. Hell, she is great, for her age, but the decline is inevitable. At this point she needs help to get up some of the time. Not every day, but some days, several times a day. The stairs are also a concern for me at this point, although she still chooses to go up and down them. I’ve put a gate up at the bottom and am restricting her stair activity. I especially don’t want her to take a tumble down them at night while we are sleeping, so I restrict her at night. She gets lonely though, and she has started needing to go out in the middle of the night sometimes. Overall, it just adds up to me feeling mentally better if somebody sleeps downstairs with her, despite having no first floor bedrooms. We definitely will not retire in this house.

    My preferred option for a sofa bed is the MÅNSTAD. In looking for reviews of it, I found this adorable video on YouTube. I love the dog.

    I think we’ll move a bed from the guest room downstairs and try dressing it up to look kind of like seating. It won’t be as good a solution as the MÅNSTAD, but will be far less expensive. That will save some money for more throw rugs, which also help Indy out. Hard floors are not easy on old dogs. I would like to walk a line between helping her out and keeping her company, without crapping up the look of the house so badly that it further depresses me, as if watching her age doesn’t depress me enough. meh

    She is still generally happy, and quite enjoys walks and being near her family. One thing she doesn’t enjoy is getting a bath, but she is in desperate need of one, so next week that needs to be crammed into the schedule. Today, there needs to be nail grinding.

    It sucks that her organ systems are doing so well while her nervous system is slowly failing.

    She is such a good dog.

  • Ice Ice Baby

    Our Watson is totally obsessed with ice cubes. He loves them. He comes running from anywhere at the sound of the ice dispenser. We joke that it is because he was born in Minnesota, in the middle of winter, but who knows, maybe it isn’t a joke.

    Whatever the reason, he absolutely loves ice. The only thing that limits the amount of ice that he would eat, appears to be us.

    My husband is a hobbyist mixologist. I am a lush  guinea pig  lush. A cocktail is poured in our house more evenings than not (for health reasons, of course).

    My husband goes over to the bar and picks up a shaker, and opens it as he crosses to the kitchen, where he fills the shaker with ice from the handy little dispenser in the freezer door. He then walks back over to the bar to start crafting a drink, and on the way he gives Watson an ice cube or two. Watson was always there to get one because he heard the ice dispensing.

    Except now, he shows up at the sound of the shaker being opened.

    Our dog is learning about bar tools.

    Last night, my husband offered Watson two ice cube treats, one in each hand. He just did it because one had slipped, and he’d grabbed it with the other hand. He leaned down with both hands held out, each offering an ice cube. Watson froze like an ice statue. His eyes darted back and forth looking at each ice cube, and he was unable to decide which precious hunk of ice he should eat. A puddle of drool appeared on the floor as he salivated in anxious anticipation of tasty(?) ice, but which one should he take? His poor puppy mind was blown.

    It was not purposeful, but of course now it is a great new game: offer Watson two things and see which one he picks. Hey, a little introspection and learning about your own priorities is a good thing, even if you are a dog. Be decisive, little Watson. Meditate. Know thyself.

  • Wagging Tales

    Things have been a little coney around here.

    First, Watson got neutered. He was sentenced to a cone for two weeks.

    One week later, it was time for Mindy to get spayed, and she was sentenced to a cone for two weeks.

    Watson was released from his cone, for less than a week, when he injured his foot, and got reconed.

    Mindy got deconed and had to wait for Watson to be free.

    They finally got to play together again.

    Then, Mindy hurt her side, and had to be reconed.

    So, they are back to not being allowed to play with each other again. This is especially sad for us humans, because their playdates really help to burn puppy energy. The energy they instead use to destroy things, like, cones for instance.

    Rather than tell you more boring things about my life, I shall instead link you to some of my favorite dog related stories.

    Mostly, I am gathering them together so it is easier for me to find them again in the future, but hey, maybe you’ll enjoy them too.

    Yeast Rolls

    Sweet Potatoes

    IQ Test

    Dogs in Elk (retold in carvings)

    Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts

  • Life With Dogs

    Leather Option on my friend’s car seats – $3000
    Water/Mud proof cover for the backseat to protect it from two Border Collies – $50
    Adoption fee for my adorable new puppy – $225

    Moment when Border Collies grrr-umph about puppy getting into THEIR car and puppy submissively urinates all over the uncovered front seat – Priceless

  • Playing Catch Up – Part II

    Last episode of Bitchy McBitcherson had me Cranky in Colorado, so we’ll be starting out there too.

    C R A N K Y

    Seriously, the damn breakfast room attendant was too busy chatting with another employee to keep the food stocked and when she wasn’t doing that, she was watching the TV, which was on way too loud.

    Anyhow, the husband and I chatted and debated between drive two harder days, or three easier days. We opted for the 3 easier days, so I picked a stopping point in 460 miles. We got on the road with a plan of being at the Robbers Roost Motel by about 8:30 PM.

    We stopped in Idaho Springs for a late lunch at Smokin Yard’s BBQ. This was good. Surprisingly good. This was, I’d enjoy eating there for dinner good, and random stop mid-roadtrip it was totally amazing.

    While we were sitting next to the window stuffing our faces full of barbecued beast, we noticed all this white stuff blowing sideways past the window. Ash? What? Snow?! Yes, snow. When we finished up and got back outside, it had stopped. We took the dogs down by the river behind the restaurant, and gave them some time to stretch their legs.

    Watson checking out the river near our BBQ lunch stop.

    Then we loaded our stuffed selves back into the cars and began driving.

    Within a couple of miles we were driving in a little bit of snow. A few more miles rolled by and we were driving in a full on snow storm.

    This was not part of the plan.

    Then, the plan exploded like Alderaan. You didn’t need to have any damn midi-chlorians to sense my spike in frustration levels. They closed the highway we were on, with no estimate of when they would reopen it. Our choices were to look for a room where we were, that would take two cats and two dogs, and eat the cost of the two rooms booked in Utah, or to take a long detour.

    We took the long detour. It only added an extra 100 miles to our drive, but it was 100 difficult miles through two lane winding roads. Our rate of progress was much slower. Plus, the place we were booked to stay had a cut-off time for check in, and we were racing the clock, very slowly, while trying to avoid hitting large herds of deer and elk.

    We finally made it back to Interstate 70 from our painfully scenic detour, and we were exhausted. Seriously, I had reached that state where I needed my passenger to talk to me about what was ahead on the road, because sometimes I could see two roads, and they weren’t going the same direction. I needed a bit of help following the one that was in the same reality that our vehicle was traveling in. Then it started snowing again. Hard. Snowing with big gusts of wind. The snow was mainly blowing straight into the windshield, but then the wind would send it swirling. It was like driving through a Star Tours hyperdrive special effect, and it was making me nauseous. It was at that moment that the cats decided they had truly had enough of each other, the car, and everything. They began screaming and hissing and trying to kill each other, right behind my head.

    Am I having fun yet?

  • Playing Catch Up – Part I

    So, a lot has been happening, and none of that has been blogging.

    I moved. I don’t live in Minnesota any longer. We moved back to Los Angeles.

    It has been pure hell, but all in all, it is a very good thing. I am glad we made the decision that we did. I’m glad we moved. It’s just that moving sucks.

    We knew for a while. My husband gave a month’s notice at work, but they didn’t want him to share the news right away, and while they can’t enforce that, we decided to give them some breathing room, and we kept it quiet for a reasonable amount of time. By the time it became more public, I was simply too busy to blog about it.

    Leaving Minnesota was difficult. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. I wanted to move back to California, but in the two and a half years we spent in Minnesota, we’d made some good friends. I’d also put a lot of time and heart into working with ACT V. Friends that I made, I can keep. That is what the internet is for. It’s very difficult to continue fostering for an organization I was very happy to be volunteering for, from 2000 miles away.

    Speaking of 2000 miles…

    ROAD TRIP.

    Ugh.

    Big. FAT. UGH!

    2 cars + 4 humans + 2 cats + 2 dogs + 2000 miles = STRESS

    To start things off, when we took the cars in for an oil change and a quick checkup, the mechanic discovered stuff wrong with one of them. Stuff that should be fixed before the road trip, and stuff that cost a bunch of dollars, because it always costs a bunch of dollars when the mechanic says “Well, we found…”

    This got us on our road trip later than originally planned.

    That, and our own insanity, but that’s another issue.

    Seriously, we left our rental house at 11:30 PM. I know, I know, logically it seems like it would make more sense to just sleep there one more night, but it we just needed to go, or we’d find more reasons to linger the next morning.

    So, we left our former home a total mess (because we knew that a wonderful friend had our back on dealing with the MN end), and we drove by the house of one of the ACT V people to deposit a final donation of blankets and detergent on their doorstep (much to the suspicion of some neighbors that saw us).

    Then we headed out of town…

    In a snow storm.

    I’m not kidding. It snowed on us on the way out of Minnesota. We pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion and got our butts to Iowa, so that we had left the state. There we stayed at Microtel Inn in Clear Lake that didn’t charge us any extra fees for the pets, and had a very nice and accommodating staff. Unfortunately it was also snowing and hailing on us in Clear Lake as we tried to unload the cars and get our butts into the room. In order to have enough space in the cars (because we needed room for 4 people, 2 traumatized cats, 1 large kitty litter, 1 cranky old dog, 1 puppy, food for all the critters, and a disturbing amount of wine, not for road trip consumption), we’d purchased a giant duffel bag to keep luggage in.

    It turns out it takes about an hour to get 4 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and all the stuff the 8 of them need for one stupid night, settled into a motel room.

    Did I mention the snowing and hailing? Oh, well also there was horrible biting, bitter, nasty, COLD wind. It was late April. We were dressed (and packed) for early spring. My husband got himself a minor case of frost bite on his fingers unloading the car that first night. Good times.

    The next morning I set out our plan for the day by finding a motel that would take the pets and plotting our route. I’d been planning originally on aiming for 500 miles a day, but decided that day to stretch and reserve us a room just over 600 miles away, because of our late start and our race to get to California before we got charged extra by the movers for not being able to meet them on time to get our ginormous amount of stuff back.

    So, we were aiming for Sterling, CO and Best Western Sundowner, which charged us an extra $20 to let our pets stay there ($12 for one animal, $20 for two or more), but had a larger room for the price than our other options, and after the first night, I knew we’d do better with a little extra space.

    We got on the road planning to be in our room by about 10:30 PM. Unfortunately, it was an extremely windy day, and we hadn’t really perfected our strapping the giant duffel bag to the top of the car technique yet. It took all day to get that technique down. In total, about 3 hours was spent in various parking lots, rest areas (BTW, Iowa has the nicest rest areas I have ever seen.), and wide shoulders, working on that technique. This meant we got to the motel about 1:30 AM.

    Watson at one of the rest area stops in Iowa.

    Remember the one hour to get everybody settled in the room thing? It takes even longer when you are on the second floor of a Best Western that doesn’t have an elevator. WTF? Also, their free wireless internet sucked frozen possum testicles, or as I like to call them, possnutsicles. I needed internet in order to send a very detailed email to a friend, including floorplans of our house that I’d edited to map out the placement of all of our furniture. The movers had made amazingly good (not good for us) time getting the load to CA, and the path of least resistance for dealing with that, was to have a friend manage the unloading of the stuff. Between the battling with the internet, the super slow connection, and the occasionally drifting off between keystrokes, I finally hit send and got to sleep at 5:30 AM. Then up early to battle the internet again in order to find the right stopping place for the night. By the time we were ready to head out, I was 31 flavors of cranky.

    Now we’ll pause for a message from our sponsors. Actually, we’ll pause so I can sleep. You’ll have to wait for another day to find out more about our road trip.