…is this the emergency…

ok, before i start this i want to make one thing perfectly clear ~ i love animals ~ all animals…. this was just tooo funny not to write about.

my old dog is in moderate renal failure and i have had to take him to the vet each morning this week for some treatments to try to flush out his kidneys and to determine how we will handle this from here.  he’s almost 15 years old and except for a little incontinence he is doing just fine…  i took him in to see if there was something they could give him for that because, honestly, i have never changed a diaper in my life and don’t really want to start now… so while at the vet we discuss doing a ‘senior wellness’ exam.  which is a good idea for anyone when they get to be old [like me for instance].  that is how they found the renal failure.

he has never liked getting in the truck, mostly because about 15 years ago now someone took him, his mother and 4 other puppies up the canyon and dumped them off ~ so ~ whenever i have had to take him anywhere it looks like i am trying to steal my own dog… i have to lift him up and shove him in the truck and then jump in and close the door before he can jump back out.  he doesn’t weigh quite as much as he used to so it is a little easier to lift him up, but no easier to get the door shut before he tries to get back out.  i have had to do this three days in a row now, but they are real good with him at the vet so he hasn’t freaked out too much, at least not after the door is shut and we start to roll…

my [his] appointments have been at 8:00 am just when the vet office opens, the treatments take about 10 minutes and the plan was for me to take him home and be to work by about 9:15 or 9:30.

yesterday morning the place was a little busy, someone was picking up their dogs that had been boarded, someone else had a dog in for a nail clipping.  simon was waiting patiently in the corner.  the door burst open and this 20 something girl comes in with something wrapped in a towel and she was crying, red-faced and quite upset.  the receptionist said ” is this the emergency”… “yes the chick”.  inside the towel was a teen age looking chicken, not your garden variety chicken, but one of those exotic looking birds.  at this point i am thinking i hope she doesn’t drop it and simon nails it right here…. it had already been attacked by something, turns out by another chicken.

after a converstion with the receptionist about money and when they would be able to look at the bird the tech transported the chick to the back of the hospital and shut the door, simon is still waiting patiently in the corner, but by now he has peed on himself and on the floor ~ i say “we have had an accident over here”… now i’m sure simon is not the first dog, nor the last to pee in the vet’s office but i still felt bad for him… we get it cleaned up and they put out the wet floor sign and i towel him off and while everyone is staring at us i look up and say “it sucks to get old!”

that sweet girl has calmed down a little bit and the office isn’t quite so busy. now i’m sure that if it was my chicken i would have been just as upset, i get very attached to animals very quickly. but the conversation that followed, just struck me as humerous and it was all i could do not to bust up right there.  the vet came out to get simon, while she was holding his leash she said, “the chick is standing up and is in stable condition”.

i waited for simon to come out, put him in the truck and brought him home… we had a conversation [well mostly me] about how i’m glad she didn’t drop the chick and he didn’t spring up and bite its face off or something.  i told someone at work this story and we laughed about if the chick didn’t make it would they have said it tasted like chicken?

 i was 45 minutes late for work…

i asked this morning and no one knew if the chick made it or not, it wasn’t still there and so i will ask again in the morning.  i hope it did  because i could tell that girl was attached to it and it was just a baby, i have had 15 years to get attached to simon and i’m praying that he makes it too!  we’ll just do what we can.

~edit~ 5-6-10  i had to stop at the vet to get simon’s perscription filled and i finally remembered to ask about the chicken.  it made it, she said they stitched up its little head and it looked like frankenchicken, but it was fine….

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… condemned …

last summer there was a tragedy in which three people lost their lives when a mud slide crushed their house.  

a couple of weeks ago i was reading in the paper where that property and the ones surrounding it were being sought after by the city.  the paper stated that a small apartment building just to the west of where the house had been destroyed had been condemned.  this made me sad.  that small apartment building was my home for 11 years. 

we moved over there after finishing out a contract on our first apartment and a boot from the landlord because we got a puppy.  that apartment was quite nice, fairly large, and fairly new.  the small apartment we moved into was old, small and not so much nice.  i remember sitting in the living room the day we moved in and thinking, this place is kind of a dump…  

that place had a wonderful three-tier yard,  large dog run at the top;  there was a spring running through the yard, a water fall, apple trees, pear trees, an apricot tree and lots of trails to explore on the hill behind, and the canal road to walk the dog.  it was in the middle of the city, but you could go into the back yard and just block out everything that was going on… it was private and shady and quiet.  it turned out to be a great place to live. 

we lived in the basement apartment, we always had good neighbors above us ~ randy and his cat boots, then jean and tammy and their dog dutchess, then mike and mike and their dog munchie, then todd and amanda. their little boy and their white poodle…  we lived downstairs ~ charlie and kim and our dog frodo and later my mom’s dog boots, our cats black cat, princess, monkey, barr, shoes, rocky and candy cat, plus a string of cats and kittens that were born and died and came and went over the years…  two of them were buried under some trees at the top of the back yard.

we went through three sets of landlords during that time, if you bought that apartment ~ we just sort of came with it…

we had lots of parties when we lived in that apartment ~ friends over all the time… birthdays and holidays and superbowls and weekends.  those were the days when the party would shut down at 11:30 for an hour and a half while we all watched saturday night live [when it was still good] and then we would turn the tv off and party some more.    

we drank a lot of kegs of micalob dark in the back yard of that apartment.  we ate a lot of gia’s godfather sandwiches in the kitchen.  there was always something going on.  our friend joel would come over most nights to watch tv.  we smoked a lot of fish outside, we made apple cider and apple sauce and i canned pears and apricots.  i had the most beautiful roses….  we had annual crappy and hushpuppie dinners with fish we caught at willard bay.

i have a zillion memories in that little apartment ~ these are some of the most entertaining ones, in no particular order, because some of my brain cells may have been fried in the 11 years we lived in that apartment…

after my mom died we inherited a small kerosene heater, it was about as big as a 5 gallon bucket and had a real flame with a screen over the front where the flame was.  it was nice for keeping the room you were in warm so the furnace didn’t have to run so much… one night we were sitting in the living room ~ we had this dorky cat, she had the i.q. of a soda cracker, but she was sweet… she LOVED the kerosene heater, she would prance back and forth in front it, just basking in the heat….  this particular night she decided to rub up against the thing, which would have been fine, but her tail went into the screen and lit up like a roman candle… the top half of her tail was seriously on fire.  i tried not to freak her out, because i didn’t want her to run under the bed or something and set the whole place on fire.  i got up and walked over to her and gently pushed her down on the floor and beat the crap out of  her tail…. fire out, she never even had a clue.

when frodo was about 10 years old charlie decided he was too old to go duck hunting any more.  the last time he had gone hunting we had to carry him outside for almost a week, because he was so stiff and sore he couldn’t walk.  so one morning charlie got up, loaded all the duck hunting paraphernalia in the truck and left a very pissed off dog home.  this was at around 4:30 am, because he was going to salt creek and that is about a two hour drive from where we lived.  i slept in… somewhere around 10:30 charlie came back home and i asked him what he was doing back so early… he said he had hit a goose and two ducks and couldn’t find them so he had come home to get the dog and go back out…. he loaded the dog in the truck and drove all the way back out there, came home later with 2 ducks and a goose.  i said [and still do to this day] if i had been frodo, i wouldn’t have gotten in the truck!

one year i decided to have a surprise party for charlie on his birthday… joel had the assignment of keeping him out fishing until 7:00 pm… i invited lots of people, friends, neighbors, sisters, brothers, just about everyone we knew… i had a giant 5 ft godfather sandwich from gia’s, made a cake, 9 or 10 kinds of beer and a giant bottle of wine.  i’m not making this up, but every single person i invited called to tell me they were going to be late! every single one… by 6:30 i was home alone with a giant bottle of wine, a giant sandwich and a birthday cake.  somehow, everyone got there before charlie did, but i was so nervous that nobody was going to get there i was pretty much tanked by the time charlie got home, but we all had a great time.

on the sunday of superbowl 10 we were getting ready to watch the game when my dad’s 15 year old tv (the only one we had ever had) decided to die.  charlie tore it apart got out his soldering iron and tried to fix it ~ somewhere during half time it started working, for about 5 minute and then died again… we did not see any of that game, and superbowl 10 is still the one that they compare all the others to…  a couple of years later we had tony and baker over to watch the superbowl and help us finish a keg that we had for a party the night before ~ this is four people finishing about half a keg of beer…. and i’m sure we gave it a hell of a try!

one saturday afternoon in the summer of ’85 or so, i wasn’t home and charlie was up on the canal road walking the dog, the hillside had given way and had filled the canal behind our house blocking the flow and causing the water to run down the hill and into the street below…   this caused a flood that went through several houses in the area and missed going down the back stairs of our apartment by about 5 inches.   the water and mud literally went around our apartment and out into the street.  the water continued to run until the canal was shut off at first dam…. for several days afterward the hillside continued to slough away and at one point the highway above was closed because it was feared the whole hillside would come down and bring the road with it….  water ran through the house just to the east of us for over a week.

last summer those people lost their lives in a mud slide that happened in an area that had a history of instability for over 25 years.  that also makes me sad.

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more random shit from my brain….

why is it that your hair always looks the best (1) right before you go to bed or (2) the day you are going to get it cut?

yesterday i was driving home and stopped at a stop light behind a white mini van (aka big mormon wagon), the van contained a dad and several children…  there was a bumper sticker on the van.  white with red letters it said “I ♥ Beaver” ** ~ well that’s obvious dude!

not that this is any of my business  (please note the name of this blog) but, i like sandra bullock, i like jesse james, i’m pretty sure that they like each other ~ i seriously hope they work things out get back together…

one important thing president obama has accomplished ~ my white trash republican friends and family have finally stopped emailing me crap about bill clinton….

i had to go buy more peeps yesterday, i ate all the ones i bought about a month ago… if i give up sweets for lent i don’t have this problem they last until easter, but this year i gave up beer. …on a related note, it is wrong to have beer for breakfast on easter??

my friend annika lent me the “sookie  stackhouse” novels… yea, yea, i know; more vampire porn ~ i read the first three and went to start the forth and it wasn’t there… it’s titled  dead to the world  and i went to borders yesterday and used my 30% off coupon to purchase it (don’t want to read vampire porn out of order, might confuse myself)… so, annika, FYI,  if you missed this one, it will be with the others when you get them back.

how many commas can YOU correctly use in one sentence??

craig ferguson is hysterical.

** full disclosure ~ beaver mountain is the local ski resort, so it’s entirely possible that white van dude is an avid skier.  but i totally convinced that whoever came up with those bumper stickers knew exactly what he was doing when he had them printed. ♥

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