Since I don't have a very large readership, and I have only seen this on one other blog, I'm going to award it to myself. I really just love the picture.
And just for fun, to keep the party rolling, I'm also going to award it to Janice and Stacey and Yvonne . I'd also like to gift my occasional commenter at Happydoghouse, but I can't remember who belongs to that email address! (If you know/remember or if it's you, please send me a reminder so I can link properly!)
Pit bulls don't deserve the bad rap.
Can we please, please, please move beyond the demonization of certain breeds? John Woestendiek gives us several famous examples of rhetoric that simply must go.
I only caught a bit of Palin's speech before I couldn't take any more. I'm the eternal pessimist, and I hope to Dog I'm wrong, but I'm afraid McCain's choice was a brilliant move. How can anyone not support her? She's a working mother who fired the Alaska governor's house chef so she could prepare her own meals, she's a special-needs-children's advocate, she's against waste and corruption, she's for ethics, and heck, as an Alaska governor she's well-versed in international politics, particularly with Canada and Russia. And that list doesn't even cover all of her redeeming qualities for a VP option. I'd even be willing to bet she'll do better in debates against Biden than many are willing to credit her.
I mean, how bad can it really be to fire people who don't agree with you or do what you tell them? Don't they serve at the pleasure of the mayor/governor anyway? And a pregnant 17-year old? Well, she's "chosen" (like there was actually a choice in her case) to keep the baby and is going to marry the father. "Yes, we have dirty laundry," Palin is saying, "but we are acting within a family values framework given the circumstances."
I'll admit that I'm a sucker for patriotism. Not the BS "if you criticize the president you are a traitor to America" patriotism we've been seeing for the past 8 years, but the real patriotism of "America really is a good place to be." I want to be proud of my country again; I want to want to live here, rather than wishing I were somewhere else because the government is not what I want it to be. So, yeah, I teared up when I first heard Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American."
And here's another one, another song that gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, I can get out from under the shell of cynicism I've erected. Hope that maybe politicians aren't all bad, and that maybe someone can do something to reverse the damages our current administration has created.
I loved this strip:
As with many pups, Remy is a destuffer/desqueaker. But she loves it nonetheless. And even when a toy is technically "dead," she still plays with the raggedy, empty shell. When she first gets a new squeaky toy, it has a specific name: "Go get the hedgie!" or "Go get the elephant!" But once it's dead, it turns into a generic "thing": "Go get a thing!"
And she always knows what to bring us!
Enjoy the drunken safari, courtesy of Cute Overload.
Today's edition of DoT features other dogs we run into at the park. These pics are from the past two trips we've had to the river park.
This guy fishes for minnows. He spends minutes at a time watching for them and sticking his nose in. I don't know how successful he is, but he's sure cute to watch.
I just loved her markings. She's a younger pup, and wanted to play with everyone. Here she was playing with a person who was skipping rocks. It doesn't matter that the rock-skipper was skipping rocks for her pup...this little charmer wanted to play.
These two are siblings. The younger little golden has really bonded to her older sister. The lab kept chasing the ball, and the golden just needed to be with her. See the real dogpaddle in the first picture? The golden was a failed foster from RAGOM, the same rescue group Remy came from. She was apparently a puppy mill rescue, and is super-shy around people. Her foster mom decided just to adopt her rather than traumatize her with going to yet another home. Her foster mom also asked me what it was like having two big dogs...I told her my philosophy of always having at least 2 dogs so I'll never be dogless, but that I don't like 3. Having 2 is fine, and any number over 3 is fine. But with three dogs, someone always gets left out, no matter what the activity is.
Size is everything to some kids. The stickless lab in the first shot just wanted to play too, but the stick-owner would have none of it. My kids, in picture 2, just wonder what the heck he's doing with a stick that big.
I only got one shot of this one, because he left the water as I was gearing up for a second shot. He had been laying down, and was so clearly enjoying just...being.
I had my proof yesterday. I didn't document it because my BP is high enough already, thank you very much.
My BP has recently risen for my past few dr appts, so my dr wants me to take additional readings between visits to monitor what it's doing. When I picked up a prescription yesterday, I sat down at the BP machine. I had already witnessed a little boy running crazily around the pharmacy area; he was unconvincingly reprimanded by grandma at one point.
Sure enough, the reading was still in the low end of the high range. Drat. On a whim, I decided to hang around a little while and try retaking it. The hubby says he can reduce his BP by deep breathing exercises, so I sat down and did that a little bit. Then went back to the machine to find little brat and only slightly older sister being encouraged by grandma to mess around with the BP machine and nearby massage chair. I decided to risk it and checked my BP again...MUCH higher than the first reading. Even with the relaxing and deep breathing.
How do you get an accurate BP reading when you're worried about your BP?
Just thought I'd list a few interesting (?) blogs I've stumbled upon recently. My emotions on some of them are mixed; on one hand, they're just plain amusing. Good for wasting time at work or for realizing that you're not alone in terms of dealing with stupid people. On the other hand, it's really sad/scary how many stupid people there are....
(The Customer is) Not Always Right
Conversations related to stupid patrons/clients/customers, etc.
Cake Wrecks
"When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong."
Fail Blog
"Fail, Pwned and Owned pics and vids"
I took a vacation day yesterday, and the kids and I went to the river park. This is Remy's favorite place in the whole world (well, any body of water is....). Two and three weeks ago, she barely made it down and back (there's a 1/2 mile hike down to the river, then a 1/2 mile hike back up to the car, plus another 1/2 mile or so along the beach down and back). That was before the meds.
I am still very worried about her being on Deramax because of liver and kidney issues, but man, is it ever working for her. She's a whole new dog. She was running and laughing and leaping and playing yesterday like I haven't seen her do for a while. It just filled my heart to see her so happy again.
In this shot (I don't have Adobe Lightroom accessible at this very moment, so I apologize for the crappy photo), you can see her taking off for the last leg to the river; Payton is just ahead to the left, partially obscured by a tree. This is pretty much the point they abandon me and just get to the water as fast as possible. This is the first time she raced to the water, which is one of the ways I knew something was not quite right.
A guy who passed me soon after the kids raced by him commented that I'd never be able to get them back up the hill at the rate they were going. :-)
The river had been pretty high fairly late in the summer, so we took a while before going down there this year. Now, though, it's actually pretty low; it seems like we maybe had a total of 4 inches of rain all July (that's probably grossly inaccurate, but just saying how it feels). Remy had to go pretty far out at some points to actually be able to swim rather than just wade.
As I mentioned, water is just about Remy's favorite thing. She'd have a very difficult choice if she had to choose between people or water.... On our way back up the beach, she decided to do some swimming while Payton and I walked. She swam with us for about 50 yards. I call her my little river otter (thanks Kristi!).
And of course, once she gets out of the water, she has to give a good shake. I'm going to try to get a little animation going, but for now, this was my favorite "shake, shake, shake" shot. She never chooses anyplace convenient...if there are people around, she usually finds someone to shake on or snuggle up against. In this case, I was hoping to get some fun rainbow/spray in sunlight shots, but of course, she had to shake in the shade.
Nonetheless, both kids had a great time, and my little Remy girl was still able to move yesterday afternoon/evening. We'll definitely be looking into holistic medicine as time goes on, and I want to drop her down to a more "as needed" dosage of meds, but just seeing her enjoying herself like that again was so wonderful.
(The kids wanted to sign off on this post...I'll let you figure out which print belongs to which pup.)
I've been sitting on this one for a while because it's a more complex issue than most of the books I read. And I still don't have a full review ready. But for an additional take on some of the ideas surrounding Winograd's book, visit John Woestendiek's blog, Mutts.
This woman was at the vet when I was there with Remy. She had one of her cats with her. We were chatting about the three super-cute little black kittens available for adoption when she mentioned that she had a litter at home...babies having babies was the essence of her chatter.
At the same time, there was a young man (mid-late twenties) with an adorable yellow lab puppy. The pup had been going through diarrhea and vomiting phases, which isn't atypical for pups...but it appeared that this young man was a first time puppy owner, so was concerned. This wasn't the problem; the problem was the pup is 7 weeks, and he'd had him for about a week, meaning weaned at 6 weeks. And he got him from "a guy over in ..... " Um, can you say backyard breeder?
I'll probably get some hateful comments from this one, just based on the title, but I think this is an important enough issue to risk that:
Meeses in sprinklers
Just a quick peek at YouTube seems to indicate that meese love sprinklers. If I lived where meese were around, I'd keep the sprinklers going just for them. :-)
I just had Remy in to the vet this afternoon to discuss arthritis and long-term pain management. Too bad it isn't arthritis; my little Remy-girl appears to have fairly severe hip dysplaysia.
I probably should have had her examined many years ago...she has always had a slightly stiff-legged walk, but she has always been so healthy and happy, that it didn't really appear to be an issue. Recently, though, any extended exercise (as in, "around the block" extended) has wiped her out afterward. She's been "talking" more when she lays down, and we can definitely see a struggle when she gets up from a sitting or lying position.
For now, we're going to try pain-management for the next month. If that works, we'll probably just stay with that; she's around 8-9, and finances aside, I really would hate to put her through a surgery. The best surgical option is the total hip replacement, but we'd be looking at about $3500 per hip. After that, the next best option appears to be femoral head excision, but they usually recommend that for smaller dogs. Once we get her weight down a little (all of the training classes and treats have added pounds to her), she will be only slightly over the general recommended maximum weight for that, so it may be a viable option (we didn't discuss $ for anything else).
She's on 50mg of Deramaxx per day, which is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pain killer in the same family as Rimadyl. The problems associated with NSAIDs, though, can be loss of liver functions, so we will need to keep a close eye on that. We've also started her on a regimine of glucosamine/chondroitin, but it usually takes around 6 weeks to get into the system. While I can't be 100% certain, I do think I've seen a difference even since I gave her the medication this afternoon.
I'm including a link to a fairly good article I found this evening that discussed hip dysplaysia and options in more detail. The only REAL experience I've had was with Baron when I was much younger, and he was much younger. I've never really had to treat an older dog before, so I'm sure I'll be doing a lot more research in the next few days/weeks/years.
