I think it's safe to say that Henry enjoyed his first Christmas.

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Sometimes you go looking for something on the web and you find it.

Sometimes you don't find what you were looking for but you do find something far, far better. Something like this:

Twitter helpfully describes this image in their version of a 404 Page Not Found response as "A primped poodle with a bow in its hair sitting in a chair like a human."

Well, of course! How else is a poodle supposed to sit in a chair? (Perhaps like this. Or maybe like this. I guess my point here is there's no wrong way to seat a poodle.)

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from "The Canine and the Crooks," Superman #19, November/December 1942

You tell 'em, Superman!

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I recently heard that 12 months after getting a new dog, owners claim to be happier than they were before. That's obviously true. After a year, the worst of the puppy behavior is in the rear view mirror. I expect to be happier this time next year, too.

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The view of the sky on the way home from Henry's first vet visit:

(Ok, not actually his first visit. We know he'd seen a vet at least twice before he came to me: once for theoretical puppy shots and once to stitch up a hole in his gums where he chewed on a fishing lure and got dragged around the yard on the line by a cruel golden retriever. But those vet records were contradictory and confusing, and it's not entirely clear what shots he did or did not get. So my vet started over at the beginning. Henry didn't seem to mind.)

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Meet Henry.

I told my family I was in the market for an adult female rescue standard poodle. My aunt found a 7-month-old male. But he is a rescue standard poodle.

One-out-of-three sounds like my kind of odds. I think I'll keep him.

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Today we put down my father's 7-year-old poodle Scarlett because we discovered that cancer had eaten her liver. She'd been lethargic for the past week, had stopped eating, and at the last, her skin and eyes turned yellow. But she didn't complain. She wasn't that kind of dog.

Scarlett's last haircut, Oct 5, 2021

Scarlett loved chasing squirrels, walkies (especially when she was stalking a squirrel), belly rubs, and escaping through open gates to chase the squirrels who wouldn't stay inside her fence, probably in that order.

Scarlett wasn't my dog, but she kind of was. And I miss her. Even the trouble.

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Time falls back tonight, which is great. What's not great is I am supposed to be watching my aunt's dogs this weekend. How do I explain to them that they have to go an extra hour between their scheduled trips outside?

Even dogs hate time change.

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2020 killed my dog.

July beat cancer for the first time in 2016 after having her toe amputated. She beat it a second time when she had a portion of her ear removed in 2019. This past July, she had a mammary tumor removed. Three times seems to be the limit.

In late October, she got wobbly in the legs. We crossed our fingers that it was a spinal problem. She initially responded to treatment, but she took a turn for the worse about two weeks ago when she lost even the ability to stand with assistance. It was downhill from there.

So long as she was lucid and had an appetite, I felt it was my duty to support her however I could — I couldn't justify killing my dog simply because she had become inconvenient. But I realized late last night that we had probably reached the end of the line. (I'll save the gory details except to say that cancer can be a real bitch.) I had her euthanized this afternoon, and she died in my arms.

For the better part of the past decade, July had been my shadow. Her sister, Victoria, wanted to be near me; July *needed* to be near me. She followed me everywhere and complained to whoever would listen when she couldn't see me. I can't blame her. Who else was she going to get to take her for walkies or hand her a slice of pizza?

I already feel like I'm missing something when I walk into a room and don't hear the tappa-tappa of toenails trailing behind me. I keep looking for baby, and she's not there anymore and never will be again. That will take some getting used to.

Thanks to Kelley for bringing her into my life and thanks to Mom for being a substitute Walter when necessary over the years. Thanks to her vet, Jeff, for helping me keep her around as long as we did. (Fourteen years is a good, long life for a standard poodle!) And especially thanks to July for doing your best to make 2020 bearable for as long as you could.

I loved my girls.

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