Showing 21 - 30 of 431 posts found matching keyword: poodles

And the first dog to bite me in 2022 is not the puppy but Dad's Rambo. Admittedly, it was partially my fault for having the temerity to attempt drying off his back legs after a long walk on a damp afternoon. He was probably sore. He *is* 12 years old.

I could be mad, I suppose. He bit down hard, leaving pretty good puncture wounds on both sides of my right forearm. It certainly hurts. (Honestly, it hurts a lot.)

I wish he had politely said, "please don't do that, it hurts," but he's never been much for manners. Dad did name him Rambo for a reason. The warning is in the name.

But there's no point in kicking the dog, literally or figuratively. What's done is done: lesson learned, muzzle ordered. And frankly, given the choice, I'd rather have a dog bite puncture wound than COVID.

That said, it's not the great start to 2022 I was hoping for. (And I sure hope it didn't give Henry any ideas!)

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

Get the hell out of my chimney, fat man!

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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:

The fun World Wide Web of yesteryear is still out there hiding under the accumulated detritus of Captialism

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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Meet Henry.

He's a dog of few words

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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I had to change the latch to our picket fence gate because Scarlett learned that she could put one paw on the handle and push to let herself out of the yard.

My irritation at having to track down a muddy escaped poodle was tempered by my appreciation that she learned how to escape just from watching us come and go.

Never underestimate a determined poodle.

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  • Awoke to a call to repair a broken door at our commercial rental property
  • Bent the jack on my aunt's new lawnmower trailer as I was swapping her two trailers
  • Smashed my thumb with a sledgehammer while trying to "repair" said jack
  • Nearly wrecked my car changing lanes in front of a tiny Smart car on the way to the hospital
  • Visited Dad in the hospital to find him once again weak and confused (he was readmitted on Saturday because he couldn't breathe well... and he still can't breathe well)
  • Failed to properly latch the gate and allowed Dad's poodle Scarlett to escape my yard
  • Struck in the eye by a falling acorn
  • Watched Matt Amodio lose on Jeopardy!

That was my Monday. I don't think I'll be getting out of bed on Tuesday. I don't want to find out what falling thing hits me in the eye next. It'd probably be a plane.

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2020 killed my dog.

July, R.I.P.

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.

In happier times

I loved my girls.

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Good news! July's back and legs are responding to treatment, and she's walking much better.

Bad news! July is now having seizures (two in the past three days).

I'll keep you posted.

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July's health problems continue. At least this time it's not cancer (we think).

She's been getting wobbly in the back legs for the past few months, a condition that we've been attributing to old age. (She's almost 15!) However, on Monday she abruptly lost the ability to coordinate her back feet, began dragging her back knuckles, and could no longer get up from a laying position. Or even a sitting position.

Her doctor agreed that this seemed abnormal and took x-rays. He ultimately diagnosed, and I quote, "likely intervertebral disc disease at L5-6, spondylosis at L7-S, mild hip dysplasia."

What did you have for dinner?
"Spondylosis"? Uh, yeah. I see that now.

She's now on a prescription of steroids, muscle relaxers, and spine massages every 8 hours, which she has responded to quite well. In fact, she's already learned her med schedule and asks for her pills on time. (She loves Pill Pocketsâ„¢!)

The biggest difficulty of her condition comes from her continued refusal to let me out of her sight. This has always been the case. Despite her wobbly legs, she recently fell down the stairs rather than let me be out of her sight for a whole minute. (Could that be how she damaged her back? Silly poodle.)

So, for the foreseeable future, I'll be carrying her upstairs for food and meds, outside to do her business, and everywhere else I need to go, including into my bedroom when I work and sleep and into my bathroom to lie on the bathmat when I take a shower. She's such a diva.

Not that I'm really complaining. It could be worse, which probably isn't something I should say in 2020.

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To be continued...

 

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