Here’s my Raymond with all his stitches. He had to spend the night at the vet because he was still snoozing yesterday at five when they closed. He’s fine. All cleaned up and they said I did a nice job with the butterfly bandages over the weekend — poor guy really took a gouge out of himself. He’s very happy to be home and is in his crate in the other room loudly licking at those parts of the wound he can reach. Pet owners may order also order products like a dog turmeric supplement that can further help improve…
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It’s been quite a weekend here at LivingSmall. First, the gimpy dog has not recovered very well — turns out that his achilles tendon is falling apart, and his “good” leg isn’t really good enough to support his weight — it’s full of arthritis in the hock. So I think he’s having more surgery on Thursday to repair the achilles tendon, and then we’re going to have to order him some braces to support the poor arthritic hocks. With any luck, this will at least get him back on his feet and allow him to get around the yard and…
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It was a gorgeous weekend here — blue skies, yellow leaves falling off trees, sunshine, snow on the peaks. It was so gorgeous that even though we’d done a nice hike early in the day, I couldn’t stay home yesterday afternoon so I took Raymond for a little bike ride. It’s our newest trick — I get on the Happy Bike with Ray on the leash and off we go. He runs alongside with that rocking-horse run that really happy dogs get. The trick though, is that I need to keep reminding him to “be careful” and to “watch out”…
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It’s fall in Montana which means that the bears are on the move — there’s been a black bear down in the creekbed woods behind the dog park where we walk and last night Raymond came home covered in bear shit. Bad dog! Bad dog got washed with cold water from the hose in the backyard. Bad dog got washed with the stinky leftover orange-rosemary shampoo that he hates — I keep hoping this will deter him from rolling in stinky dead things, however, I seem to be hoping in vain. I haven’t seen the bear, but we’re all having…
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I went out last night, and when I came home — Raymond was missing! He wasn’t in the basement, or in his crate, or in the yard. He was gone! Owen was home, wagging his butt and licking my leg as though to say “I don’t know where he went! He’s gone!” I’m not sure how he got out of the yard — sometimes the front gate doesn’t close properly, but it was closed when I got home. And the back gate was also latched. My hunch is it was the front gate, and then Owen somehow closed it by…
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We’re knackered here at LivingSmall — the Real Job is a little crazy — back soon.
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The weather turned cold and grey today — and after our walk/swim, poor Owie was so shivery that he needed to be swaddled in a towel. Some hunting dog, eh?
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People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…
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I went off for my annual doctor’s appointment about a month ago, and while all was well, that scale thing had crept up to a truly frightening figure. My clothes were still fitting pretty well, but shall we say, my face was a wee bit more full than I’d like — and of course, just as I was realizing that middle-aged spread was indeed happening to me, work got really busy, the bears got into their annual fall frenzy, the out-of-state hunters with their scary high-power rifles arrived, and somehow we just weren’t getting out for our afternoon walks in…
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Poor Owie — we came home from a very joyful morning walk today and Owen climbed into a corner of the couch and curled up. Then I noticed something sticking out of his eye! An eye that was sort of swollen and puffy. There was a piece of cheatgrass sticking out of his eye! Cheatgrass is this terrible stuff that grows everywhere around here — it’s a grass seed, with a long tail on it, but it’s barbed with gazillions of little barbs and it’s famous for worming its way into dogs skins, and infecting their blood. So, I pulled…