Last week, I said goodbye to my perfect spaniel. After I wrote the post outlining the details of his cancer, I was flooded with messages of support and love. Those notes gave me so much comfort. Both in knowing that I’m not alone with the immense struggle that is deciding when to release a beloved pet, but also that because everyone echoed that I’d know when it was time… and that it was probably not too soon. I was completely…
A lot happened in my blogging absence this summer. Some of it was fantastic, but a lot of it was not. I promise to update on happier things soon, but something that’s especially been weighing on my mind this week is Eliot’s health. I got Eliot, the most beautiful dog I’ll ever known, for my 21st birthday. All of my other dogs have been rescues, but Eliot is the embodiment of my deep rooted love for purebred dogs. In his…
Although I expected conversation to spring out from the post I published yesterday about flying with my large ESA dog (I mean I thought there were things to discuss… that’s why I wrote it!), I admit that there were both more total and more negative comments than I expected. Usually I try to respond to people one-off in my comments section, but felt this subject deserved a its own follow-up post. After my experience flying, I felt pretty uneasy about…
Both of my dogs are technically Emotional Support Animals, which are similar but different from a service dogs. An emotional support animal or ESA, is not trained to perform any function. Instead, they provide emotional support (it’s almost as if the title tells the purpose…) to their humans who suffer from psychological disorders of some kind. If you’ve read this blog for a long time, you’re probably not surprised to hear I have a psychological disorder… and though I probably…
Today I need help from my reader hive mind, because y’all are smarter than me on almost every topic. See, I have a problem with my best girl, Pascale. Ever since moving to California, I’ve had to adjust the dog’s schedule completely. Pascale is the one who’s taken this adjustment the hardest. Previously, she was used to a big backyard that she spent about 1 hour in in the morning unsupervised and another hour or so in the evening when…
In the past six months, Eliot has turned into a much older dog than he was a year ago. Earlier this year, he lost his hearing seemingly overnight. I feel like one week he was coming when I whistled, and the next I was trying to teach him hand signals for “come.” He’s not the first deaf dog I’ve had. BT couldn’t hear or see for the last year of her life, maybe more. Though Eliot losing his hearing didn’t bother…
I’ve written about The Little Prince on this blog before. I wrote about how Tim’s crooked path led me to discover the book (as many other things I’ve discovered), and how it helped grieve the loss of him. The words in that little children’s book gave a different meaning to death, and I needed them at the time. I keep them with me, but that’s not all I took from the book. There’s a passage in The Little Prince with the prince…
This morning on Facebook I was nominated by a friend to do one of those 5 day Facebook posting challenges. Now I typically hate those kind of things, but this one was about dogs… and well, I love dogs. Because I cannot follow directions, I modified the rules to suit my fancy. As I typed up probably my longest Facebook status ever, I thought no one is ever going to read all of this… if only there was a platform for long…
Getting bluebonnet pictures were really important to me this year. Even though I’ve admired the amazing wildflowers in Texas for seven years now, I’ve never actually taken any kind of bluebonnet pictures. Maybe that’s because of this hilarious tumblr that makes fun of people squatting in the bluebonnets for pictures, but mostly I’ve just been lazy. Originally, the plan was to meet my roommate at a little patch of bluebonnets by our house and take some photos of the dogs….
For reasons that escape me, I haven’t expressed much on this blog how obsessed I am with pugs. Let me catch you up to speed – I’m smitten with them. I follow a multitude of celebrity pugs on social media, the most notable being of course Doug the Pug. I also have a Doug the Pug calendar by my desk at work that one of my best friends got me for my birthday, because hey — my people know me well!…
Last year I did my best to skip Christmas. While I attended holiday gatherings with my family, my heart wasn’t in it. As a lifelong lover of all things holly jolly, I can’t tell you how weird this was for me. Weird, but understandable. The goal of Christmas 2015 was survival. This year, the stakes are higher. Grief has stolen so much from me that I’m not going to let it take my holiday spirit. I’m not back to my…
It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red along with some resentment I’d held in for a few weeks, which was not helped by the sight of little nameless things pierced with toothpicks on the tables, or by talk that promised to be nothing if not small. But I’d consented to come, and I knew what part of the house their animals would be sequestered, whose company I loved. What else can I say,…