grrgoyl

I wanted to take a better picture of my little Lulu this weekend, but sadly my phone battery was too low and it wouldn't let me. I'm not sure how much longer she'll be at the kennel, since she's all better (except for a gaping hole in her throat that must just be a missing layer of skin because no blood comes out of it) and there are lots of employees in the hospital who have fallen equally in love with her and would happily adopt her. Tery finds it hard to believe that such an affectionate dog doesn't have anyone searching for her, but sometimes (most of the time) people are fuckwads and abandon perfectly sweet animals for the flimsiest, most selfish of reasons.

Speaking of blood (and bodily fluids in general), this weekend I got to run the gamut. I had a heeler, Ty, on IV fluids. When I unhooked him to take him outside, I stupidly forgot to cap off the end of the catheter line. In my defense (which is a phrase I seem to use quite a lot), unlike the average vet tech who works with IV catheters 10 times a day, I do it so infrequently that when I am faced with a dog on fluids I kind of freak out on the inside and tend to forget important things. By the time we came back in, he was bleeding out of the line. Furthermore he had already peed in his kennel (obviously dogs on IV fluids need to pee a lot more) so I needed to set up a new pen for him. Ty happily wandered around, sniffing the other dogs and dripping blood everywhere. By the time I finished and had him all hooked up again, the place looked like an abbatoir, the floor and my scrubs covered with blood (okay, I exaggerate a tiny bit, or else the dog might have died. It wasn't a life-threatening amount of blood, but it was spread everywhere). Another lesson learned (hopefully for good) the bloody hard way. Pun intended.

I also had an older Sheltie (Haji) who wolfed down his breakfast too fast and immediately threw it all back up again in a big steaming pile. Plus a kitten diagnosed with a common syndrome, ADR (which I am told stands for "Ain't Doing Right") who needed a fecal sample taken. Kitten poo is enormously stinky, considering their tiny size. Thank god Lulu has gotten over her pus-oozing stage or I would have thrown in the proverbial and literal towel.

However, I finally had my dream come true of a weekend of very well-behaved dogs that didn't bark all night long. So naturally instead I had to listen to the clothes dryer continue its downward spiral of death. Tery was forced recently to replace the decades' old washer, which would spin out of balance every 14 seconds if you tried washing a blanket and towards the end would practically walk out the door if you didn't sit on it and bodily hold it down. In the three days it took to replace it (because naturally it waited until the weekend to give up the ghost) we amassed about 12 garbage bags of dirty laundry. Now there's a sleek new High Efficiency model in there beside the decades' old dryer. The dryer has developed this very high squealing sound that I would compare to nails on a chalkboard, except that sound has never particularly bothered me that much. Occasionally the squeal is mixed with an even higher metallic shriek that sounds for all the world like I've got a dinner service for 4 tumbling around in there. As much as this sound puts my teeth on edge, I can't begin to imagine what it translates into for the poor dogs with their super sensitive hearing. But the batch this weekend never so much as whimpered. I made sure to thank them for a quiet night the next morning, again as if any of them speak English.

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Today I got to wreak sweet, sweet revenge on dchatonly. I received an email from Amazon offering me the opportunity to leave feedback. "Oh, are you SURE you want to know what I think?" was my first response. I kept it fairly levelheaded, because no one wants to read a string of obscenities. I tried filing my claim to get my money back but that has to wait until the 12th, for some reason. None of this fazes me anymore though because on Saturday I received my DVDs finally, from a seller on Half.com for roughly the same price and shipped in only 4 days. Everyone in my house breathed a collective sigh of relief and I spent almost the entire day in bed Sunday watching them.

The best part about not catching the eps on TV the first time is when I get the DVDs they're almost all new to me. Season 8 is worth the purchase price due to including what I consider the funniest ep of the entire series, "Woodland Critters Christmas" with the devil-worshipping squirrels and chick-a-dees. Almost as funny was "Good Times with Weapons," when they pretend to be anime ninjas at Butter's expense. Or was it as funny? When I watched it right after waking up (again, in that crucial post-third shift period when I love the world and everything seems fabulous to me) I laughed until I cried. Later in the evening I made Tery watch it, and some of its charm seemed to have vanished. Truly not as funny as I first thought, or had all the laughter been leached from the room by Tery's black hole of stoicism? I'm still not really sure.

Wow, these last entries have been more pointless than normal. Perhaps I should adopt the tag my friends