Family pe[s]ts

Earlier this week one of my grandmothers passed away (my stepfather's stepmother), so my parents drove up to Minneapolis for the funeral and left SY and I to take care of the two pets.

The family dog is eleven years old, and is reputed to be quite lacking in intelligence. I don't really like him, and haven't liked him ever since he chewed up a shark tooth necklace I bought in 1995. Though he no longer loses control of his unirnary system whenever someone comes home, he is still quite an irritation to all who know him.

In spite of his faults, I've been feeling a bit more sympathetic towards him. He recently had a toe removed due to a tumorous growth, and has been going around with a sock on his paw and a cone on his head to keep him from licking it. I may loathe him, but he's still the family dog, and besides -- who wouldn't feel a bit of pity?

The cat is about fifteen, and while not stupid, is getting really crotchety in his twilight years. I've always liked him (in part because I got to name him), but he's lost a lot of favor with my mother since he began opting not to use the litter box. He lost a point with me the other day by jumping from dining room table onto the kitchen counter, thereby knocking over and breaking a wine glass. Guess who got to clean that up. Yay.

Tuesday was a worse day for pet clean-ups. I missed his normal feeding time of 5:30 am, and some time before 9:00 he'd managed to tip over a plastic container of cookies and bread that I'd put on a counter the night before. By the time we got up, he'd eaten everything.

One of my jobs was to change the sock on his paw every morning and evening. But just as I took off his sock and reached over to grab the new one, he got up and urped on the carpet.

That got him sent out to the carpeted porch, but I didn't want to send him outside without something to protect his foot. That changed after he heaved up five more piles. It didn't matter anymore how wet it was outside, he was going to have to bear it.

I also gave him as much water as he could drink, as I noticed he'd throw up everytime he drank. (I wasn't going to be fooled by his good mood and let him in only to be surprised again.) This caused him to empty his stomach contents four more times on the lawn. By the time four o'clock rolled around, they whole place was like a Slip & Slide, but I figured he'd finished so I let him back into the newly cleaned porch.

So although he's still a dog and probably hasn't learned a thing, at least one of us learned our lesson from that. Everything even remotely interesting to a dog goes inside a cabinet or on top of the refrigerator.