Week in Review

[kate_nepveu]

Wednesday, our first full day back from vacation, we had the exterior house painting finished and more bookcases (the last, we don't have any more room) delivered. Work had been pretty quiet while I was away. Other than that, mostly everything else notable about the week was dog stuff.

We picked her up Wednesday morning and she was fine, very happy to see us; so happy, in fact, that she wiggled extravagantly, licked us both, and then peed on the floor. Whoops. Oddly, my first reaction was, "She's so small"—the friends we stayed with over the weekend had a Rhodesian Ridgeback, i.e., a dog bred to kill lions. It was over a hundred pounds and not at all wide, just very tall and long. Somehow my default for "dog" had become reset to "enormous," which Emmy is certainly not.

On Saturday, she rolled in some dead stuff (ah, dogs) and so we headed to a pet supply store to get dog shampoo. We had her nails clipped while we were there, and she met a number of dogs without freaking out too much, which was good. She was very patient through her bath; it probably helped that we have a detachable showerhead, which speeds the process. Once or twice she put her paws up on the bathtub edge, in a very "May I leave now, please?" manner, but didn't fuss when we put her back on all fours. She's such a good dog. We gave her a new toy afterward as a reward, and it took her a full twenty frantic minutes to rip the squeaker out.

Today she was sick in the afternoon, vomiting several times over a couple of hours. Her behavior was otherwise pretty much the same, so we think she just ate something in the yard that upset her stomach. We're fasting her (is that a proper verb use? I don't think so, but "starving" sounds so bad) until tomorrow to let her stomach settle, as recommended, and we'll see how she does.

[ Chad just gave her a new toy, as the pig-frisbee from the very first night home finally disintegrated in an unsafe way. It's a long fuzzy thing with a rattle inside, and she is just going to town on it, prancing all around shaking it to hear it rattle, pushing it on the floor with her nose, the whole nine yards. She's just absurdly cute. ]

[ETA: twenty minutes later, by my system clock, she's got the squeaker out from one end and has about half the stuffing pulled out. The rattle is down the other end and she seems to be having some trouble getting to it; we'll see how long that takes. Definitely talented in a very specific and useless way . . . ]

Oh, by the way: if a recipe for sauce calls for an egg yolk, do not use an whole egg because you misremembered the recipe. They're really not equivalent. This hard-won lesson is brought to you by our overly-sticky alfredo from Saturday night.

Entertainment this week: the DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. This was only the second time I'd seen it, and I can now definitively say: we hates it, the nasty tricksy movie, we HATES it. Every single element, with the exception of the emotional dynamics between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum (okay, and some pretty Aragorn-in-motion shots), is flawed in precisely the right way to drive me stark raving mad. I see that I got most of them in a Usenet post I made last December, so I won't repeat myself now, though I now have more multi-faceted objections to the Theoden thread.

Gah. I am hopeful that the third will be better, but I'm probably not going to do the marathon all-three thing, even if I wouldn't have to take off work, just because I don't want to be in a bad mood going into Return.