First and Last Days of First Grade.

I think her legs doubled in length!

I’m still messing around with formatting in WordPress, which has way more bells and whistles than Blogger. Today I’m figuring out how to insert and format photos, so here are a few pics of Delaney.

My daughter took the first and last day of school photos in the same spot on campus. Can you believe how much this girl changed in a year? At this rate, she’ll be as tall as I am by 4th grade. She’s doing great. She’s smart as hell, very funny, utterly dance-obsessed, reading waaay above grade level, taught herself to write in cursive, she’s really quite a kid.

While Grandma does worry that dance takes up so much of her life at such a young age, she truly lives to dance. The hours of work those kids put in are mind-boggling, but she’s thriving on it. It requires a lot of mental discipline as well as physical talents, and as everything academic is a breeze for her, it’s good that she has something in her life that requires this much focus. And her poise and confidence in competition will serve her well in any future career. She can walk out onto a huge stage at 7 and perform a solo in front of hundreds of people and a panel of judges, and her smart, sassy personality shines through. I never could have done this at her age.

Rambling Update.

(I know, blogging gurus, I should be thinking about SEO and meta descriptions and all that “professional blogger” stuff, but this is a reincarnated blog. I’m still cleaning and painting and trying to decide furniture placement, so eff off on that stuff for now.)

So, first of all, Sophie DID have a UTI, and is back on an antibiotic, and (dare I send this out to the Universe?) she seems to be doing quite well. She’s still peeing much more often, but she’s a very, very good girl about using her potty pads while I’m at work. Everybody please cross your fingers that our months of expensive medical drama are over! (Oh shit, I just jinxed it, didn’t I?)

Meanwhile, I woke up on Monday morning – not Saturday or Sunday, when it would have made sense – with an overwhelming urge to declutter and rearrange and organize everything I own. I wanted to first bag stuff for donation, then throw away crap, then organize what’s left by color and then alphabetize it. It was a fever, and I couldn’t indulge it because I had to go to work. The fever didn’t break when I got home and I filled a big blue IKEA bag with clothing which I now realize I will never want to wear again. I’ll drop it at Goodwill on my way home tomorrow.

I am not done with this project. I recall that back on the old blog I started the year with grandiose plans to redo my home office and I’ll confess right now that I’ve accomplished exactly jack shit on that project. Time and money, always the issue/excuse. So the year is half over and I’m not where I want to be, and I know why. It has taken me a lifetime to figure out how to eat an elephant. I would look at this office/rarely used guest room, think of how I wished it looked, feel defeated, and go into another room. The year is half over. I still want a comfortable, functional home office.

So this particular elephant is being consumed in 30 minutes a day increments. I actually do set a timer for 30 minutes, which I’m free to ignore if I’m on a roll – but 30 minutes is set in stone. I’m also being much more ruthless with the “But I paid good money for that!” (I can hear my father’s voice in my head with that crap.) Yes, I did. And I either used it for a while, while it worked for me, or I decided early that it wasn’t right for me and I was too lazy to return it. So why am I hanging on to things like that now? Reminders of bad decisions past? Believe me, I have lots of those in forms that don’t take up physical space.

So my mission: 30 minutes a day. Be ruthless. Donate things that are legitimately still nice/in good shape/someone else would want/use. IKEA bags, downgraded cloth grocery bags, Amazon boxes – keep a few of these things on hand and then send them on their way when they’re full. I’m setting aside clothes that could go to consignment. If you have a neighborhood Facebook or Nextdoor group or other place to post a curb alert for plant stands and flowerpots you don’t need, just send it back into the Universe that way. And if it’s genuinely crap nobody else would ever claim, do everyone a favor and throw it the hell out already!

I’m on a mission. Sophie’s asleep on the couch. Time to start the 30 minutes for today.

Sophie’s Woes (Gross but True)

The last three months have been shitty in every sense of the word. I think it was some time in mid-April when Sophie developed spectacular diarrhea, pretty much out of the blue. It was so spectacular, it would have been comical if I didn’t actually fear for her life. (As long as this post is, it is a highly condensed version of what was actually an over two month long, incredibly expensive and exhausting saga.)

So, Sophie had a gastrointestinal situation. She’s also the smartest and cleanest little dog ever, so this was as distressing for her as it was for me. Did I mention how smart she is? When Sophie has diarrhea, she runs to the master bathroom shower. I didn’t train her to do this, of course, I have no idea how she figured out that the shower would both contain her poopsplosions and be super easy to clean afterward, but she used the shower faithfully during this very trying time. I kept a spray bottle of bleach solution handy for cleanups, and the old grout in the shower has never looked whiter. (Bonus!)

Of course I took her to the vet at the start of this mystery illness, and she was on a steriod and an antibiotic AND expensive prescription food; none of which was helping. Because she’s a very clean dog and doesn’t want to poop in the house if she can help it, she would wake me at all hours when the urgency hit, so we were both miserable.

Weeks went on this way. She seemed to be getting a bit better, then, nope, liquid again. In one particularly impressive burst, she was squatting in the strip of grass beside the driveway, and it burst from her with such force that it SPRAYED ACROSS THE ENTIRE SINGLE CAR DRIVEWAY, which is about 10 feet wide.  I was thankful that it was my driveway and not a neighbor’s.

The Driveway Poopsplosion was frightening. Let’s remember that this is a small Boston Terrier, 12-13 pounds on her biggest day, and I was worried that’d she’d become dehydrated quickly, so I immediately called the vet’s office, and was told they couldn’t see her that day, call somebody else.

This is the veterinary office I’ve been taking my animals to for about 25 years, and yeah, things haven’t been the same since they sold out to VCA. I don’t blame the doctors; they’re preparing for retirement and winding down their practice, and they have to do what makes sense to them. But there are a lot of new faces on staff, and the girl on the desk had no idea I’d been a client since before she was born, and probably wouldn’t have cared. So I called another clinic, and eventually ended up at a very nice clinic a bit further away. I liked the vet so much that when my long-time vet does decide to wrap up and retire, I’ll probably switch to her practice.

BUT – of course this doctor had never seen Sophie before, so she understandably wanted to do a thorough exam with a new patient. She shared my concern about dehydration and gave her subcutaneous fluids and a B-12 injection, and more medication, and told me to follow up with her or my regular vet if she didn’t improve, and another few hundred dollars were spent.

A week later we were back at the regular vet, who said the next step would be to send a blood sample to “the Texas lab” – which turned out to be at Texas A&M, and apparently specializes in canine gastrointestinal distress. Let’s pause a moment and salute the brave lab techs who deal with THOSE samples all day. That test was over $200, but finally, finally we should get an answer about the root cause of the issue.

BUT – remember I said the new vet had given her a B-12 injection? That shot meant that the blood test would be screwed up, and we’d have to wait 30 days before we could do it. So the saga continued; Sophie got better and worse, the poopsplosions became less frequent and dramatic but still, she wasn’t really okay.

(I forgot to mention that we also switched her food to something called “hydrolyzed protein,” which must be made in a magic kitchen high in the Himalayas or something, because that shit costs over $4 a can. I counted my blessings that she wasn’t a Great Dane.) Fortunately, my picky eater LOVED the stuff and cleaned her plate at every meal, and the diarrhea slowed to a weird yellow sludge, but never really went away.

We finally did the expensive Texas A&M blood test – at last we will get a diagnosis and know what’s going on! And it came back: Inconclusive. Yes, her blood showed evidence of the gastrointestinal distress, but not a clear cause.

By now her poopsplosions had slowed to a fairly normal poop schedule, but her poop was still that odd yellow sludge.  She obviously was feeling much better. I had spent well over $1000 on this saga, and decided to take a break from further and increasingly expensive testing, and just see how she did.  Last week she decided she didn’t like the super expensive food anymore, so I decided to throw caution to the winds and try her on the prescription gastro low fat food I still had in the pantry, instead of the hydrolyzed protein.

She liked it more than the HP,  and her poop actually became a bit firmer and more normal looking!  It appeared that our long gastrointestinal nightmare was OVER! She was feeling fine, she liked her food, the entire household started getting some sleep.

Then, the night before last, she woke me at 2 am in distress, AGAIN.  She was peeing very frequently, and her pee had traces of blood in it, and she was obviously very uncomfortable. Yep, she as a urinary tract infection. It was kind of inevitable, if you think of the anatomy of a female dog: her ladybits were in frequent contact with runny poop, no matter how I tried to keep her clean. We were back at the vet yesterday, her pee is at the lab and she’s on a different antibiotic, which hopefully won’t bring back the diarrhea.

And now you are up-to-date on our very shitty summer.

Welcome to the New Bossy Doghouse

After many, many months of intermittent blogging at my old home on Blogger, I’ve had an urge to reboot my original blog.  http://yorkiedog.blogspot.com/ If you came here from the original Bossy Little Dog, thanks for hanging in there.  Be patient with me; while WordPress isn’t hard, it’s just a bit different from Blogger.

If I’m going to actually start blogging again, I figured should do it right.  I have new hosting, WordPress, and there will be actual topics and tags and organization that was totally lacking for the 16 YEARS!!! I messed around with the old blog.  I still have thoughts, and I still have the urge to inflict them on the world.

I turned 61 years old on Friday, and while I swear to God in my head I’m still 40ish, the reality is I’m roughly 5 years from retirement, whatever that will mean for me.  I’ll never be able to afford to fully retire, that’s just reality.  For me, “retirement” will mean cutting back from a 40 hour cube rat existence to a couple of part time jobs, and it’s time to lay the groundwork for that future.

So Bossy Little Dog 2.0 will be about where I am now, and how I’m planning for the future.  It’ll still be the eclectic (that sounds so much nicer than disorganized) blog it always was, but hopefully easier to navigate.  I have thoughts about aging, money, bullet journals, dogs, politics, Florida, knitting and lots more, but I’ll try to organize things a bit better this time.  The original blog will remain in place, but even I have a hard time searching my own archives.

If you came here from the old blog, I know the most important question I must answer: “Never mind you, how are Sophie and Ellie?” They are both fine. I’ll share more about Sophie’s Most Expensive Gastrointestinal Adventure Yet in a post of its own, because approximately 2 months and $2,000 in vet bills deserves its own post.

I’m back!! This is exciting!!