Dogsitting Daylog 2

Monday evening

Way better mood than yesterday, mostly because Jon drove across the bay and took me out of the house for a few hours. Seeing my best beloved and breaking my cabin fever together, plus he brought me cough drops for my itchy throat. Heh heh heh . . .it's too bad tregoweth is a fuckin' saint was deleted.

And now I'm at home and Jazzie isn't whining so much and the puppies aren't yipping so much. Or just my improved mood prevents it from being annoying. Who knows?

In fact, I found it funny instead of annoying to watch one little black pup and Jazzie go in circles -- Jazzie was trying to lick the pup while standing up, and the pup was trying to nurse, so it kept moving out of tongue reach, and she kept backing up to lick it, and it yelped so unbelievably loud every time she moved away from its questing mouth. Finally Jazzie must have gotten annoyed with the situation, because she lay down and let them all nurse. Their sucking is unexpectedly loud, and occasionally one emits a little squeak. Jazzie has this look on her face that I interpret as long-suffering, "when will the need for this be over?"

Tuesday Evening

Though my cold has progressed from sore throat to runny nose and coughing, I'm still in a fairly good humor. I think I'm starting to understand the dogs a bit better -- the adults at least, and their desires and ways of doing things. The puppies can still be uncomfortably loud when I'm in the same room with them, and they make the most astounding range of noises -- if I couldn't see the source I'd swear there were angry cats and a flock of seagulls (but not the band) behind my chair in addition to the pups. And it's funny how Jazzie whines more when I'm back here in the computer room than when I'm out in the living room watching TV. But right now the puppy being licked (and again, while it would rather nurse) sounds most like what I imagine an angry monkey might. I guess puppy children make as much fuss about baths as human children like my siblings do.

Between being ill and being a late sleeper at the best of times, the dogs have served as an alarm clock at least twice every morning. Jazzie will probably remove all the paint from the puppy nursery door scratching at it and barking to wake me. (She does that with Mom too, but Mom doesn't go back to bed after the dogs wake her at 7:00 a.m. to be let out; I do.) It's a good thing they aren't parrots or the vocabulary they would learn from waking me up that early would displease Mom.

Wednesday Evening

I swear this pair of puppies is getting close to oral sex. Brown puppy on its (his?) back, legs in the air; black puppy's head is over the hindquarters of brown puppy and making noises that sound just like it's nursing. (And God only knows what goes on in those puppy piles. 8) Or maybe I'm just going stir crazy -- I haven't been out of this house and its yard in two days.)

Thursday

Christ. It has been a tiring day. Jon came over; with the adult dogs in the backyard, we played with the puppies for a while. Then we thought we might see if Jazzie would be friendly with him. Secret Puppy is a growler-at-strangers, but Jazzie has no such problems, just no training. She has a bad habit of jumping up on people when she's excited, which is always the case when anyone new comes by. When she first met Jon last week, she managed to tear his shirt with her claws.

So this time, he put on an old cast-off shirt and I let Jazzie in from the backyard. We were on the opposite side of the house from the puppy room, so she couldn't have seen him as an immediate threat to the puppies. I think she's just untrained and overenthusiastic. I was still closing the back door, which sticks, and I heard Jon yell. I turned around to see his hand bleeding. I don't think Jazzie was attacking him -- there was no trouble in getting her away from him, she'd already backed away from the yelling. She ran down the hall to the puppy room and I shut the door behind her. (Jon's perspective: "I dunno -- Jazzie was barking, came after me, was biting me...it wasn't just enthusiasm." He adds, ""tregoweth is currently accepting 'get well' and 'what were you thinking, dumbass?' /msgs. :)")

Jon's left pinky and a spot on the left side of his stomach were bleeding. We blotted up the blood, looked through Mom's rather antiquated first-aid supplies (expired antibiotic, large-size bandages old enough that the wrapper and pad were stuck together) and examined the wounds. The one on his stomach appeared to be mostly a bruise with some very shallow claw marks that stopped bleeding almost immediately. The bite marks on his pinky were more troublesome; he wrapped the finger in gauze secured with a band-aid that by itself wouldn't have covered enough area, and we went to the drugstore.

Neosporin and larger bandages were acquired, and the worst of the emergency seemed covered. We went to Barnes & Noble, but Jon looked through first-aid books and found that he might need a tetanus shot. He would have dropped me off at Mom's house and gone to a clinic nearer our Tampa place, but we happened to pass a walk-in clinic before reaching Mom's home. So I spent time doing the Tampa Tribune crosswords while Jon spent $95 on being checked on and given the tetanus shot and some antibiotics to prevent infection.

I was starved by this time, so we went to Arby's and then took me home. I called Mom's boyfriend Mike, who had left a message while I was gone; he said that he had gotten many unintended bites and scratches while playing with his Australian Shepherds (same breed as Jazzie). He agreed with me that Jazzie greatly needed training. I then called Mom at my grandparents' home; she had the unpleasant news that Grandmother was ill and couldn't keep anything down. Grandmother has at least twice in the last year and a half had to go to the hospital to get fluids intravenously because she was dehydrated. I suppose if you're 95 years old, health problems are to be expected, and it's at least kinda good that this happened while Mom was up there to help Granddaddy out; even if he is ten years younger than his wife, he's no spring chicken. But it wasn't all that fun to respond to bad news with more bad news. Mom's first words on hearing about the bite was "So what, he's going to sue me?" Yeah, don't care about the harm your dog might cause, woman! (My mom and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of things.) I didn't tell her about the Department of Health form about Jazzie that we filled out at the clinic, but it really won't make Mom happy to have to prove to some civil service worker that Jazzie has had all her shots and such. Maybe that, and more nagging from Mike, will get her to take the dog for some training. Secret Puppy, who's been to training classes, may be a growler-at-strangers, but frankly, he's been much better behaved while I've been here than Jazzie has.

So now I just have to worry about Grandmother.