Tag: Harriet

My Garden, Pets, Photography

Monarch

Shelly

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Monarch (Danaus plexippus) on Zinnia

This guy was VERY shy. Every time I went out to get a photo, he flew off.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with drama-llama-ding-dong. The cherry on top was waking up early Monday morning to Harriet having a grand mal seizure. As far as I know, she’s never had one before. Hopefully it will turn out to be an isolated incident. It’s likely though, since she’s an old dog, that it was caused by a brain tumor. If so, she’ll have more seizures, and they will get progressively worse and more frequent as the tumor grows. For now, since we don’t know what’s going on, we’re in “wait and see” mode.

You would not know that anything had happened judging by Harriet, though. Within half a minute of the seizure, she was up and asking to go outside, and then she came in and demanded breakfast.

Crankypantsing, Photography

The Ass Upstairs

Shelly

My assy upstairs neighbors continue to astound. Today’s festivities involved the dude (I’ll call him Doofus) letting his clearly untrained puppy (name of Lola) run off leash in the back field. Harriet, being an old lady dog, has to pee frequently. So I took her outside. Lola came galloping toward us. I told Doofus that Harriet is dog aggressive. Doofus called his (again, CLEARLY UNTRAINED) puppy, who totally ignored him, because she has no idea what the word “come” means.

Harriet, bless her heart, has a small amount of tolerance for puppies. Otherwise, it would have been ugly when Lola stuck her nose in Harriet’s face. Since Doofus was incapable of controlling Lola, I took Harriet back inside. She still hadn’t peed, though, so I watched out the window until Doofus and Lola were (I thought) a safe distance away from my patio.

So. I took Harriet back outside. Harriet peed. Lola saw us, and we had a repeat of the above scene. I took Harriet inside before Lola got to us, but I didn’t have time to close the patio door before Lola shoved her head inside my apartment. WTFBBQ?!

And now, a photo of an avocado. It was perfectly ripe and damnfinetasty.

Yum

Pets, Photography

At the Vet

Shelly

At the Vet

Harriet went to the vet today. She’s been leaking again, despite being on Proin. The vet did blood work and urinalysis to rule out a UTI, diabetes, and kidney failure. He doesn’t think it’s Cushing’s syndrome, either, given her occasional bouts of having no appetite. We can do a more definitive test for that later, if we need to. His verdict is that she’s just got a floppy bladder. She’s an old lady dog, and that’s common. He recommended adding DES to her regimen.

She does have laryngeal paralysis. That’s not of immediate concern, but it’s something that’s going to progress. Eventually she’ll begin to have trouble breathing, and at some point we’ll have to weigh the pros and cons of tie-back surgery. He feels (and I tend to agree) that by the time surgery is necessary, it will likely only buy us a few months. At that point, it may be more humane just to put her to sleep. Hopefully that’ll be way down the road from now, though!

For now, she’s pretty healthy (leaky bladder aside), and she’s pretty happy, and that’s all I care about.