When the weather is nice outside, it is very difficult for me to sit down & blog. So, I usually tweet more in the summer & blog in the winter. I hope that works for everyone’s schedule. 🙂
Now let’s get down to what I have been up to.
For the most part, I have had a great summer. I am still looking for a position at a nonprofit organization, but while I have been doing that, I am also having fun. Some of the jobs I have interviewed for, I can look back & really say that it is OK that I didn’t get that specific job. It just wasn’t THE JOB.
I will write about my trip to Europe for our 1-year anniversary & I will tell you about being a tourist in my own city. I will also tell you about my time spent in Texas and how many wonderful people & organizations I have met. It has truly been a great experience.
For now, I am going to tell you about MY BIG O. His name is Oscar & he is the cutest little puppy. He is a shih zhu mix and lord help me if I ever figure out how to spell that. 🙂
He is approximately 1 1/2 years old & was found wandering the streets of Chicago’s southside. If you can even believe it, he was on the streets for a while. I am not sure how he survived. I do know that he had a pal – possibly his girlfriend, aka Britney. If we breakdown & hire a pet psychic, I will blog about it – don’t worry!
The two pups were rescued from Animal Care & Control in August, spade/neutered and then put up for foster by PAWS volunteers. I got the email early on a Saturday morning. Nicole wrote about (shreek) K-fed & Britney (their PAWS-given names), as they were called, and described how they needed a home for 2 weeks while they recuperated from their surgeries.
This particular morning, I must have been able to pull out the kind of sad face to trump all sad faces, because my husband agreed that we could foster both pups for the 2-week period.
We picked them up the next day & learned that Britney’s surgery had not gone as planned. They discovered an expired fetus inside her uterus. The vet removed the fetus & she was spade. Because of this complication, Britney had to be on medication & needed rest.
Both dogs were so dirty, but they couldn’t have baths. They were so little & frail and they had big white cones on their heads because of their surgery. And, no matter how long they have a cone, they never understood the concept or width of these cones. Nonetheless, it was entertaining.
But, Britney was getting sicker & wasn’t taking her medication. We would try to force it down her throat, but it got to the point where that wouldn’t even work. She was no longer eating. All she would do is sleep for a few hours at a time & cough the entire time she was awake.
That week, I got no sleep. We tried to put them in the bathroom, but that only scared them because they didn’t know where we were. We could hear Britney coughing & K-fed (shudder) whining & crying.
We tried to keep them in a separate part of the house with an impromptu baby gate that we made, using a table. K-fed (shudder) tried to jump over it and almost hurt himself in the process.
Since my husband was working & I wasn’t, the only logical thing I could think of was to sleep on the floor in the living room with the dogs. And, so I did. I pulled out an extra comforter and pillow. I stayed with them on the other end of our loft apartment so that my husband wouldn’t hear Britney cough & he could get some sleep.
After many, many phone calls to the vet & to PAWS, they finally agreed with me that Britney was not going to get any better in our house. She needed a much higher level of medical care. She needed to be on an IV, so that she would actually receive her medicine. She also needed a vet to check on her many times during the day.
We dropped her off & got some additional medicine for K-fed. It seemed that he caught a bit of kennel cough from Britney. So, off we went – back home.
We all slept soundly & after a couple days, we were able to give K-fed a bath. I remember thinking after the bath, “Well, he is still cute, but I think he needs to be shaved so we can start over.”
Once K-fed’s cone was removed, he had been bathed & brushed, we discovered who he really was. He is a little adorable guy who loves to play fetch, snuggle and chew on random things. (We definitely have to keep a close eye on him.)
Once he was off of his meds, you could tell he felt better. At this point, he had been with us for 3 weeks & we had fallen in love with him. Both my husband & I decided that we would be too sad to give him away. So, after much consideration – we adopted him & renamed him Oscar. (I mean, really?! K-fed?!)
We got him groomed, clothed (only when super cold) and gave him tons of toys. The photos above were of K-fed, but the photo below is of our “Big O,” Oscar. He has a big personality, but weighs only 12 lbs. He loves to run & loves his parents.
We also checked in on Britney several times. Once she was on an IV, she got better pretty quickly. We were so glad, & if we had more room, we would have adopted her, too. But, her story ends happily, too. She was put up for adoption just a month later & was adopted extremely quickly. Way to go, Brit-Brit.
Some people say he is lucky to have such [over-attentive, overbearing & crazy] wonderful parents. We think, however, that we are the lucky ones.
Two Cards Short of a Deck 