Those Pudders

Alan is away at CDL driver's school and I've been working every day. So having two friendly faces and wagging tails (well, at least ONE wagging tail) greet me when I come home warms my heart. Rusty and Gizmo have been my constant companions since they were pups. I remember bringing Rusty home and he was so cute. That tail never stopped wagging. One time I tried to hold it still and the very tip of it still wagged. I showed it to Ken and we both fell out laughing. Rusty's tail still wags and when he's excited, his whole back end wags. Gizmo never has been much of a tail wagger. Ken called him One-Look-No-Wag. But he's starting to wag his tail a little bit these days than he used to. It's more of a lazy back and forth than it is a wag but I'll take it.

The boys are six years old now. Rusty will be seven in October (Gizmo will be seven in February). They are doing OK. Rusty still has his pepper that he's had since he was a pup. I remember one time it was coming apart and my mom sewed it together for him. Whenever anyone comes to the door or whenever he's excited, he'll run and get his pepper to carry around. Gizmo likes to squeek his toys. He thinks he's so cool when he does that so I buy him toys that are easy for him to squeek.

Gizmo is my high maintenance dog. He's allergic to three kinds of grass and two kinds of mold. I've been doctoring his skin for about four years now and it's a chronic thing with him. He's learned to walk on dirt and pavement rather than the grass. It's like he knows it makes his feet itch. He'll venture onto the grass long enough to pee or poo but other from that, he sticks to the pavement and sidewalks. He barely has any hair on his legs and his head and he constantly chews and scratches and licks his legs. I've tried many, many different kinds of remedies (herbal, natural, you name it) along with natural dog food and omega-3 oil and all kinds of other stuff through the years. Nothing works as well as good old fashioned chemicals. And vets make me so mad sometimes. I could get everything I need online through 1-800PetMeds but I haven't seen a vet yet who will authorize his script for his skin meds. So I always have to shell out the loot for an office visit before they'll refill his meds. About the only thing I've found that works on his poor skin is antibiotics along with cortisone spray. It's almost like Giz has psoriasis because his skin is all flaky and itchy. But I have to be careful with how much cortisone I use because as he licks it, too much can damage his kidneys.

They both got baths this morning so Gizmo is all white and soft and fluffy. Rusty's coat is more coarse and not as soft as Gizmo's. Last month Alan pretty much shaved all their hair off since it is so hot here in Texas. But it's finally starting to grow back out. I don't mind him shaving their legs and bodies but I like for him to leave some length to their heads and tails so they'll have at least SOME personality. Last time he cut all the hair off their heads and clipped their tails short and I had a fit. The hair on their heads is finally starting to grow back out and they're starting to look like Shih Tzu again. We leave as much length as we can on Gizmo's head to cover up the bald spots. He's lost most of the hair around the back of his head between his ears but there's enough hair left on top of his head that you can't see the bald spots so much. The only thing is you can really see the scar on his head when he had a growth removed (and Ken called him Frankendog) I've found that even though the omega-3 oil doesn't help his skin itchies, it does help the hair to grow back faster on his legs. The challenge is getting him to eat stuff with the oil on it.

When Alan gets done with school and goes to work, I'm going to order some allergy meds for Gizmo. I tried the allergy shots a couple years ago and they didn't do anything for him. But they were for the mold allergy. This time I'm going to try the stuff for the grass allergy and see if that helps him. He's so good and tolerates me giving him the shots even though we both hate it.

Rusty has been relatively the healthy dog. He used to have a lot of problems with his eyes but for the last six months or so I've not had to clean out his eyes as much. Maybe those tiny hairs that irritate his eyes have stopped growing. Now his problem is his anal glands. They get plugged up which makes his butt itch and so he scoots on his butt. He doesn't do it all the time; usually only when he gets really excited like when he meets a new person. When Alan starts work and we get caught up, I'm going to look into having Rusty's anal glands removed. For now I do the anal gland expression bit before I give him a bath. I'm not very good at it but I get some results for the most part. It beats shelling out $45 for an office visit just to have his butt squeezed.

They spend their days doing what they normally do -- sleeping. Gizmo likes to lay on the dining table chairs so he can look out the windows and bark at other dogs. We are parked right by the dog park so he has plenty of entertainment. He huffs and puffs, and finally gets his bark out. He tried laying on the back of the couch by the other window a couple of times but he needs about another two inches of width to be able to lay up there comfortably. So he's not been monkey dog very much in the RV like he used to be at the house.

I used to have a laser pen and we played laser in the RV. Our Tour is long enough that they can run from the front to the back like they used to in the house. I'll never forget how Ken used to be able to just walk up to the knick-knack cabinet and put his hand up and Gizmo would start to bark and run without even seeing the laser light. Silly puppies.

We still have some of the same routines that we had back when I had the house. I still tell them that it's time to go to work and they run to the door to get their "cookie" which is a Meaty Bone -- their favorite. Every once in a while they'll crawl on top of me to get their back itchers. Gizmo doesn't have his crate anymore to dig his way to China in so he substitutes his dog bed and digs like crazy in that. Since it doesn't make as much noise as the crate used to, Rusty doesn't bark at him anymore when he does it.

Rusty still has lots of opinions. He doesn't like certain commercials on TV and will bark at the jingle songs they use. One that comes to mind right away is the Vonage commercial. He always barks when they start the hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo part.

They still howl. If Gizmo barks long enough, Rusty will start to howl and then Gizmo joins him.

Gizmo has developed a kind of aggressive response when he sees other dogs. He'll run up to them and if they shy away, he gets really aggressive and intimidating. But if they stand up to him, he backs off like "my bad." If the other dog is the aggressor, he doesn't even try and stays close to me. So it appears that he only tries to be a bully when he thinks he can get away with it. Rusty doesn't even care about other dogs. He's all about the owners and possibly getting petted. He just LOVES kids. Gizmo couldn't care less about kids.

Giz is still a pig. He's gained a pound in the last year and was up to 16 pounds the last time I had him weighed. Rusty is maintaining his petite 11 pounds that he's had for years. Rusty has also figured out to stay out of the grass. Not because it makes his paws itch but because he's figured out that there are stickers in the grass. Most of the grass here has those little yellow spiny stickers that gets between the pads of their paws and boy, these things hurt. I've put plenty of holes in my fingers getting them out so I know they must really hurt sensitive pads. I'm always watching them when we go for walks. If I see any sign of a limp or if they've gone through grass, we always stop for a paws check.

So all-in-all, the boys are fine. They're due for shots but I'm putting it off until Alan starts work. I really don't know what I'd do without them but for now they're my boys and they know everything I say when I talk to them. I can tell by the way they turn their heads and prick up their ears when they know I'm talking to them.

Ax murderer

Last week I started a new roll -- like I do every week. And I'm in a nice neighborhood -- like I am every week. So I pretty much don't expect to find a crack house in an up-scale neighborhood but that's what I felt like I stumbled on to in this case. I swear, I am not making this up. I'm going from house to house working the roll. One of my houses is on a corner. Beautiful house and immaculate landscaping. Nice lady at home. Then I round the corner and my next house is a complete 180.

First impression is the grass is all gone to seed. But that sometimes happens when the homeowner is out of town for a couple weeks. There are two decorative pillars kind of "U" shaped with a gate hanging open off one of them. This gate hasn't seen any use in quite a while. There are two concrete lions resting on the bottom of the "U" in each pillar. Normally they'd be turned outward but these two have been turned to face the pillar. So that was kind of weird. You can't see the house from the road because there are too many cedar trees grown around it. So I drive up to the house and I start to get the creeps as scenes from Chainsaw Massacre flash through my mind. There are two derelict vehicles in the driveway (a car and a truck) that have been sitting there for so long the grass is grown up around them. The front end of the car is totally burnt. The garage door is hanging open and it's all full of junk. Which matches the yard. There is junk and garbage scattered all over the yard. There used to be a pile of ceramic tile stacked up beside the driveway that had gotten scattered and totally crushed into thousands of bits so that you couldn't help but run over it.

Now, some of the places I've been to have seen better days. I guess sometimes there comes a point when people's circumstances change and things start to wear out and maintenance doesn't get done. Every once in a while I'll come across a house and the first thing I think of is 'renters.' Toys scattered all over the place, etc.

But this house was different. It was just plain nasty. It was worse than nasty but I can't think of a worse adjective to describe it. There was a huge fountain in the front that had dried up leaving scum and algae all in the bottom of it. There was what used to be nice lawn furniture on what used to be nice landscaped terraces. But the furniture had all kinds of mold on it and the chairs were laying on their sides like they'd been blown over by the wind. Nobody has used that area in a long time. I carefully walked up to the door and I could see inside the house looked like a superfund site. There was a futon on the front porch that had months of mold growing on the cushion. Yuck. There was mold on the stone walls, the front door, the eaves....everything just reeked of negligence.

So I knock on the door, give it all of about 20 seconds, and am relieved when nobody answers. When I get back to the road, I study the picture to try to see why the photographer shot it. To be honest, it doesn't look that bad from the air. The lawn furniture is hidden by a grove of cedar trees. You can see the junk cars in the driveway but the rest of the house doesn't look that bad. It does look a tad shaggy in the photo but the camera just didn't pick up all the mold and bits of trash and garbage around the house. There were just enough trees so that you couldn't really tell just how neglected the yard was.

The next day I was selling a print to the man who lives in the house diagonally opposite from the other really nice house on the corner. When I asked him if he knew who lived there his first words were, "Yes, and don't go there." I told him too late, I'd already been and he told me not to go back. "Why, is it a crack house?" (I was only half joking.) He said the man there was really strange (no shit!) and that the homeowners association (of which he was president) were trying to decide what to do about him. He and his neighbor were the ones who had put out the car fire in his driveway and when they knocked on his door to tell him about it, the dude was like, well whatever. Dude thanked them, went back inside, and closed the door. He said you couldn't really see how bad the house was from the road and so they really didn't have much leverage to do anything about the guy. You can't get rid of someone just because they're a weirdo.

And it's a real shame. He said he knew the previous owners and they took a lot of pride in their landscaping. He said there were more terraces in the back of the house and that they used to be really beautiful.

I have something called a hardcard that gets sent back to Air Photo along with all the rejected prints. On it I list the status for each print, whether it was sold and for how much or whether it was rejected and the reason. For 57BUVD3-88 I put R-Ax murderer.

Note to David: This is what I was going to tell you on the phone before my train of thought derailed.