Month: August 2010

I’m an ordinary dude. Patient and goodnatured, gentle and generous to a fault (excepting my ball), humble and accepting, from my muzzle to my paws. There are no sour grapes involved here (grapes aren’t good for dogs) but things have changed a little bit since Catie became a movie star.

She used to play some of the music I like. Now she’s obsessed with Ethel Merman, and George Gershwein and Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s all about overtures and sweeping finales and songs about enchanted evenings and favourite things and spoonfuls of sugar. Don’t get me wrong. I love musicals as much as the next guy, but sometimes I like to switch it up to solid dude tunes too; like, when Mom’s not home and Dad puts on hardcore rock or plays some earsplitting guitar chords with the amplifiers on full blast.

But enough of that. It’s hard to believe it is already mid August. It’s been a busy summer. A wedding (which Catie and I didn’t get to attend). Lots of rain. Almost nightly thunderstorms. Endless reruns on television. Mosquitoes the size of my nose. An alarming yet mysterious bout of summertime diarrhea that had both Catie and me running to the door. A lot. And we didn’t always make it. A brief stay at a boarding hotel with a redbone coonhound who went into heat Catie and I were there and simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. I finally had to tell her about the surgery-that-cannot-be-named and that she was looking for love in all the wrong places.

Besides, my heart belongs elsewhere.

I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but a word to Comet: I’m working on getting a lawyer for the annulment as quickly as I can. It’s been a little tight around here since Mom took back her credit card and it’s turned out more difficult to get into the pawn shops with only one Jimmy Choo shoe than getting through customs – of course, wearing a “working dog harness” at the airport and pushing Catie through security in a wheelchair helped a lot.

And just so everyone knows, Catie might be a film goddess but Mom’s busy working on the next New York Times bestseller about ME and she’s calling it “S*it my dog says.”

Bwahahahaha!

August 13 2010

Turn up the music and pump your arms. Have an extra cookie and some ice cream or a whole lot of your treat of choice.

It’s Catie’s 7-MONTH ampuversary TODAY! And, oh, how far we’ve ALL come in seven months. We are ready to go to town and CELEBRATE!

I could have said them but Mark Doty said them too in Dog Years:

“We’re in the world, we’re breathing, we’re together.”

What more could you ask for?

I don’t really have anything to say right now; Cometdog may have silenced me forever with her slide show of Catie. Who needs words when you can have a Smartypants Production?

Without ever having met, Comet captured the essence of Catie in four memorable moments.

Thank you!

Tummy update: Splats have dried up. My husband was off the hook for collecting the nasty specimen: the medications first constipated both Catie and Riley and by the time things got moving again, everything was normal.

They’re both back to their happy, barking, grass-eating, ball-chasing, ball-chewing, piano-playing, sun-basking, sniffing, snuffling selves.

P.S. On a human-related note, my 79-year old father had hip replacement surgery this morning. I visited him this afternoon and seeing him so vulnerable in the hospital bed, with the tubes and the catheter and in considerable discomfort, made me overwhelmingly sad. In my mind he’s still much younger than he looked today.