Puppy Woes

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Arizela

Today, we took our puppy for a little nip-tuck of the testes. At just over 4lbs, he’s still a bit small, but the vet assured us he was big enough. So after a day spent worrying, I picked him up from the clinic and here he is, protective cone and all.


Poor guy. He’s going to be in that plastic headgear for a week, and he’s so little that every time he tries to sniff the ground his cone gets stuck in the snow. It’s possibly the most pathetically cute thing I’ve ever seen. Heartbreaking, but for his long-term good. For the next week, he’ll need to be hand-fed and get his water by straw-feeding, because he can’t get his little face in the water dish.

The vet is also typing up a letter for the breeder, because our not-inexpensive pedigree puppy has bad knees, a genetic anomaly that should certainly have been picked up by the breeder’s vet and that the breeder was mortified to learn about. She offered to take him back, but hell, I’ve got bad knees too and no one is sending me back. We’ll keep him. Instead, she’s offered us a pick from a future litter to make it up to us. We’ll see about that.

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Puppies: What’s in a Name

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Arizela

We welcomed a new member to this crazy clan last weekend. Meet Tennant, a 13 week old, 3lb Toy Fox Terrier pup.

He’s working on potty training and teething, which means we have to be quick with the going outside thing and even quicker to find a chewy if he starts trying to use one of us as a teether. In a lot of ways, taking care of a puppy is like raising an infant. Except with more barking and less equipment.

Several people have asked us why we would name a dog something like Tennant. Well, that’s simple enough to explain. We are geeks. My cat is named after the witch’s familiar in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Greebo. And our puppy, born 10/10/10, is of course named after the 10th Dr. Who, David Tennant. A friend of mine says we might as well have tattooed “My owners are geeks” on the poor thing, naming it like that, but well… why deny the truth? At least we didn’t name him Eccleston.

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Bringing Out the Big Guns

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Arizela

I try not to post here too often about my heart.

Not because it’s an intensely personal issue for me, exactly – it is, and it’s difficult to express how vulnerable I feel when someone asks me how my heart is doing these days. And not because it’s depression inducing – for me at least, I have always been what I call a realist. Working within my limitations is pretty difficult, but I’m willing to admit they exist, and I’m more than willing to look at the parts of my life that I still enjoy, that make life still worth living.

I try not to post about my heart too often because mostly it’s the same old-same old. It’s a chronic condition that isn’t expected to improve much on a day to day basis. I have good days and I have bad days. Most of my days are in the murky middle. It would get pretty tedious reading my list of symptoms every day.

Today, however, I’ve been doing a little research. My current cardiologist has decided he is out of his depth on my case and is referring me to a local neurologist and to a nationally renowned specialist for autonomic dysfunction. So I decided to check up a bit on Dr. Renowned. The professional literature dealing with my condition is pretty scarce, and a substantial portion of it has this man’s name on it.  His words are backed up by a world-wide client base (as well as his 9 month long waiting list, yikes!). According to his literature, I may actually have a chance of getting better someday. ~50% of the people he’s seen in his office end up being capable of going about their activities of daily living (eating, bathing, grooming, preparing food) without significant symptoms after 2-5 years of intensive, highly-individualized treatment. Those activities of daily living are things I struggle with every day at the moment, so as dismal as that might sound to some of you, it sounds pretty good to me.

So it’s not exactly a pot of gold, but it’s a damned sight prettier a prognosis than the one I had before, which was little to no hope of improvement during my lifetime.

It’ll probably be months or a year before I get to see Dr. Big-Guns Specialist, and years of therapy after that before I see major improvement, but at least I have some hope of getting a little piece of my life back someday.

Posted in Broken Heart | 1 Comment

For the Children

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Arizela

Yesterday, I made a small donation to charity. See that picture up there on the header? It was taken about 18 months ago, when my hair was only about 3/4 of the way to my waist when straight. Yesterday, it was waist-length when pulled straight. And here’s today:
Yep. 11 inches, bundled up and clipped off in the name of a charity.

Locks of Love is a non-profit organization that provides kids suffering from medical hair loss with high quality, real hair prosthetics. They are accepting donations of any hair type at lengths of 10 or more inches. You can have the hair cut for free at many participating salons. They also accept donations of cash and shorter hair that is sold to help offset the over $1000 cost of making each hair piece.

Talk about a good use of recycling!

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Picking and Choosing

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Arizela

So after my post last week, anyone reading the blog regularly will know that I’m not doing Nano anymore. Probably never-more. It’s a personal choice, though, and I still wholeheartedly support anyone who wants to do it.

So I’m honestly surprised to see how much negativity is swirling through the interweb about the event this month. Maybe I’ve just broadened my feed settings this year vs. last, but it seems to me there’s a lot of extra vitriol floating in the ether this season.

I read a post today at a site I’ve been looking at for a few weeks, the second in a row of their contributor pieces that points out the folly of Nanowrimo participation and the apparent need of their posters to deny nanoers ‘writer’s street cred’ based on the hobbyist nature of the event.

I think that’s kind of pathetic, actually. It’s like the mean girls at High School trying to exclude the girl in a homemade dress from attending the prom. Com’on, people. Get over yourselves.

What really got me about that post, though, wasn’t so much the mean girl attitude of the poster – I’ve seen that before. The thing that really irked me to the point of hitting unsubscribe was the moderator in comments. One commenter basically said that she didn’t see the need to make nanoers feel like the scum on the writing pond. There’s room to share. And the moderator called the comment out as an example of how not to “flame” the contributor.

What?

Seriously?

Since when is a respectful, if metaphorically stated, disagreement with the contributor’s thesis the same thing as flaming? I think someone needs to brush up on her internet trolling terminology. Any blog that refuses to allow people to respectfully but strongly disagree isn’t the blog for me, particularly when it comes to something that is wholly opinion-based to start with.

The way *you* write isn’t necessarily the right way for everyone. Not even if you got it from an MFA program, or from an agent’s seminar, or from a best selling how-to book. The way *I* write isn’t the right way for everyone, either. There really is room in this big old world and in this big old profession for people of all sorts. The one-month-a-year writer included.

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