I’m a Slacker

I was just catching up on blog reading, and now I feel like a slacker. I have a friend who has twice as many kids as me, her day job takes her outside the house, she has fifty family and school and extracurricular obligations a week, and she STILL manages to blog every day.

Obviously, I’m not that dedicated.

She also writes funny and fun posts, while I write about paper towels.  It’s a wonder anyone ever reads this thing at all.

*crickets*

My dog is mostly better now, I don’t remember if I’ve said that here.  Her head tilt is almost gone, and she can walk and eat and everything is fine.  Except for the residual effects that have nothing to do with the vestibular syndrome itself.

First, there’s the eating thing.  She doesn’t want dog food anymore.  We hand fed her real meat at the worst of the condition, and she’s gradually gotten back to eating dog food, but she clearly prefers not to eat it.  She’ll snarf around the kitchen looking for crumbs and she’ll eat the cat food, so I’ll put her dish back down, and she’ll turn away.  Too bad.  She can starve.  (Not really—we actually have plenty of crumbs on the floor.)

The other thing is that she can’t walk on non-carpeted floors anymore.  She avoids them, and when she can’t, she dashes across them.  Now, even when she was healthy, she wasn’t the most graceful dog.  You could call her, in fact, one of the least graceful.  So when she dashes down the hall or across the kitchen, she inevitably slips, her feet splay out, she crashes into the wall, and down she goes.

I haven’t been able to take her for grooming because of her balance issues, so I bought nail clippers.  Oh, yeah, you can see where this is going, can’t you?  I bought nail clippers with the plan to clip her nails, thinking if they weren’t so long, maybe she wouldn’t skid so much.  They didn’t have a styptic pencil, though.  So I just decided to be really, really careful.  And I was.  Despite her wiggliness, I was really careful, and didn’t cut down very far at all.  Of course, on the eleventh nail, the blood vessel must have come all the way down to the point, because…yeah, she bled.  All over the carpet, the tile…me.  I sat holding her down as she was desperate to get up and run from me (no pain, she just didn’t like me holding her foot!), trying to get it to stop.  I thought it had, but it hadn’t.  Then I used flour, and that worked.  Phew.  Kept a newspaper bag over her foot for an hour, though, just in case.

Guess who’s never using clippers again?