Tag: pets

In which the Great Old One emerges

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

IMG_7694It looks like it took the cat just over six weeks to realize that the dog is really, truly dead and is not hiding somewhere in the house waiting for her to lower her guard.  The dog, mind you, never gave a damn whether the cat existed or not, and they’ve lived together for over ten years regardless, a length of time that you would think might convince the cat that the dog was, if not a friend, at least something not to be constantly feared.

BUT!  Witness, my friends, as my 20-year-old asshole cat Mizu takes the Sam Gamgee-esque single step that places her as far as she’s ever deliberately been from our bedroom, which you would be able to almost see the door of were hte picture at a slightly different angle.  We have been living in this house for seven years.  See that one paw on the grey flooring in our dining room?  it is literally the first time she has ever set foot in that room.  In seven years.  Not once.  A moment later, she went into the family room, which is to the left.  She’d never been in there either.

Five or six years from now, when my son is in middle school, she might allow him to pet her.

It is Sunday and I am not at work

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

IMG_7562We went to the zoo today.  I haven’t been to the zoo in two damn years, and I love our zoo.  I am probably going to have a sunburn on the top of my bald-ass head tomorrow and I feel good about it.

They have two peacocks; they just let them wander around.

A brief note about the dog, if you’ll indulge me again a bit: you may recall that while I was finishing up that piece yesterday the doorbell rang and I didn’t answer the door.  That wasn’t an invention for the piece; it actually happened.  My wife and son were out of the house for a little while and they got home just a few minutes later.

There was a vase of fresh flowers on our doorstep, delivered to us on behalf of our vet’s office.  The dog had been gone for maybe three hours.  Guys, if you live anywhere near me, and you have pets, you could do a lot worse than letting Clayview Animal Clinic take care of them.

Tomorrow should be an exciting day: I actually get to find out what my job is!  I’m not teaching this year, as you’re probably aware if you’ve been paying attention, and while I know the broad outlines of the new position it’s not necessarily immediately clear what I’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis.  For example: the first day of school?  I have absolutely no idea what I’ll be doing right now on the first day of school, or really even the first couple of weeks.  I mean, I’m on the administrative team in a school; there’s gonna be stuff to do if I decide I wanna do things (and I do,) but none of those things will be my job.  The next couple of days I’m in training for my specific position and I’ll be much clearer on what my day-to-day job is going to look like by the time it’s over.

So yeah.  I’m excited.

What’s your week looking like?

Snarf, 2004-2018

On By Luther M. SilerIn life14 Comments

 

 

For reasons that aren’t really clear to me– I live my life online, and I write about goddamned everything— I don’t tend to write about it when my pets pass on.  When my wife and I got married in 2008, she had a cat and two dogs and I had two cats– our five pets were actually against county ordinances for the first several years we were married, until one of my cats died and we were down to a legal two cats and two dogs.  My author description on most of my books describes me as living with “an assortment of pets.”  Since I started this blog, we’ve lost Hector, one of our dogs, and Kashmir, one of our cats, who I know I wrote about a couple of times.  I did not mark either of their deaths with a post, and I don’t know why.

We had to let Snarf go this morning.  My cat (she is twenty years old, has lived with my wife for half of her life, and is still manifestly my cat) is now our only pet.  Snarf was nearly fifteen years old, a ripe old age for any dog but particularly so for a German Shepherd, a larger breed that most of the time doesn’t make it past twelve or thirteen.  She’d been on a slow decline for at least a couple of years now; I’d had a conversation with my mother as recently as last weekend about how much longer we were going to let things go.  If you know German Shepherds, you know they tend to have issues with their hips, and over the last couple of years it had been getting harder and harder for her to move around.  In addition, she’d gone stone cold deaf.  But she was still her, and like I told my mom when she asked, how do you get up in the morning and decide okay, today’s the day I kill my dog?  Today, and not tomorrow?  How the hell do you decide that, until it’s already past the time when you should have decided?

I dropped my son off at day care yesterday morning and spent most of the rest of the day in front of my PS4.  Around noon I realized that Snarf wasn’t in the room with me.  If I was home, Snarf was always in the same room with me, to the point where lately I’d been trying not to move around all that often because she’d force herself up and follow me around, even if I was just going to the bathroom or getting something from another room.

And I’d been home for three hours, and I hadn’t seen her yet. I actually thought right then that I was about to find my dog dead on the floor in my bedroom.  But no; she was alive, just a few steps slower than she’d been even the night before.  I don’t know what changed, but overnight she’d gotten worse.  Much worse.  She stayed in the bedroom almost all day.

She didn’t eat dinner last night, and she didn’t eat her breakfast this morning, and that was after my wife woke me up crying because she couldn’t get the dog to get up and go outside.  She’d made it to our bedside, where she slept every night, and that was as far as she wanted to go.

That’s how you know, I guess.

Our vet has been taking care of Snarf since she was a puppy– she’s actually known the dog for longer than I have– and she was nice enough to come in on her day off to take care of us.  And for the third time, I had to explain to my son that one of his pets was going to die– only this time, it was a complete surprise.  Kenny knew that she was getting old, of course, but she wasn’t sick in a way that a nearly-seven-year-old was going to really notice.  As far as he can remember, she’s never not been an older dog, and it was even harder than usual to explain why what was about to happen had to happen.

I’ve had, depending on how you count, somewhere between four and seven dogs that I could have called my dog, and two that I was actually personally responsible for.  Snarf was probably the smartest dog I ever had, and she was absolutely the best-trained of all of them.  She was loyal and friendly and scary as hell when she wanted to be and she was happy and she had fourteen good years with us and some months that maybe weren’t so good.

And as I’m writing this, the doorbell rings, and it’s not greeted with a chorus of dog barks, and that’s the moment when I lose it and start crying again.  I’m not answering the door.  Whoever is out there should have called first.  There’s supposed to be a dog there, telling them to stay away, until the moment I let them in the house, when they became safe and a friend.

She was a good dog.  I’ll miss her a lot.  Bye, babygirl.

 

 

Briefly

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

This is more a proof-of-life post than anything else; my wife is out of town for the next few days so I’m on solo Daddy duty, and today was a long and ridiculous day at work featuring virtually no sales of furniture in exchange for money but well more than a nine-hour allocation of nonsense.

And then I got home and had to clean up dog poop, which always improves one’s day, as you can no doubt well imagine.

The goal for tomorrow is to get through it without smacking anyone.  We’ll see how I do.

Proof of life

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography3 Comments


Kitty has survived her veterinary ordeal and is expected to be fully recovered quickly.  Right now, she won’t sit still.  😀

Oh screw you

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

10759207938205341276.jpegJust aborted a job application in midstream when it became clear that they wanted me to take one of those godawful personality tests, where you have to Agree or Disagree, or worse, rate your level of agreement or disagreement with an ambiguous-ass, obnoxious statement like “Although I don’t let little things get to me, in a big project I can easily get stressed out.”

Here’s my answer to your personality test, guys: I have a perilously low tolerance level for bullshit, both my own and that of others, and the second you start making me parse shit like that alarms start going off and I decide very quickly that I don’t want to work for you.  If that makes you not want me as an employee I’m good with it; I am absolutely certain that it is more your loss than mine.

(I am aware that they think these things represent something real or they wouldn’t do them.  I’m also well within my rights to think that maybe a fifteen-minute phone interview will tell them more useful information about me than whatever bullshit data their test spits out.  Fuck these things.)

Anyway.

Kitty passed all of her blood tests and was dropped off at the vet this morning for her dental surgery, so I’ve been staring at the phone waiting for the vet to call me and tell me everything went fine and she’s okay.  One mistake I made: not actually bothering to ask when the surgery was.  I headed straight over to them, cat in tow, after dropping the boy off at school this morning, and it didn’t occur to me until I was back in the car and heading home that just because they wanted her dropped off by 8:30 did not mean that they were going to immediately commence to yanking teeth out, nor do I really have any idea how long it might take to deal with a tooth abscess in a cat.  I strongly suspect they’ll end up pulling more teeth than they initially thought, as she’s had not-great teeth pretty much forever and I’m sure they’re going to find something else in there they don’t like.  I just hope to not be too completely broke when they’re done.

And also to have a healthy pet.  That too.

Hmm.  Last night as I was drifting off to sort-of-sleep I had a great idea for a politics post float through my head and I no longer remember a single word of it.  I’ll update when I get the kitty back and if I remember what that was about I’ll toss that at you too.   More later, in other words.

A bleg and a quick OtherJob story

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching6 Comments

burning-money.jpgSo I just found out that my eighteen year old cat has a tooth abscess, which is going to require a spot of dental surgery on Wednesday, and my brother’s wedding is the weekend after this, and the hotel alone for that trip is going to be ugly.

What I’m getting at is that this would be a great time to buy a book or two, if you’re the type to enjoy science fiction or nonfiction books about teaching.  I even sell autographed print books directly if you’re interested in that.  Because the next two weeks were already going to be bugfuck expensive, and the vet bills ain’t gonna help.  And I still don’t have a proper job.

That said, let’s tell a little story about the job I do have.  Several years ago I was in charge of the morning video announcements at one of my schools, which involved putting together a script, hustling a pair of middle school students through reading it, then editing the whole thing together and adding sound effects, text, and the occasional bad joke.  Over a while it became a running joke that Mr. Siler Doesn’t Dance.  It started with a two and a half minute speech about sports physicals by our gym teacher that I intercut with shots of students dancing to keep them paying attention and then eventually cut to me, sitting perfectly still, because I don’t dance.  A later shot had me doing a gesture with one finger (no, not that one, but hell if I know how to describe it) in tune to the music while other people danced behind me.

For the rest of the year, any time the kids walked past me, especially the younger ones, one of them was bound to be doing that finger dance.  It stuck around for years.

Fast forward to Saturday night.  We got killed at OtherJob on Saturday; I walked in to discover the day shift had done probably 30% better than they ever do, especially on a day with no big groups or birthday parties, and we managed to double that number by 7:30 PM and triple it by the time we closed.  It was gorgeous outside.  You could tell.

Anyway, I was at the outdoor register and basically had my head down most of the night because the line of people wanting to play never let up.  At one point I heard my name off to my left.  “Yeah, Mr. Siler used to do this all the time,” the kid is saying.  I look up, and it’s a former student, a kid who’s probably 16 or 17 by now.  He’s part of a big family.  There’s a (good) story about his sister in Searching for Malumba.  I think I had him and three of his brothers and sisters.

And he’s talking about me, and he has no idea that I’m standing a foot away.  And he’s doing the goddamn finger dance.  

The look on the kid’s face when I called him out by name was hilarious.  I don’t know if he just wasn’t paying attention or what– it was pretty common knowledge that this was my other job, so frequently kids would come looking for me if they showed up, but it’s been a few years since I’ve seen him– and I think I exploded his brain for a bit there.

Every sick day should be like this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories1 Comment
its-not-lupus-black-t-shirt
One of the tests was for autoimmune diseases! It really isn’t lupus!

I’m about to write a whole bit about all the fun & productive stuff I’ve done today since I didn’t have to go to work because I’m on medical leave.  Let me start with this, though: we have an elderly cat.  I got her when I moved to Chicago in 1998, so she’s seventeen and some change, not that you can tell from interacting with her.  She has been a puker for as long as I’ve owned her.  Last night I was ripped out of sleep by the sound of a cat preparing to hork on my bed.  I snapped awake and tossed her out of bed, resolving to clean up whatever she did to the floor in the morning (this may be why the carpet in my bedroom is so shitty) and then rolled over and went basically immediately back to sleep.

And then it happened twice more in the next hour.

And the third time it triggered another of the same type of attack/”episode” things that have been keeping me out of work lately.  The only difference is this happened in the middle of the night, but it was the same thing: simultaneously freezing cold and sweating, nauseous, weak, shallow breathing, generally awful.

Turns out, when your cat wakes you up trying to hork, it generates a bit of an adrenaline surge, and the third such event in maybe an hour fucked me up bad.  I still say there’s something wrong with my adrenal glands, but I keep getting test results from all the blood I had sucked out of me on Saturday and so far everything is normal, so I have no goddamn idea what the hell is going on.  I do know I couldn’t have gotten out of bed at 6 if my life had depended on it; I didn’t feel human until 11, at which point I was able to haul myself out of bed and take a shower and start my day.

How do I feel now?  Completely fine.  Which is the most frustrating thing about this; I’m either completely fine or I have medical professionals hovering over me and telling me to go to the ER.  It kinda sucks.

But anyway.  I did a whole bunch of shit today!  Have the rest of my day up to now in bullet point form:

  • Went to the bank to clarify some stuff about our recent mortgage refinancing.  Turns out I need to pay my own homeowners insurance now as the bank doesn’t do escrow.  Annoying, but manageable.
  • Checked a couple of mattress stores for a new bed for my son, who is now big enough for a twin bed.
  • Bought my son a bed at one of said stores, which will be here tomorrow.
  • Had lunch at Five Guys, a rare treat since basically just setting foot in the place will probably kill the boy, who has a peanut allergy.
  • Went to the Apple Store and scratched my “need a new thing” itch by buying one of these.  Almost certainly not the wisest use of my money, but I use two monitors and the massively increased size over the previous version won me over.  Using a trackpad instead of a mouse is wonderful.
  • I’m generally a big fan of Apple’s fetish for minimalism, but it really hurts them on mice and keyboards.  I can’t use their mice at all, and this is my keyboard on my desktop.
  • Actually saw one of the $17,000 Apple Watches in person for the first time, and walked away surprised by the fact that I actually prefer the look of my $250 Pebble Time Steel.  The leather on the Apple Watch actually looks kinda chintzy, and the gold is way too shiny for my tastes.
  • Speaking of surprising things, walking past a Mennonite woman piloting an electronic wheelchair via an app on her iPhone was my moment of Zen for the day.
  • Hit the grocery on the way home.
  • Since getting home, I’ve applied for a job and done some light cleaning.  I’m making dinner tonight, too.  Chorizo Mac and Cheese!

Tonight: Walking Dead!  Assuming, like, my son doesn’t jump at me from around a corner and put me in a coma or something.  I’m naming my disease Reverse Hulk Syndrome until someone comes up with something better.