I am still trying to catch up our latest happenings here; we’ve been so busy the last few weeks that I haven’t had much time for the site or the Blog.

Lots of trips to the vet, as usual; Wednesday had her surgery to remove her bladder stones yesterday and is home recovering. She seems to be feeling OK, but is still on pain medication. The vet sent her home with one of those soft blue E-collars and she looks sort of like a clown with it on…I’ll have to get a picture. Since she is now on a special diet, and so is Olive, (more on that in a moment) we have decided it is time to get tough and take away the ‘all-you-can-eat kitty buffet’. We’re starting with structured meals of dry food and once things are stabilized plan on getting them onto a bit more natural diet. The cats are not amused. If I stop posting log entries after this it can be assumed that we were murdered in our sleep in a bloody feline revolt.

Olive–who we’ve always referred to as ‘the healthy one’ up till now–has been having an outbreak of skin lesions and then suddenly developed a very inflamed, ulcerated anal area. Our new vet feels that, based on the symptoms and her history of having adverse reactions to everything including Benadryl, that she has an autoimmune condition. He thinks it is Lupus. He probably was surprised that Joy was relatively unfazed by this news; but with the year we have had with these animals, very little would shock us at this point. Olive is now on Prednisone and trying a ‘low allergen’ diet. Luna, our new rescue rat, also went to the vet this week to be treated for her mites, and is feeling a lot better. We’ll need to wait on introducing her and Willow until the treatment is finished.

Also on the veterinary front, we found out that one of the vets at the clinic we used to go to was arrested for animal cruelty for bludgeoning his neighbor’s miniature Dachshund to death when it came on his property! I am not going to mention any names here, but the story may still be up at the Dallas Morning News website. We were shocked that a vet could do something like this — and apparently it is not the first time he’s killed a dog, the last time it was a Lab and he claimed it had lunged at him. This was not the vet we used to see, but he did do Simon’s first femoral head ostectomy. Yet another reason we are glad we quit that place.

Last weekend we took the dogs to White Rock Lake Park. They had a good time except it was awful hot, even at dusk when we went there. At one end there is a concrete ramp into the water (I guess it is a boat launch?) and we took the dogs down onto it to cool themselves. Lilly promptly slipped on the green fuzzy algae that coated the ramp and fell on her side in the water. She wasn’t hurt, and decided that it was so nice and cool in the water that she just laid there on the ramp with only her neck sticking out for several minutes. It’s the first time I have ever seen her stay in the water willingly. Lindsy, on the other hand, loves water…she couldn’t wait to get in. She marched right out onto the ramp, walked off the side, and promply disappeared! Apparently there is a pretty abrupt drop-off. Joy reeled her in (she was on her flexi of course) and she was OK, just a little startled. I don’t think she’s ever been in deep water before. She snorted out water for several minutes and looked rather embarrassed about the whole incident.

Lilly also found a big patch of nasty, smelly black mud in a ditch near the lake. I don’t know what demons possessed her to wade into it up to her belly, but this resulted in her again being taken back to the ramp to rinse her legs off. Both dogs also got baths as soon as they got home and my car still smells a little swampy. Overall they had a great time and would have had even more fun if the weather was cooler. I can hardly wait for fall. There is a ton of stuff to do with the dogs here, so different from where we moved from…