Muzzle it

Last Tuesday, Leo and I were out for our early morning walk. It was a beautiful morning with mild temperatures and a bit of pink sun peeking out from the clouds. We were in the home stretch: He had pooped and we were heading for home.

Thoroughly relaxed and content, I was contemplating what I would have for breakfast (Cereal or bagel? Coffee or tea?) when Leo lunged for a black plastic bag in the grass. I gave him a quick yank but it was too late: The bag was firmly clenched in his mouth, bits of unidentifiable meat poking out, wriggling maggots falling to the ground.

I watched in horror as he chomped and swallowed, chomped and swallowed, unable to summon the bravery to try and grab the bag from his mouth. Those foreboding teeth, that growl, those writhing maggots….no, no, no. All I could do was yell and scream and demand that he drop the bag, to no avail.

Judging by the maggots, and the stench, I knew the meat was well beyond rotten. But that wasn’t what worried me: The plastic bag, about the size of a doggie bag (ironically enough), had been knotted closed. I worried that the bag might get stuck in his intestine somewhere along the line. This was bad, very bad.

I hoped that maybe if I walked him a bit more, maybe he would just vomit the whole mess up. Maybe.

We walked. And walked. He appeared perfectly unfazed by the garbage that must be roiling in his belly. When we got home, he assumed his usual position in the kitchen, by the counter, waiting for me to serve his breakfast.

What to do? What to do? I fretted. And fretted. Should I feed him? No. Would he just throw up all over the rug eventually? Maybe. Should I take him to the vet? Probably.

But I had so much work to do and it would cost so much money and I’d have to drive him in my pickup truck, which was always a disaster (he insists on either lying in my lap, blocking my vision; or sitting up on the passenger seat and flying into the windshield whenever I make a stop). Urg. What to do?

I finally decided to call the vet, explain the situation and ask for their advice. They suggested I bring him in immediately.

“Please don’t cost $400 like last time,” I silently pleaded. (Last time being when he gobbled down some roadkill and pierced the inside of his mouth with a bone, which then formed a huge infected abscess and had to be drained, under anesthesia. Very pricey procedure, that one.)

So I sent a crazy-dog-lady frantic e-mail to work (“Dog emergency! Back later!”), loaded Leo into the truck (who, though excited to be going for a ride, was quite miffed that I had neglected to feed him his breakfast) and sped off.

After a short wait, the vet came in, heard my sad story, and took Leo into the examination room. He came back a few minutes later and led me into the exam room, explaining that he had given Leo some morphine to calm him (Where’s mine?) and an injection that would make him very nauseous.

It was almost comical back there: Dogs were flopped everywhere. To my left, a Husky was on an exam table, under anesthesia, having its teeth cleaned. To Leo’s immediate left, there was a Great Dane passed out on an exam table, a person in scrubs hunched over it.

And there was Leo on the floor, chained to the Great Dane’s exam table, his head hanging over a bowl with a vet tech encouraging him to “Let it up, Leo.” Visions of myself in high school, having had too much to drink, my head hanging over a toilet bowl, came floating back.

“Ewwww,” I said, and returned to sit quietly in the waiting room.

A few more minutes passed and then, bursting forth from the exam room, a chorus of “Oh! Gross! What is it? Gross!” I came back in just in time to see the vet tech hand the bowl to the vet. He shoved it in my direction. “Look familiar?”

The stench was staggering. In the bowl was a slab of gray mystery meat and a very slimy pile of black plastic.

“Yep, that’s it. Bag and all.”

They ushered Leo to a cage so they could keep an eye on him throughout the day, and I rushed home to work. Later that evening, I came back to pick him up. He was fine, his usual wiggle butt self. The bill was $158, not so bad after all. We drove home without incident. I fed him his dinner and put in a couple more hours of work.

Oh, and I bought a muzzle. Leo isn't gonna like this.

Favorite Peeps

Woe is me. It’s been almost another month since I last wrote and our kitchen still isn’t quite finished. It’s the little things like window treatments and trim work that are waiting for our attention—and that which prevent me from taking photos and showing off our project to the world. Just know that we are no longer living on microwave meals and that some day (some day soon) you’ll get to see a glimpse of our masterpiece.

Til then, let’s take a look at what findingDulcinea has been up to. We’ve been churning out some “Happy Birthday” features on some very interesting people. In fact, we’ve covered some of my favorite people—writers, musicians and pioneers of all kinds. Here’s a sampling:

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the famous “Little House on the Prairie” books, was one of my favorite authors as a child. But after a friend urged me to read her books again as an adult, I was charmed by Wilder once more. “The Long Winter” blew me away with her account of life during a particularly hard winter in South Dakota. Wilder astounds with a storytelling ability that’s never sentimentalized or overwrought but thoroughly genuine and yet suitable for children.

In high school, I was cleaning out my great grandfather’s attic when I found a book entitled “We.” Written in 1927, it was Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography, filled with photos of the daring pilot. I read the book in one sitting, wrote a paper about it for a history class and developed a crush on Charles. It was 1986 and I had a crush on Charles Lindbergh, just a few decades too late.

A happy accident also led me to Zora Neale Hurston. My father, seemingly at a loss to find a Christmas gift one year, gave me “Spunk,” a collection of short stories by Hurston; I was hooked. Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Fla., “the first black township” and went on to write “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” There’s a Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville, not far from where my husband grew up, that I hope to attend some day.

An old neighbor-turned friend turned me on to Django Reinhardt. Names don’t usually stick in my head but Django’s did; my neighbor even suggested that I name my dog Leo “Django” instead, but Leo was dubbed Leo at the Humane Society, so I decided to stick with it. Months after first hearing Django’s music, I stumbled onto a Django Reinhardt tribute concert. Different musicians performed Reinhardt’s music at a lovely old church in downtown Portland. It was one of the early "courtship” dates my husband and I had together, and it was sublime.

I'm baaaack

Wow -- I've been a real slacker here. Work has been crazy busy and we've been renovating our kitchen. But I'll save that for another post.

The real story is that the company I work for, findingDulcinea, is launching a new and better search engine called SweetSearch.

It uses Google's technology to search only credible Web sites chosen by a team of Internet research experts. For most Web searches, SweetSearch will get you the information you're looking for a lot faster than other search engines will, and for the rest, Google's results are just a click away. Try it out and see for yourself. And please let me know what you think. We are constantly improving the product, so I'd really love to have your feedback. Please bookmark it and make it your regular search engine, and share it with everyone you know.

My future employment depends on it!

Need Holiday Gift Ideas? Consider Canine Reads

Here’s a little push for a book I read recently called “The Dogs Who Found Me: What I’ve Learned From the Pets Who Were Left Behind” by Ken Foster.

I stumbled on the book while browsing around on the Powell’s Books Web site and had to have it. The author shares his stories of dog adoptions, from New York City to a Mississippi truck stop, and details the way that dogs tend to choose us more than we may choose them.

That wasn’t the case with me and Leo. I fell in love with his photo online and mooned over him for months before I made the trek to the Oregon Humane Society to adopt him. I had decided he would be mine before I even met him, and it never even occurred to me that he might not like me.

As it turned out, our first meeting was rather anticlimactic. He was sleeping, as I detailed in an earlier post, and when we retired to the playroom to get to know each other better, he seemed more interested in playing with my neighbor, who had driven me to the shelter.

It wasn’t until we got home, to my little two-room apartment, that he really acknowledged me. He first made a thorough inspection of the premises, sniffing along the floors and walls. He refused to eat or drink anything, but made a great show of scratching the floor near his dishes, as though to mark the area as his own.

I sat on the couch, watching him intently. When his inspection was complete, he came over to the couch and launched himself into my lap. There he whimpered and lathered my face with kisses, as though to thank me for giving him a place to live.

Months later, I discovered this book online, “Tails From Katrina.” It’s a collection of photos of the cats and dogs that were rescued by the Oregon Humane Society and brought back to the OHS shelter in Portland. I made a beeline to Powell’s and found the book.

There, on page 15, was Leo.

Leo's 15 minutes of fame in that book is one of my greatest treasures. Either of these books would make great holiday gift ideas for the crazy dog lady in your life.

Trick or Treat

We survived another Halloween—this year with a surplus of candy. (Treat!) In past years, there’s been a mad rush at the door and we’ve had to ration candy toward the end of the night. (Trick.) Not so this year. (Treat!) It was fairly quiet and with friends over to visit (our summer houseguest Ripple’s people) who helped man the door, it was more fun: I had time to sit back, sip on wine, and toss down candy. (Treat!) Unfortunately, wine and too much candy made for a nasty stomach situation later on. (Trick.)

I didn’t bother to dress Leo in his Elvis costume, or even put the jack-o-lantern handkerchief on him (the one that the groomer sent him home in a few weeks ago). Why bother? We had to shut Leo and Ripple (who got along just fine this time) in the kitchen because every time a trick-or-treater knocked on the door, both dogs went berserk and barked up a storm.

Could Leo read my facial expression and tell that I was annoyed when he barked at our little candy-seeking visitors? Though a study cited in this article on findingDulcinea might suggest yes, I would probably say no.

He does respond to my emotions—that I really do believe—but I think he picks up on auditory cues. When he hears my husband and me arguing, he’ll come and sit by my side, as though to guard me. To fully understand the significance of this, you have to understand that Leo doesn’t budge from his couch and fuzzy blanket and pillow but for two things: the suggestion of a walk or a morsel to eat. The fact that a verbal argument inspires him to leave the comfort of his fuzzy nest and seek me out is remarkable.

Still, his guarding me is probably more about protecting the source of his walks and meals and fuzzy blanket and pillow--that would be me--and less about being in tune with my emotional needs.

He is a male dog, after all. (!)

Leos in the News

My friend Stan sent me this story over the summer: it’s about a pit bull named Leo who was rescued from Michael Vick’s dog fighting ring and rehabilitated to serve as a therapy dog to cancer patients.

Though I’ve always been a bit intimidated by pit bulls and swore that I would never have one, reading about this Leo made me reexamine my attitudes. Here’s a pit bull that was trained to be a fighter and yet he’s now a silly love bug in a clown collar making friends wherever he goes.

Chows have a bad reputation, too, yet my Leo is a sweetie pie—once you’ve earned his trust and gotten acquainted with his personal quirks, that is. So maybe I can’t write off all pit bulls, either.

And speaking of Michael Vick, my dear mother-in-law sent my Leo a Michael Vick chew toy. Gotta love her sense of humor! Fortunately for this chew toy, Leo isn’t much of a chewer (unless it’s edible, or something that belongs to a baby).

On the other end of the doggie spectrum is this Leo, a tiny terrier mix no bigger than a cat, who stood guard over a litter of kittens during a house fire in Australia. This little guy had to be revived with oxygen and a heart massage after guarding the kittens in thick smoke. He’s now back at home and hailed as a hero. Awwwww….

Little lap dogs usually annoy me—they all seem to suffer from the Napoleon Syndrome and can be so yappy and nippy. But I’d make an exception for this little Leo any day.

Scary Movie Time

There’s nothing I like better than to turn off the lights and curl up on the couch with snacks at hand to watch a movie. Halloween is no exception, only the movies have to be scary.

I recently wrote a feature on findingDulcinea recommending “Five Scary Movies for Halloween.” Writing about the movies made me think about them again and, in the case of “The Haunting,” inspired me to rent the movie for the first time.

Be assured: I think all of the movies in the article are scary. But by far the scariest movie on the list has to be “The Shining.”

I first saw “The Shining” when I was in college. My school, Bard College, had a Friday and a Sunday night tradition of showing films in what we called the old gym. It was an old gymnasium—the school’s original, I’m sure—with a stage and a screen and ratty old couches and easy chairs strewn about.

Bard was pretty lawless then, and we were allowed to bring in our own food and booze and smoke to our heart’s (lung’s?) content. I arrived to see “The Shining” feeling rather tipsy and armed with a paper grocery bag full of popcorn. How many batches did I pop up in my dorm room? A LOT.

Being young and foolish and wanting to seem mature and sophisticated, my drink of choice back then was gin and tonic. I had mixed myself a generous portion and then transferred the supersized cocktail into the half liter bottle that the tonic came in, thinking it would not only last the duration of the movie, but make for easy slugging straight from the bottle.

I was right.

Alas, much of the movie was a blur. But I do remember laughing out loud, trying to focus my blurred vision, and stumbling out of the movie drunkenly declaring, “That wasn’t scary!” Seems booze and scary movies don’t mix.

Years later, I decided to give “The Shining” another chance. I rented it and watched it at home—alone. It scared the bejeezus out of me! I was a puddle quivering under a blanket on the couch. I had to pause the movie several times in order to get a grip on myself.

Just writing about the movie for the findingDulcinea article creeped me right out. Sitting at my computer in my office, all alone in the house, remembering scenes from the movie…it made me uneasy.

So I had to rent the movie yet again. It arrived from Netflix today. I can’t wait to watch it tonight, with my husband—without gin and tonic.