ninanevermore

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“First my dog and then my grocery store,” I said to The Carney, a.k.a., the Angel of Death, a.k.a. Jim, “You keep nickeling and diming me, man.”

The Carney didn’t even look at me, though he did crack a crooked grin on the side of his mouth that wasn’t holding his cigarette. Being just slightly younger than Time (who he once told me he admires and considers to be a mentor), he’s been around long enough to know that pissing and moaning is part of human nature. It's something people need to do from time to time in order to make ourselves feel better by wallowing in our own misery for a bit. The demise of my 16-year-old dog and the closing down of one of the last family-owned-and-operated grocery stores in southeast Texas are of little concern to Jim. He’s seen it all – literally – millions upon millions of times before. Still, he tried to sound sympathetic. Not enough people give him credit for it, but Death has a strong streak of decency.

( Dog gone it. )

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My husband removed the old dog’s bed when he buried her while I was at work. I’m not sure what he did with it. The towel I used to cover her I found her that morning so my little boy would not see her and be disturbed, I found in the washing machine. Her bowls of food and water, untouched in the last few days of her life stayed untouched until the weekend, when I tossed out the food and dumped the water down the sink. I washed them so that they gleamed like new, along with the rubber mat that sat beneath them to protect the floor. There is a no-kill shelter in my little town that I plan to donate the rest of her food to, as soon as I get around to dropping it off there. I set the large blocks of wood we used to elevate her bowls out in the garage. As she grew weak and frail she had trouble bending down to eat and drink. We raised them so that they were level with her chest, and this seemed to help.

( Putting things away. )

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Sandy doesn't look like Sandy to me anymore, unless I look closely at her face. Her best feature was always her long dark brown hair, which is now a rather odd shade of blonde. One of her daughters is a cosmetology student and she uses Sandy for practice. Her hair's current artificial yellow color was the result of a brick-red dye job that Sandy didn't like, so her daughter tried to go with a blond to fix it. The red and the blond hair dye colors, when mixed together, made a unique, not-commercially-available-for-understandable-reasons shade of yellow reminiscent of a Crayola crayon. When Sandy takes off her cowboy hat you can see about an inch of her natural salt-and-pepper colored hair growing out of her scalp.

Sandy doesn't mind the yellow color so much. She says when her daughter gets a chance, there's no telling what color her hair will be next.

( Hair and There )

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I woke up an hour late this morning but still made it out of the house pretty close to on time. It turns out I didn't need to rush so much, since my babysitter also overslept this morning.

Once thing I have to get used to with paying a person to watch my son in her home as opposed to dropping him off at a commercial daycare center is that instead of being greeted by a bright-eyed woman who has showered, dressed herself, fixed her hair, had breakfast and downed whatever caffeinated beverages she needs to get herself moving, is I drop my son off with a bleary eyed person still in her pajamas. I am not just sympathetic, I am jealous since that is how I, myself, would look at that time of day if I didn't have to go to work. On the weekends, sometimes it's noon or later before I bother getting dressed. Carlie's mom confessed that she sets her alarm so that she wakes up just enough to stumble to the couch to pass back out so that she wakes up when I knock. Neither she nor her daughters are early risers.

Only this morning, she forgot to stumble to the couch, so she stayed in bed. Her bedroom is in the back of the house, far from the doorbell. It must have seemed very soft and comfortable to her.

( I'm not exactly opportunity, but I can knock pretty hard. )

I'm busy this week. No time to write. Just so you all don't forget about me, though, here are a couple of pictures of my Dad's foundling Schnauzer for y'all to look at.

Meet Hank:

( These were taken shortly before he was taken to be fixed. He went along with it, though he didn't think he was broken. He's confided to me that next time anyone offers to fix anything on him, he's going to ask some questions first. )

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about my husband's dead dog and how she helped me find the box of checks that had been missing for a week. She had them, actually. You know how dogs are. Just because she has been dead and cremated for the last 10 years doesn't mean she can't wander off with things that aren't hers.

To be fair, I don't think the dead dog actually took the box of checks. I think it was my year-and-a half-old son who did. But the dead dog wound up with them.

( Here girl, fetch! )

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about my dog and how she is slowly adjust to having my son around the house. She is 12 years old and set in her ways, and was an only dog for so very long.

( Invasion of The Man Pup )