Category: Life

In Notes From an Eclectic Mind: Snakebit, Rana writes about rattlesnakes. When we moved to Colorado, I had a live and let live, snakes are our friends approach, but three snake bit dogs later, I lost my tolerance. Lacking a shot gun, Jack drove over the one that menaced me in the driveway several years ago.

I think I may have discovered the best way to give Lody pills. I had cut a chunk of hotdog, and noticed that the tablet was long and somewhat spindle-shaped. I used a skewer to piece the middle of the hotdog, and pushed the tablet in. Lody gulped it down like a treat while I watched closely to make sure she swallowed everything.

p. I’ve been encouraged recently by the move to tasty drugs for dogs, but a lot of medications used for pets were originally developed for people.

This photo of the boardwalk gives another view of the intense green of the Toronto Islands.

Lody spent the night in the mudroom with none of the unpleasantness that I described
yesterday. She did complain several times, but the mudroom is sufficiently far from the bedroom that I was able to harden my heart and ignore her. The antibiotic tablets I am giving her are huge, and a challenge to get down her. I am good at giving pills to most dogs, but the long jaw and small throat of a collie can make it difficult when they don’t feel like cooperating.

You know your day has been odd when you don’t get around to brushing your hair until 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. We got home late Wednesday night to find a note from our critter sitter saying she thought our collie Lody had diarrhea. Both dogs seemed fine and happy to see us. Yesterday Lody soiled in the kitchen, so I didn’t give her dinner. She got me up in the middle of the night, and was distressed enough that I regretfully shut her in the mudroom. She soiled in the mudroom, and I panicked when I found blood and mucous in the stool. Since this was about 5:00 am, I knew it would be a long wait before I could talk to my vet at nine. What I found in the mudroom this morning was very similar to what I found from our last collie Siobhan twenty-four hours before she died.
Continue reading Odd Day

After I walked out of the airport, I paused to breath the fresh Colorado air. As major cities go, Toronto doesn’t smell _bad_, but it doesn’t smell like Colorado either.
Continue reading Back Home

Jack and I just watched the “Toronto Blue Jays”:http://www.bluejays.com win over the New York Yankees 8 to 1. Toronto’s pitcher creamed the Yankees. Jack’s happiness at the Toronto win was tempered by the fact that the Yankees’ relief pitcher was one of his in the fantasy baseball league in which he plays.

In a Globe and Mail article called “Genre in a Time Warp”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030901/SCIFI/TPEntertainment/TopStories , Hal Niedzviecki discussions his impressions of current science fiction fandom.

I walked down to the waterfront this morning, and drank my first cup of coffee overlooking Lake Ontario. I’ve been successful in staying on Mountain Daylight Time, keeping my bedtime at eleven or twelve o’clock, which works well for a science fiction convention. As a result, I have been getting out of the hotel room at what seems a shockingly late time of the morning for me.
Continue reading Waterfront

I met “Anita Rowling”:http://www.anitarowland.com/ this morning. She was walking out of the Internet Lounge as I walked in and I recognized her from her weblog photo. We had coffee and compared fan histories, and talked about weblogging and the fact that both our husbands are named Jack.
Continue reading Torcon