Tiny and the Grape

So it's been a week.

The southward turn came Tuesday when I realized we hadn't received our tax packets from our accountant, which includes our meeting date. So I did the reasonable thing.

I called. On Tuesday, Jan. 27.

And am I glad we did!

We usually meet with our accountant the first Saturday of February. We've been in that rotation for years, and we don't jump out of it. One year, I was in the hospital or the ER or something, and I sent an adult child by proxy, if only to keep our place in line.

So when I called, the person at the other end of the line explained the many tax-related changes this year, which took longer to get the packets out. 

Then I asked for my appointment date and time, assuming she would tell me February 7.

No, the appointment is January 31.

Saturday.

This Saturday. In less than four days at the time of the call.

While I was already committed to the author fair at Critical Grind.

"Is that a problem?" she asked.

And then she very nicely moved the appointment to later in the afternoon to eliminate the conflict.

And then Rebekah and I have spent every night until very late at night (because we still don't have those tax packets yet), getting ready for our meeting with the accountant.

That brings us to last night's adventure.

It's already been a stressful week, and everyone was at sixes and sevens with each other when "it" occurred.

Rebekah was standing in front of the refrigerator moving grapes from the bag to the bowl to head back upstairs to her computer when a single grape hit the floor.

"You dropped a grape," I told her.

We both looked. Only a stem.

DAMN IT!

I ran into the living room  where Tiny (who wasn't even in the kitchen when Rebekah opened the refrigerator), was polishing off the last of the grape.

Now anyone who's owned a dog knows grapes are highly toxic to dogs - and there's no antidote to the toxin.

Treatment is usually a combination of inducing vomiting, maybe using charcoal, IV fluids to keep the kidneys flushed (necessitating a 48 to 72-hour hospital stay), bloodwork to monitor kidney fuction, and hope for the best.

Rebekah called the ER to let them know Tiny was on his way.

Timothy and Daniel - both of whom had late nights at work last night - took Tiny to the ER so Rebekah and I could do taxes. The ER staff took Tiny back immediately.

Tiny is one really, really, really lucky Pembroke Welsh Corgi.

Because we moved Tiny to the ER (almost) as quickly as Tiny snatched the grape from the kitchen floor, the vomiting brought up the entire grape, along with Tiny's only meal of the day because he refused all food and water that day until Daniel came home.

Yes, Tiny has a complicated relationship with food. But that's a whole other story.

Although I did keep fuming all night on how Tiny wouldn't eat his very nice (and expensive) kibble, but couldn't wait to devour a poisonous grape.

The veterinarian said no further treatment was needed because the grape hadn't yet left Tiny's stomach.

They did baseline bloodwork, finished the night off with a shot of Cerenia so Tiny wouldn't keep throwing up, and sent him home - in his crate, not a small box of ashes.

Tiny ate up his kibble last night with Daniel sitting beside him.

And then he settled in for a forty-five minute cuddle session with me, even though the next day was approaching, and I still had to take care of Faith.

We still don't have the tax packets.

But we should be ready for the accountant on Saturday, although we will need two more long nights after work in preparation.

But all's well that ends well.

Because we still have a corgi named Tiny.

Kid's Wish For A Corgi Puppy Comes True | Dodo Kids

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It's Dog!

When my twenty-year-old son Timothy, now studying culinary arts, was a baby, he hated meat. However, he did like dogs--as pets--so we could induce him to eat a slice of chicken or a small, toddler-sized hamburger, if we told him it was dog.

When Melissa, Bryony's main character, travels back to the Victorian age, she is less dismayed by the vampires she encounters than the unfamilar food that appears on her plate: pickled beef tongue, turtle, boiled calves head, mashed turnips, goose giblet soup, and tea with egg in it.

Perhaps she should might have been more open-minded if she hadn't known what she was eating, if John had, perhaps, renamed certain foods to make them more palatable to modern, adolescent tastes. Then again, it was probably impossible to fool her into believing that mushroom ketchup was exactly the same as tomato ketchup.

Are you adventurous about eating? How do you react to new and strange foods?

Scooter, Part One

One of the oldest scenes in Bryony is when Melissa's younger brother, Brian, acquires a small tan and white dog. Three years ago, when I began writing Bryony as a novella birthday present for my son Timothy, then only seventeen, I impulsively named the dog, Scooter.

Scooter was the name of our terrier mix who, at the time, was battling kidney disease. Since I assumed Timothy was the only person who would read Bryony, I added the name to make him smile.

Less than eight weeks later, Scooter was dead. When I ripped the novella apart to create the novel, I had mixed feelings about keeping that name for Brian's dog--and so did my children.

Brian's Scooter was smaller than our Scooter, so, in my mind, I did not confuse the two dogs. Yet, in the end, I decided to keep the name, because it now also belonged to the little dog in the story and because I wanted to immortalize the dog that brought us years of joy.