I received this letter from the University of Missouri; click on it to see it better, or press ctrl/+ to make it larger.
I have to admit it made me teary-eyed to read it. But what a sweet thing for our veterinary clinic to do.
Good grief, it just hit me this morning that I was putting my address on here for the world to see; now that approximately 150 people will be able to go to Google maps and find me, I've blocked out the address... which was slightly wrong, by the way. But not wrong enough!
I spend lots of my time looking for her. A while ago I searched and searched; standing in the guest bedroom, I could hear breathing, but couldn't see a dog. Finally I looked under the bedspread at the foot of the bed:
Seriously. Iris has issues. She likes to be totally out of sight.
She doesn't shadow me from room to room as much now; I guess she has decided I'm not going to disappear within the house. She does worry, though, if I go outside without her.
Her kennel cough is MUCH better; I'd say in another day or two, all symptoms will be gone.
She prefers to quench her thirst at the toilet, rather than at her bowl. I'm OK with that.
One of my big concerns was that I'd have trouble keeping her off the furniture, but she seems to understand what I want from her now; twice I heard the sound of something getting OFF my recliner, ran in to see what was going on and saw my chair rocking and Iris cowering behind the kitchen table. Obviously she had momentarily forgotten the rules, hopped in the chair, realized what she was doing, jumped down, and ran and hid behind the table, hoping I wouldn't find her and yell at her. (My yelling consists of a sharp "No!")
She is well house-trained; there have been no accidents.
She still shows no interest when Cliff and I are eating.
At this point, my main concern is how she'll get along with other dogs; I watched another episode of "Dog Whisperer", and once again Iris stalked, barked and lunged at the dogs on TV. Once she's entirely over the kennel cough, we'll introduce her to Hawkeye, my daughter's dog. I want to try her out with a big dog before we get her together with my sister-in-law's mini-doxie.
I had always heard that dogs can't make out television images, but one of these days I'll make a video of Iris attacking the TV dogs, just to prove that she does it.
Here's a Baltimore Oriole at my hummingbird feeder; notice the hummingbird on the right, waiting for the interloper to leave. I have seen a couple of them eating grape jelly at the oriole feeder, too. This is the first year I've had orioles hanging around. They're flighty and easily scared, so it's hard to get a picture of them.
