Living Large In Our Little House

This one's for you, Cal! Dale's potting/utility table

Sorry for the absence, we have been busy at Our Little House get­ting taxes ready (yuck), work­ing (would rather be play­ing, but hav­ing work is good), Dale’s been fight­ing a cold (dou­ble yuck) and we’ve been deal­ing with Abbi’s injury and Molly’s heart prob­lem (triple yuck).

Perhaps it’s the dis­trac­tions or tir­ing of the cold weather – I can’t call it Cabin Fever this year as it hasn’t been that cold – but it is win­ter and not spring or sum­mer, but my mind hasn’t been too cre­ative with regards to com­ing up with posts for Living Large.

I would rather give you sub­stance rather than dri­vel, so I decided to take a cou­ple of weeks off. I intended on replac­ing writ­ten posts this week with some pho­tos I thought you would enjoy, but the week got away.

When a cou­ple of peo­ple in our com­mu­nity con­tacted me this week to make sure we were still alive and kickin’ here at Our Little House, I real­ized I needed to get it in gear.

Thank you so much for your con­cern, I truly love you all!

This first photo is for Cal, espe­cially, who wanted to see a photo of the potting/utility table Dale built from scrap pieces of pal­let wood.

I’ll be back Tuesday with more pho­tos, I promise!

What do you think of Dale's first table?

Dakota

I apol­o­gize for my unex­pected absence from the blog on Tuesday. It has been the “Week of the Dog” around here.

Dakota, our Doxie/Beagle mix is hav­ing ter­ri­ble prob­lems with her aller­gies again. This past spring, she dug her eyes so badly that she actu­ally cre­ated what the vet called a “divot” on her cornea. It took us sev­eral weeks for us to get that to heal so she wouldn’t lose her eyesight.

This past week­end, she began dig­ging every­where (except her eyes, which now required two med­ica­tions, twice daily). By Monday, she had scratched her­self raw and by the time the vet could see her on Monday after­noon, she was bleed­ing from her ears, her neck….you get the idea. She was mis­er­able, we were mis­er­able and it was a mess.

Fast for­ward to this morn­ing and she seems to be heal­ing, the allergy meds and antibi­otics to clear the bac­te­r­ial infec­tion from scratch­ing are start­ing to take effect and she is act­ing more herself.

The vet has no idea what sud­denly caused this out­break, but sus­pects it was a diet change more than a month ago. We switched from one high qual­ity food to one I felt was even bet­ter. While they all seem to enjoy the new food, Dakota’s sen­si­tive allergy sys­tem didn’t, so back to the old food for her.

Now, Abbi has severely cut her paw and she will not allow me to put any­thing on it (she imme­di­ately licks it off), so I fore­see another trip to the vet in our future.

We hate it when our dogs are ill or in pain and can­not tell us what is wrong.

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When the weather last Saturday was a warm 70+ degrees, we decided to take the dogs for a walk.

My mom used to use the expres­sion, “Go out­side and get the stink blown off of you,” and that was partly what we were try­ing to do on Saturday – literally.

The night before, Chloe and Abbi, who have taken up the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion that love to roam the woods, got skunked.

Emma, who also used to roam with Sade, got hit once.

While it usu­ally only takes once before dogs real­ize what dam­age these black and white stinkers can inflict, once is more than enough, espe­cially in a lit­tle house.

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This time, I only intended on spon­sor­ing a dog from the shel­ter to res­cue, but as Living Large read­ers have quoted John Lennon so many times: “Life is some­thing that hap­pens when you’re mak­ing other plans.”

We have a new mem­ber of our fam­ily at Our Little House. Right now, she is offi­cially a fos­ter, but well, you know….

The res­cue doesn’t name their dogs, as they don’t want a dog to get famil­iar with a name and then have it changed, but I can’t stand not nam­ing them, so Abbi it is. I wanted to name her Annabel Lee, after my favorite Edgar Allen Poe poem, but Dale thought it too creepy.

Abbi is a fence jumper/digger. She was given up because she wouldn’t be con­tained in a sub­ur­ban yard and when she got to res­cue, they had to build her a spe­cial run as she wouldn’t be con­tained there either.

Last week, she got out of her spe­cial run and killed the son’s duck. In addi­tion to deal­ing with her son’s grief, the owner of the res­cue knew now that this poor dog couldn’t be in the sub­urbs or on a farm.

Our Little House, sit­u­ated near nei­ther, is perfect.

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