New Year's Fun

Our new year's weekend was a lot of fun. Todd and I headed up to my family's cabin in Nancy Lake with our two dogs, followed by Cameron, Sarah and their two dogs. Yep, you read that right, no kids!

It was pretty (ok, really) cold up there, but I had fun staying in and relaxing. We played scattegories and cranium, and watched some Will Farrell classics. Of course, I took my Kindle and read a lot, too. Todd had fun finding some incredibly hideous clothes to model for us, including a shirt that no one has any idea what it means. Pretty sure the best quote of the weekend, though, was while we were playing Cranium. It was a clue that had to be drawn, the word was "house husband" and as Todd was drawing it, Sarah blurts out "BROOMING PENIS"!

You know you're jealous of our awesomeness

Poor Jake. He's such a laid back guy, it's easy to torture him

Jake thinking he was tiny enough to fit into
Duncan's little dog bed.

Beautiful, but really cold

Awesome golf shirt Todd found. I helped complete this
look with the hat.

Mini table tennis....across the cabin

You'd never know from this picture, but he was
the only sober one in the bunch

Broken glasses fixed just in time for midnight

Poor Duncan, he has no real snout to speak of so
holding glasses on his head was not so easy

And Jakers again, wondering when we were going
to just go to bed and leave him alone

Here's the shirt no one knows what it means. "Final Entry"

You just had to be there.

Gorilla Park

Down the bike trail from our house is a little park with just one swing and two big gorilla statues. This used to be across from a bunch of AK Housing apartments, which were all recently torn down. Any time we drive down C Street, Mason talks about the excavators, and I've been promising him to go see them for weeks.

Today after breakfast all five of us (three people and two pups) went for a walk. Here's how Mason describes how to get to "gorilla park". Go down street, over bridge, by the water, by the other bridge, under the tunnel, over next bridge and there they are!

We had a lot of fun on the tire swing and of course walking around the excavators and the loader. Mason never ceases to amaze me with his knowledge and memory of construction equipment. He knows all the correct terms, and will absolutely correct you if you call something the wrong name.

Checking out the gorillas

Fun on the tire swing

Look at those tracks!

Mason and Daddy in the big scoop

Mason brought his little excavator along, too

All of us in the excavator bucket

The dogs, waiting patiently 

Our happy boy

Sweet Girl

This past February, my sweet Sierra girl turned 10. I cannot believe I've had this dog for ten years! It seems like a lifetime ago that I brought her home, and in many ways, it really was. So many things have changed in my life, but she has been through it all with me, and she's taken (most) all of it in stride. I still don't think she'll ever forgive me for bringing home a pug puppy a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure we made up for that once we brought Mason home for her.

Indestructible

Our other Christmas drama had to do with our pug, Duncan. Our family does a kind of potluck-style dinner when we all get together. It's great, everyone brings something so no one gets stuck having to cook everything all day. For Christmas we were responsible for the turkey and the bread.

I actually really love making bread. It's such a process, but I think it's so fun. I decided to make a braided Challah loaf. I mixed everything together, kneaded the dough and set it by a baseboard heater upstairs (behind a closed door where it could get nice and warm). Punched it down and let it rise again. Punched it down and rolled it out into four pieces, then braided them together. Then I put the braided dough back to rise a final time...and apparently didn't close the door all the way. Next thing I know the stupid pug has eaten almost half of the raw bread dough. Grrr! My beautiful bread was ruined!

I actually didn't think much of it at the time, other than being mad Duncan ruined my bread and also mad because he's so stupid (he really is, he'll eat anything). I figured he would have a belly ache, probably throw up, or have diarrhea (or both) and that would be it. So out into his kennel he went.

The next morning, after Todd fed him and went to work, I noticed he threw up his food. This didn't really surprise me much. What bothered me was the fact that the poor dog was tripping over his own two feet, stumbling around the house, literally walking into things. Then I noticed that my normally svelte pug had quite the round little tummy. It hit me like a ton of bricks...FRICK! The dough kept rising IN HIS STOMACH! Then for the second ton of bricks...DOUBLE FRICK! The yeast fermented, and he is drunk!!!

I immediately got on the phone with Diamond Animal Hospital (not our normal vet, but they have a 24 hour emergency room there). They said I needed to bring him in right away to be seen because the alcohol poisoning can be toxic to a dog. Ugh. Great. I had just gotten Mason down for his nap, so my aunt was kind enough to come over to the house while I took Duncan to the vet.

The moment we walked into the vet office they took us straight back (there were probably 5 people in the waiting room ahead of us). The vet did a couple x-rays of Duncan's abdomen to see if he was passing the dough or not.

For those of you reading this that work in x-ray, I'm sure your jaw just dropped (like mine did, too). For those of you who don't work in x-ray, Duncan's stomach is the huge thing taking up most of his abdomen. Basically, the picture on the top is like you were looking at him laying on his back. The black at the top is his lungs (air), the white in the middle of that is his heart. Just below this on your right (Duncan's left) is a huge oval shaped fuzzy thing...that would be his stomach full of raw bread dough.

So, this explains why his stomach was so distended. The problem here is because his stomach was so huge, it shifted all his other abdominal organs out of place, making it hard to tell what is what. Based on these pictures, the vet couldn't say with certainty that Duncan hadn't perforated, or ruptured, his stomach. He suggested going into surgery immediately...which I was not a fan of at all. He decided to do an ultrasound first to try to confirm what was going on, which luckily showed Duncan hadn't ruptured anything. So now we could try to get him to throw up this mass of dough, which I am so thankful he did. The other option was to go in surgically and get it. Again, not a fan of that option at all.

Story over, right? Wrong. Tuesday I had to take Duncan to our normal vet to have his liver enzymes checked. Because of the alcohol poisoning he had we had to make sure he didn't do damage to his liver. Our vet called us last night with his blood results. His enzymes are a little elevated, and his electrolytes are slightly out of range, but judging on the weekend the poor guy had, it wasn't anything too shocking. Hopefully the enzymes are just up right now from having to metabolize all that alcohol and will go back down, but we won't know for sure until we recheck them in 6 months.

As for Duncan, since the moment he threw up he has been acting like nothing ever happened. This dog is seriously retarded, but I love him. I can't help but wonder, though, how many lives a dog gets. They always talk about cats having 9 lives, but no one says this about dogs. Whatever the case is, this dog is going through them pretty quickly. 

Home again

We made it back home safely. Mason is a great traveller! He slept on both flights and adjusted to the time difference and sleeping in a different place like a champ! I'm working on getting a slideshow of our pictures...but in the meantime I thought I'd share a Duncan update.

While we were gone Duncan lost an eye. My brother (who was housesitting for us) called me when he came home from work to Duncan's eye looking like this...

He took him to our vet, who determined that the eye wasn't salvageable...so she removed it. Now he looks like this...

Actually, it looks a lot better than this already. Poor little guy. We don't know how it happened, but it looks like he was biten.