I'm the guy who keeps all the packing materials when items show up in my house. Many of my kitchen devices have a box piled up in the basement, complete with styrofoam padding or assorted internal pieces of cardboard. There was also quite a few boxes from baby things. Not all of the boxes are large; the box for the camera I bought before my trip to ( Read more... )

Quite some time ago, I said that my best advice about having children was "Don't have kids during a global pandemic." Upon due consideration, my second best piece is "Don't ever buy a baby toy new if you have a Buy Nothing group in your area." M has been using this mechanism to supply Birdie with all sorts of fun toys for no more than the effort of ( Read more... )

Today would have been Tulip's 14th birthday. Since I can no longer give her a cheeseburger, I thought I'd pull together links to all the best posts about Tulip that's I've made since her gotcha day back on April 13, 2008. Here they are in chronological order.

1. Gotcha Day! Unfortunately those photos are in my ex's account and I can't get to them ( Read more... )

There's a well known and poorly sourced quote that in most forms says something like "if you have a dog you'll have a lot of good days and one horrible day." When your dog has been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer and is close to fourteen years old, it's only a matter of time until the horrible day shows up. For Tulip, that day was Thursday, ( Read more... )

With Birdie's arrival, the second most common question after some variation of "are you getting any sleep?" is "how is Tulip dealing with the baby?" The answer is that Tulip is dealing with her very well.

Since the clarity on her cancer diagnosis last July, Tulip has kept on keeping on. M spent most of last year taking Tulip on short, social ( Read more... )

1. The "days without takeout" made it to 37 before we reset it when we had pizza delivered from Angelo's on July 25 for Tulip's thirteenth birthday. She got a very small piece of cheese pizza and was quite appreciative ( Read more... )

Ok, to recap:
- Back in March, Tulip was diagnosed simultaneously with both kennel cough and liver cancer.
- The kennel cough turned into pneumonia, but after several months of treatment it cleared up, thus allowing us to turn our attention to the liver cancer.

Now, the last time Tulip had cancer the tumor was on her knee and it proved to be ( Read more... )

Nearly two months ago I reported that Tulip was sick with both pneumonia and liver cancer, and that the vets had to treat the former before addressing the latter. I am pleased to report that after far longer than anticipated, Tulip seems to have beaten back the pneumonia ( Read more... )

A keen eye on my last post shows we went to the vet a lot during the three weeks of lockdown. At first I thought I'd caption this "Tulip's Health Problems" or something like that, but I decide we weren't going to bury the lede. Tulip has had a horrible five weeks of health issues so far, and there's still a long ways to go ( Read more... )

With M moving in, I should also mention the other new official resident of my house. Chucha (full name Chucha Marie) is a 13-year-old Guatemalan street dog that M adopted as a puppy when she was in the Peace Corps and then flew back to America ( Read more... )