Resolutions? Or Commitments?

I don’t usually make formal resolutions, but there are a few things I would like to take care of this year.

Blog more: I know that I’ve already been blogging pretty much everyday for the past week or 2. But, before I started back up, the last post was I made was in November. I enjoy how it’s a little therapeutic and it’s almost a bit creative. I love thinking about what I’ll post about/how I’ll phrase it/what pictures I’ll pair with it. I also made my current page header, and I really enjoyed collecting those pieces and putting them all together. (On a side note, if you’d like me to make you a header for your page, I would love to make one for you! It may not be as perfect as the ones you pay for, but I make them with love!). Plus, I like to keep my family posted (pardon the pun) on what’s going on!

Eat better: To be perfectly honest, I can’t guarantee to myself that I will start to cook better, but I can control portion sizes. And I don’t need seconds. It’s just the food…it’s just so good once it hits the lips!

Get Bailey out more: The poor puppy doesn’t usually get out much during the week because I work all day and by the time I get home, it’s either dark or almost dark out, and I’m just so tired. So I want to walk him when I can, and make it out to the dog park more often.

Control: I want to work on making sure I don’t get upset over things beyond my control. I think this expression is meant as a joke in an Office episode a few seasons ago, but it makes sense to me – “I can’t control what other people do. I can only control how I react to it”. I just find myself stressed out a lot, and it’s pretty draining. I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets stressed around here!

So all in all, it's not so much resolutions, as things that can constantly be worked on.

Showers

I love taking showers. Not just for the obvious cleansing reasons of course, but because everytime I get out of my shower, I see this:







I know Weims are a "velcro" breed, but he can't wait until I get out of the shower! (And yes, I kept my camera in a water-safe place before I took these!)

Nostalgia

So, for lunch a few days ago, I cracked open a package of Ramen I’d been storing. It was like a flash back to my freshman and sophomore year when, surprisingly, I lost 15 pounds because I didn’t have a cafeteria in my dorm, and I didn’t feel like walking across campus. Instead, I lived on microwaveable Ramen and Easy Mac (thanks, Mom!). Living only on about 400 calories for lunch and dinner really helps you lose weight.

It’s weird, but the lunch brought back all sorts of flashbacks from college, and I realized – I miss it! I miss the whole experience! I starting thinking about things like the fact that I didn’t have a boyfriend the first year or so either, so I wasn’t going out as much on the weekends. As a matter of fact, I was one of “those people” who lived so close to home, I’d just pack up my stuff, head to mom and dad’s for the weekend, and go back Sunday afternoon. I loved the time I spent with them, but I also feel I missed out on a lot of experiences you get your Freshman year. And I missed out on making friends and those relationships that “last a lifetime”.

Anyway, just something to think about. I definitely would not go back and do high school over again, but I would LOVE to go back to college as an undergrad!

Property Laws

I definately feel I should blog more about myself...work, boyfriend, fun activities. So I definately intend to start sharing all that. But, Bailey is a pretty big part of my life, so that's pretty much what a Day in "My Life" might be like. Watching him do silly things. :) So not to add another blog about Weims (or Bailey), but I wanted to share this!


Stay posted for more "non-dog friendly" posts. :-)

All is Well!

I just got back from the vet, and have the best news! The Bailey Monster doesn't need surgery!!!

I noticed on Sunday that his wound was starting to scab over, and the area around it wasn't hard to the touch anymore. So I called the vet's office and asked if I could meet with the Vet who was going to do the surgery before Bailey went under. I didn't want him to have surgery if he ultimately was healing and didn't really need it.

So this morning, I met with the vet who suggested the surgery when I took him in on Friday. This vet took a look at him today and said, "You know what? I'm going to say, we don't need to do this. He's almost fully healed and he doesn't really need it."

WOO HOOO!!!!! My baby is gonna be fine! :-D

Here's a parting shot of him enjoying peanut butter! (I promise that's what it is; I put it on there!)

What Are The Odds?

So I decide to take Bailey to a smaller, less frequented dog park, about a block from my apartment this weekend. This one is a significantly smaller fenced in park, that doesn’t have any bells or whistles, and because of that, it’s not usually very busy. But Bailey can run “free” without me having to worry about him running away, and at 103 pounds, that’s a plus.

We went on Saturday, roughly around lunchtime. So I’m there for only 5-10 minutes, and off in the distance, I see a couple walking towards the park. They just “happened” to have a Blue Weimaraner with them!! What are the odds of choosing to go to the park when I did, and run into another Weimaraner, and on top of that, one with a very rare color!!! (This pic I found online shows how dark the coat is. The regular coat is on the left, and the Blue is on the right. It has more of a “blue” hue if you happen to see one in person). If you compare it to a pic of Bailey I’ve posted, Weims are usually a brownish or silverish gray.

I left that day thinking, “How cool was that? I NEVER see Weims at the dog park!”. It was such a nice weekend actually, so I thought I’d take Bailey back around the same time on Sunday. As I’m walking up, I see a few dogs running around, and I’m pleased that Bailey will again have someone to play with. And all of a sudden, there’s another Weim! And it was a different one than the one I saw Saturday! Now, what are the odds of that?! I hardly ever see Weims, and to see 2 different ones in 1 weekend??!!!? Pretty cool, and definitely a high point of my weekend.

Other than that, I spent Friday night playing hours worth of Guitar Hero World Tour on Justin’s Wii. I know, I can see everyone grasping their hands to their chests with their jaws dropped. Me? Playing Guitar Hero?? It’s actually more fun than I thought! I’m only on the Easy level, and I play the Bass part, so I’m no expert yet. Justin plays the lead guitar usually, and I have to say he’s definitely better than me. But then again, he has been playing longer than I have. We ended up playing some more on Sunday as well. We’ve even started a band! It’s pretty freakin’ addicting, I’ll have to admit.

And then Sunday was spent watching the playoffs, and enjoying homemade chili, in my very own Crock Pot! We got big loaves of bread from the grocery store, cut out a chunk from the middle, and then went to town enjoying our Chili Bread Bowls! I’ll be eating leftover chili for a week! Yummy!

The Accident Prone Puppy

I know I have only recently posted in November, and unfortunately, it's about Bailey again.

Last week, I came home and his abdomen was swollen, and hard to the touch, especially right around his hernia repair scar. I called the vet, and left a voicemail with them that I wanted to make an appointment. The next morning, his stomach was swollen a little worse, but I knew that he could make it until I took him to the vet. Or I guess I hoped he would. Whatever was "growing" on/in him must have popped and he was squirting blood everywhere.

So I got special permission from my boss, who is a dog person, to take extra time out of my work day to make an emergency run to the vet and drop him off. That was a pretty stressful 2 hours. They called me around 10 and let me know that, fortunately, it didn’t seem to be associated with his hernia repair but that it was right next to it.

Apparently, it was a doggie “sports hernia”, or pretty much just a really bad bruise. The vet thinks that Bailey either fell onto something, or a stick poked his stomach or maybe just stretched his ab muscles so tight that it tore. It must have happened sometime in the last 2 weeks, but as bruises on humans go, you can’t really tell, because it takes a few days for the bruise to appear.

So I don’t know how it happened, or when, but the blood finally pooled in his stomach, causing it to swell. That’s what I saw last week that concerned me. And the vet thinks that it popped simply because he’s such a big dog, and the pocket or tear (whatever it was) was completely filled with blood. So he had an internal “tear” that started the bleeding, and now he’s got a small hole on the outside that is what let the blood out.

The vet recommended at that time to start him on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, to try and heal him medically, to avoid surgery. So I took him back in on Friday for a check-up 1 week later, and the vet said he didn’t like what he saw. The medicine definitely helped the swelling go down, but the wound wasn’t healing. There was dead tissue inside that was preventing (restricting) the veins from getting what he needed to heal the hole to where it needed to go. So they want to go in there, cut out the dead tissue, sew together healthy tissue to healthy tissue, and that should make it much easier to heal.

He’s not in any visible pain, and he’s still the rambunctious ball of “spaz” he’s always been. It’s just frustrating that he is hurt, again, and that now he has to have surgery. There is also a possibility that he has something stuck in there that is causing the dead tissue to form around it, like a piece of stick (if that’s how he got the bruise – by something poking him), in that case – I DEFINITELY want to get it out.


So that’s where we stand. 20 minutes later into typing this blog. :) Hopefully it didn’t take you that long to read it. I’m taking him in on Tuesday morning at 7 am, the procedure should take 20-30 minutes tops, and then I’ll be able to take him home that night. With a wonderful Elizabethan collar to boot. :)

Love you!