Hooray for adopted dogs! Here’s Daisy, my gardening assistant:
She’ll be hitting the ripe old age of 13 this week, which means she now holds still long enough to take pictures without the blur.
11 Likes
I’ve shared Maisie’s photos before, but here’s one in her new stroller. She doesn’t walk as far as she used to but this lets my parents get out for a bit of a longer walk when she gets tired.
13 Likes
Here are Percy & Caoimhe, hunting their standard prey as it struggles to stand following the initial attack. Circling just before they go in for the kill (too bloody to share here). Poor thing didn’t stand a chance.
After that it’s a strategy meeting with fellow comrades. It was a good time, filled with [REDACTED]
And then a chance to hang up the harness and close the day with a date night (Percy’s girlfriend is three times his age, but age is just a number, and actually that new study showed that dogs are really very mature and don’t really age that fast after adolescence, so maybe you should stop bringing it up and making it a big thing? You’re only embarrassing yourself)
11 Likes
We do not have pets yet. We are in the process of constructing a backyard fence, largely in preparation for getting a dog. Step one of fence construction was the removal of some bushes along the property line with a neighbor where the fence will need to go. We have lots of rabbits that run around our front and back yards and one of them stopped to inspect the damage (sorry, bunny) before hopping under a remaining bush last night.
8 Likes
I finally gave in and decided to solo Gloomhaven, instead of stressing about getting my flakey and unenthusiastic party of four together on a regular basis (this was stressful pre-pandemic). Totoro decided that I needed a second player:
18 Likes
The Other Pub Dog, Oreo.
(Yes, that is the door out of which the landlady is about to step with an armful of plates.)
12 Likes
To swing things back in favor of the cats (though honestly I like dogs too), here’s some candid shots of our three kitties:
Kaylee soaking up some sun
Soren with customary attitude
And Scout surveying the scenery from her tower
12 Likes
Lacking a pet of my own… here’s my dad’s beautiful cat Mieke.
She has trained him well to brush her fur and bring her snacks.
21 Likes
Two meeples already occupy the Cute space so you cannot place any of yours there.Choose another place.
19 Likes
13 Likes
I see Cat Capers
2 Likes
The kid from The Sixth Sense definitely drew the short straw.
A little while back, I posted a picture of a rabbit checking out the site where a fence would be built in preparation for getting a dog. The fence construction is scheduled for the second week of September, but the dog has already been acquired. We visited her at a shelter last Saturday and brought her home today!
She’s about 10 months old and probably a beagle-lab mix. The shelter had her as “Pebbles” but she doesn’t know that as her name and we don’t really like it so we’re changing it. We haven’t settled on a new name for sure yet though.
15 Likes
We adopted our cat from the brother of a friend when we were in San Diego. At the time his name was “Dude,” but neither of us wanted to call a cat that. So C renamed him “Taiki,” after a character in an anime series. Though he acquired many nicknames, notably “Captain Gravity,” after his love of reaching a paw up and hooking things off of tables, which cost us many mugs . . .
3 Likes
The name that our cat came with was “Blackie Chan”, or “Blacks” for short. Which just… no.
4 Likes
In Memoriam – Dharma
Not to turn this thread into a downer, I wanted to share an important, recent event in my life. When I adopted Dharma, a stray that my mother found and started feeding, around 14 years ago, I was a 20-something bachelor without direction or purpose in life. Dharma represented the first real responsibility in my life and, to some degree, she taught me how to be an adult.
I loved her like I love my own daughters – more than I would have guessed possible when I drove the hour-each-way to and from my mom’s house to pick her up and bring her home.
So far this year, I have lost 2 grandmothers (1 COVID-19, 1 undisclosed-at-this-time-but-not-COVID-19) and an aunt (cancer), but the loss of Dharma has affected me more than the rest combined; I have mixed feelings about this, as, certainly, a mere animal shouldn’t elicit more emotional response than a blood relative that helped raise me, but the heart feels what it must – and perhaps it’s not that hard to explain to those of you in this thread that also have dear pets.
Dharma was the queen of blankets in our house. My partner thought I was a pushover for always ensuring there was a blanket for Dharma to bed down on for the night. One of my father-in-law’s childhood friends gave us a dearly loved, hand-knitted blanket as a wedding gift; we quickly discovered after the wedding that it was, in fact, Dharma’s Blanket and it will also be called such (seen here with one of Dharma’s other favorite blankets).
When my partner and I were pregnant for the first time, it was Dharma that knew before anyone else (even my partner). She tried to tell us: by carrying around yarn balls as though they were kittens and leaving them in our bedroom (they had been on the main floor and she carried them upstairs while we slept one night). At the time of this picture, we did not know what Dharma knew and this picture was taken by my partner because we thought Dharma had lost her mind, carrying around yarn balls and yowling all night long (seriously, we consulted a friend who’s a vet technician to ask if cats can suddenly go senile).
Sometimes, my partner and I would leave (Dharma’s) blankets in the wrong places; she was quick to forgive us, as it provided her an opportunity to take naps in locations around our house that she wouldn’t ordinarily:
(this one is hard to tell: this is looking down at a blanket that had fallen between the couch and the wall)
(here she is next to her role model, grumpy-cat-faceplanted-into-a-blanket, sometimes referred to as “garfielded”)
Dharma was never a huge fan of my (other) daughters; they were loud and grabby and generally disrupted her nap time (which was most of the day). On occasion, she would be caught near one of them, but usually only because there was a blanket or food involved
The last few weeks have been rough on Dharma. She was already looking sickly at the time we moved to our new house; a trip to the vet a few days before the move yielded no promising insights as to why she had lost 1/3 of her body weight; we did what we could and switched to a food that would be easier on her kidneys (vet suspected possibly kidney stones or, even more concerning, kidney cancer, though x-rays shed little additional light on either). For the bulk of last week, I don’t believe Dharma was able to get comfortable and I spent as much time as I could spare by her side – she still reacted like always to my pats and cuddles, purring loudly and trying to pet me back.
She is and always will be loved.
28 Likes