A day of highs and lows. In and out all day cooking and going to Thanksgiving dinners. Came home to find my dog Scout can't or won't stand. He's been ill for some little while. I just had to make the arrangements to put him down tomorrow. I already don't like Black Friday. This is just going to add to my resentment.

I'm sitting at work in a fit of mild anxiety. You see my new fence is being installed today. I'm not anxious (mostly) about the fence. But because the fence installation might take two days, my dogs are at a friend's house. So, the defense of the house, without my presence, has devolved to my cat, Spot.

Make no mistake. The  loyalties of cats never change. They are loyal to themselves, only.

Have you ever heard of a cat dragging their insensate owner from a burning building? Enough said.

I'm (mostly) certain that everything will be fine. And for those keeping track at home, this is remodel project #2, headed for the record books. Next up, we get the heat pump installed.

The day the HVAC contractors were coming over to quote out a new heat pump I put my dogs and my foster dog in my back yard so I could finish cleaning around the heat pump. This takes about an hour, but I'm finished in plenty of time for the first contractor's appointment time. I open the back door and let the dogs in. My pair comes inside. 

No sign of Mr. Pickles.

Crappity crap crap crap crap. He's done flew the coop. Squirmed his little body out through a loose picket and run away. I go outside and start knocking on my neighbor's doors to see if he's in their yard. Get a negative from one neighbor and I'm on my way to the other when my contact from the rescue calls. 

"Is Mr. Pickles missing?" I feel about 3 inches tall when I reply "Yes." Fortunately neighbors in my development who know the rescue found him, called them for the number for animal control. Then my contact made the connection with their description of a little one-eyed dog. Hmm, Ray lives in that neighborhood...

So I recover Mr. Pickles in minutes of that phone call. Then I use some tree trimmings to temporarily block the escape path. AND the other one he shows me that evening.

Now, I'd planned to replace the fence anyway. But it just got bumped up to ASAP. Fortunately, neither the heat pump nor the fence have conflicting dependencies. So, I'm going to run two projects at the same time. Not the way I'd prefer to run things, but needs must when the Devil drives.

The title is dogs, but it's really one particular dog that is consuming my throught cycles at the moment. Gna, my boxer/greyhound mix, she's the one on the left in my profile pic.

She had a tumor removed earlier in the year. It was an aggressive cancer. The only option was an exploratory surgery, open up her abdomen and see if they could find the root and take all of it. And hope it wasn't growing from an organ. Really, that was not an option, due to her age and general un-well state of being.

So, we've gone through the balance of spring and most of the summer and she's been a couch potato's couch potato. Sleeping away the days. Within the last couple of weeks she's been digging and chewing on herself. A sure sign that a dog is stressed. I made a vet appointment for an assessment.

But last night she started denning up in her crate and wouldn't come out to go to bed. I let her sleep in her crate downstairs. This morning she wouldn't go out. I let her sleep. She did come out for breakfast and went out in the afternoon. She's spent the rest of the day in bed.

Now, my once in a lifetime dog, Gage, lingered with cancer. I really feel that I was keeping him alive for my comfort, not his. So tonight I'm staring down the barrel of having to let her go in the morning.

In general I don't shy away from anything. But there's a part of me that is hoping that tomorrow never comes.

I frequently foster dogs for a friend's rescue. It's usually a good thing. This would be one of the times that it isn't.

I've fostered dogs whose owners were murdered in front of them. Dogs that were abandoned in an apartment and only rescued just shy of death's door. Dogs that were owned by an elderly person who had to be placed in a facility. If I had to make a bet, that's what I think happened to my latest dog, Mr. Pickles.

Mr. Pickles, or Pickles as I call him is probably a Fox Terrier / Mexican Hairless crossbreed. He's small, ~ ten pounds or so, long legged and roach backed. He's got almost no hair on his back and the fur on the top of his head has that wispy quality like the Mexican Hairless that have crests. He's six to eight years old and when he was found wandering stray, his left eye was detached and badly infected. So the vet took it.

After he moved into my house I discovered that he is not housetrained. It's not uncommon for a small dog that lives with an elderly person is paper trained, but never housebroken.

But Pickles can't live with me foreever. So in order to have any chance at finding a good home I have to housebreak him.

More news on this story as it occurs.