with a side order of shit on a shingle.

Ebony came up lame this morning.



There she is, in happier times.  When the animal onslaught came an hour or so ago, it wasn't accompanied by the wet puppy kiss that comes from our youngest coming in.

She's in a corner of the bedroom, not getting up for nuthin. She's not whimpering, and mostly is resting, but you can tell by her face that something is off. Way off.

So I will be spending the morning with Harry, as planned. It'll just be Harry Newman, DVM, rather than Harry Potter, OOM.

We ADORE this dog, and the feeling is mutual. Emily, especially, will be devestated if it's anything.

Pray. Offer karma. Hell, give a cat a cheezbrgr if it'll get them on board.

Supplemental. It's now almost 8, and she seems fine. She got up on her own, went outside like she always does before feeding time, came in the kitchen looking for om nom noms, and I fully expect to see a rope toy in her yap within the next few minutes. We'll still take her in- she's due for her annual anyway- but oy gevalt.

It makes sense in a way. She's half shar pei, so it figures that an hour later she'd be hungry at last.

I just got back from delivering Emily's last Care package. This one kinda escalated over the past week or so. A few days after we last saw her, she phoned home to request that we ship out a boom box or some other form of music playage, since her .mp3 player had shit the bed and she didn't have much transferred onto her new cell phone yet.

Eleanor, bless her, volunteered to clear off her own .mp3 player of the same ilk -we all three have the same one, in pink, yellow and blue

- and loaded a bunch of tunes onto it from her own computer, remembering pretty well which ones Em had ripped onto there to transfer onto her own .mp3.

Gradually, and in what we refer to as the "if you give a moose a muffin" syndrome, the wish list expanded, to include everything from laundry products and knitting gear to more DVDs (she's got close to a dozen down there already), and once the cost of shipping gets anywhere close to the $10 in gas it costs to get down there, of course I'm gonna drive it down myself.

Ebony seemed fine when I was ready to leave (and she's fine now, greeting me on my return home with her usual reckless abandon), but I wanted to keep an eye on her, plus I thought she and Em would love to see each other, so I put a leash on her and loaded her in the front seat for the 50 mile trip. We got all of a block from the house before her crying made me turn around. She's been this way for years; early obedience training and regular trips to places other than the vet are all lost on her now, so I brought her back and delivered the goods a little over an hour ago.

But not before asking whether Emily had brought down the "dead" .mp3 player. She went and fetched it, and we said our goodbyes. I plugged it into the car charger and, boom! It turned right on and both played and displayed all the songs on it. I called her on the spot to ask her to put the "new" one in her charger, and it worked fine.

The moose's muffin is mysterious.

----

That ride was longer, but far more pleasant, than the one I'd taken to my office and the bank shortly before leaving. On the corner of Main and Transit- one of the biggest-ass intersections in the whole region- were a bunch of Fundies Of Some Sort, all guys, in white shirts and ties, waving big signs saying "HONK FOR TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE."

Fine, guys. I respect your opinion and your right to express it, but c'mon. Don't rig the deck of public opinion with signs like that which offer a means of expression to only one alternative.

Not that it stopped me from expressing my own. As I rounded the corner back onto Main on a right on red, I slowed to a complete stop, rolled down my window, and yelled to the asshat, "Oh go have sex with Larry Craig in a restroom stall, you bigot!"

From the look I got, I couldn't tell if he was just shocked or seriously thinking it over.