Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

I realize I have not posted much at all lately here… there has been so much stress, and so much sadness. We still miss Mojo terribly. But we’re picking up and getting on with life, we bought a small rosemary bush pruned into the shape of a Christmas tree and decorated it… put up lights and some decorations… we will probably get the animals each a toy for Christmas but aren’t doing stocking this year.

Last night we took a few video clips of Simon playing tag. These are AVI files from our digital camera, I know they play in Windows Media Player but not sure if they are viewable in all programs. They can be accessed from the Critterweb home page.

We’ve been sent a bunch of funny links the past few days, I will dig through those and get some of them posted a little later today.

Mojo lost his battle to his tail chasing seizure disorder yesterday. He started having major seizures a few weeks back, and things went downhill fast from there. We somehow found the courage to give him relief the only way left that we could. The vet released him from his suffering yesterday afternoon. It went as well as it could have, we managed to give him that much… but now he’s gone and he’s left this huge gaping hole behind. We’re just stumbling around in a daze, so painfully aware of all the places he isn’t.

I went back through this year’s Halloween pics this morning and made this…my last tribute to our brave little broken guy.It just seemed somehow appropriate … he *was* our little superhero.

If you are reading this because this blog came up on a google search for “tail chasing” and you have a Bull Terrier, please go to the Tufts Tail Chasing study page to find out how to participate in the study. They desperately need samples from all Bull Terriers, both normal and affected before they can start the research. If they can find the gene marker, the next step would be developing a screening test…please help.

We had originally planned on dressing all the animals up and getting them into a picture together but didn’t quite get that off the ground. We did get a few pics of Simon, Olive, Lindsy and Mojo in costume, though. And a few of Lauren the blob.

I was just looking through the blog’s web stats, and wanted to post a comment for the person who stumbled onto the weblog twice while trying to run a search on “bull terrier strange behavior frozen.” In case you happen to come back and read this, the behavior you are probably seeing is what is known as “trancing” in the Bull Terrier world. It basically involves a dog moving in extreme slow motion under a branch, blanket, plant, or some other overhanging item that is tickling his/her back. Whether this is normal behavior or not depends on who you ask… but it is certainly VERY common in the breed, as a poll I have running on the Bull Terrier Neurological Disorder Resources site seems to indicate. At the very least, it does not seem to be directly linked to spinning, SOA, or any other disorder, however some veterinary professionals consider it abnormal behavior nonetheless and possibly some sort of seizure behavior. Even those that I have spoke with that do consider it abnormal have also said that it seems to be harmless in and of itself, so unless you’re seeing other strange behavior I wouldn’t worry about it.

Our Mojo ‘trances’ several times a day under our umbrella plant in our living room, as do many other Bull Terriers and Miniature Bull Terriers I know of. According to the poll results so far, 75% of respondents dogs do it, the majority of those being dogs otherwise reported as ‘normal’. I’ve also seen video footage of a Labrador Retriever doing it, and heard of it in Jack Russell Terriers and Basset Hounds so it apparently isn’t limited to our breed.

I’ve been spending most of my time with my nose buried in Microsoft textbooks for my upcoming MCSE exams, so I haven’t had much time to blog anything… and then I always feel compelled to write a marathon post when I do, recapping everything that happened since my last one, and it’s so much to catch up that I procrastinate and don’t post at all… Instead, this time, I will just give the condensed version.

We discovered Mojo turns into Cujo every time we give him his heartworm meds, so we’re trying a different drug next time for that. He’s now on Phenobarbital in addition to his other medications, and is fairly stable right now. Lilly had some sort of sudden episode where she completely lost her sense of balance, and was better before we could get her to the emergency clinic, she’s been fairly OK since then. You know, other than being older than dirt, half blind, half deaf, and mostly crazy. The rest of the animals are doing OK. The one food in the entire world we found that Olive could eat without getting hives changed its formula so we may have a problem there, we just started the new food and so far, so good.

Joy has a new job! She starts on the 31st and will be lead adoption counselor at one of the local shelters. It’ll be better pay, more consistent hours, and one weekend day off so it should be a lot better. Of course, she’s really nervous about starting a new job again…

That about covers things from here, other than the fact that it is super hot and muggy right now. Blech - looking forward to fall.

Because one of my coworkers has been in training all week, I’ve been going in to work a half hour earlier, which means getting up earlier and moving faster in order to get all the feeding, medications, and other morning rituals done in time. I hate getting startled by the alarm clock, so much that I tend to somehow rouse myself and ‘clock watch’ about a half an hour before it goes off, turning off the alarm and then opening my eyes every five minutes or so to make sure I’m not oversleeping. Yeah, one of my many nutty compulsive habits but it works for me…

This morning I was just plain whipped. We stayed up a little later than we’d meant to, discussing the Mojo problem (so much going on with him I wouldn’t even know where to start catching up the blog on this) and other things, and my allergies were throwing a fit so I took some benadryl when I went to bed. I’m pretty sure the active ingredient in that medication turns into brain glue, and it usually makes for a sluggish morning, but having an allergy attack makes for a sleepless night so I took the lesser of two evils. As expected, when my ‘internal’ alarm clock woke me up around 5:30 this morning, I really, really felt like crap and wanted nothing more in the world than to just go back to sleep for another couple of hours. I struggled groggily, fading in and out a few times before finally managing to force myself to stumble, bleary-eyed and foggy, and with a bear of a headache brewing, I might add, off to the bathroom to take a shower.

As a dozen things I needed to do at work simultaneously churned through my head, and I kept one ear cocked for the sounds of tail-chasing from Mojo’s crate (which he’s been doing this week every morning when I shower, unfortunately) I wished that I didn’t have to go to work, and thought about how I was glad that Mindy would be back to work on Tuesday and I would be able to go back to my normal routine. I tried to do the mental math of how many more days I would have to go in early.

And then it hit me.

The realization that I was quite possibly the biggest idiot alive right at that moment.

It’s Saturday. I don’t work on Saturdays.

I suck.

Clockwise from top: Wednesday, Olive, Simon, and Mojo.
The container they are all starting at holds a rather angry ‘cicada killer’ wasp, which looks like a 2″ hornet. Saved the wasp from the dogs (or vice versa?).