Animals

When Amy comes home (in 63 days, God willing) I'm afraid she'll think the place is overrun with animals.

First of all, there's Hansie of course. He is now down to about 150 pounds and ought to lose another 30, the vet says.

Last night Paul took Hansie, Ben, Steven, and Jenny to the first of eight dog-obedience classes. The teacher said Hansie was the biggest dog she'd ever taught. She thinks he's part German Shepherd and part Mastiff. (We don't know...he was originally a pound puppy.)

I am hoping that these classes will teach us how to get Hansie to be nice to Pigga.

Pigga is a fluffy gray kitty that the children found under the oil tank around Thanksgiving. It was cold and rainy outside, and he was wet and oily and looked half drowned. Emily went to great trouble to extricate him, and then shampooed him in the bathroom sink and blow-dried him, after which he looked like a piggy bank, big and round with short little legs.

He did not, however, get his name from his piggy-bank resemblance. He was found under the oil tank, which looks like a big pig, and when Emily was little she used to say pigga instead of pig, so she named the kitty Pigga. (Emily reasoning here)

A sad little side note is that about two days before Emily rescued Pigga, a woman and her daughter came by and talked to Paul and Steven outside and asked if they had seen a gray kitten. At that point they hadn't, and no one thought to get their phone number. Pigga was found soon after, and we have no idea who these people were.

We kept Pigga indoors at first to nurse him back to health and also because it was so cold and rainy outside. But now we keep him in because of Hansie. He looks into the kitchen through the patio doors and when he sees Pigga he woofs from the depths of his huge chest and stands on his hind legs and slaps his big paws on the door (about at the level of my head).

Paul grumbles about having a cat in the house but I'm not about to send him outside to become catburger. I still cherish a hope that those people will come by to claim their cat or, if that doesn't happen, that we can learn in dog school how to teach Hansie to be nice.

Quote of the Day:
"I guess it's idiopathic emesis."
--Doctor/Aunt Barb, discussing Ben's occasional nighttime vomiting episodes