Free Fruit
Somebody gave us a box of oranges -- that's what people do in California! Give each other free fruit and wait for tourists to ask us for directions to the beach. So someone gave Jack this box of oranges and said, "They're juicing oranges." I looked at them very carefully but the only clue that they weren't fit for straight eating was that they weren't all-the-way-around orange. In fact I'd go so far as to say they were partially green, which seemed kind of a racist way to divide oranges into "eating" and "juicing." But when I finally peeled one to eat I discovered that it also had seeds, so I guess America wants its eating oranges to be sexless and monochromatic and then we feed our despicable seeded multicolor breeding oranges into industrial juicers and to hell with them.
(As an aside, I prefer my orange juice to be pulp-free in my little evening cocktails* but there's an old market by the beach that is my number one destination for fresh-squeezed daytime orange juice because I'd swear they just throw the oranges in whole, peel and seeds and all, there's no other way to account for how three-dimensional it tastes.)
* Half orange juice, half fizzy water of choice (Pellegrino for those who like a less-aggressive bubble), and one shot of Hornitos tequila, served over ice in a clean glass and stirred with a room-temperature spoon
So Peewee's had a rough ride this month. He's turning eight in September, which for bulldogs is like, "Welp, I guess he'll be dead soon." He's been slowing down some, and we thought he was gaining weight due to his longstanding refusal to walk more than half a block in any direction, but when I took him in for a check-up the doctor ended up taking 3.2 liters of fluid out of his abdomen. So my dog wasn't fat, he was just turning into a stoic, furry water balloon.
Black is so slimming.
The doctor wanted to see him for a follow-up a week later, where he pulled out another 1.5 liters of fluid. Peewee is now so fluid-free I can feel his spine. I'm taking him back next week just to make sure we've got his meds sorted out (we've upped his diuretics and his kidneys seem to be able to take it), and when I do I'm imagining driving home with a sentient bag of organs that growls when you play tug with it.
Wrapped up like a birthday present.
Honestly, we all expect to wake up one morning and find him dead. We will then go through an appropriate period of mourning and then the plan is to get a dog AND a cat so they can be friends, but it's hard to think about that when the Wee is begging for half of my ham sandwich or snoring softly on the floor with his paws tucked under his chest.
Oh, Peewee.
Perhaps because of all this I have become unaccountably attached to an Instagram account for a rescue in L.A. called Road Dogs, and when the woman who runs it asked for help running her Twitter and Pinterest accounts, I waved my hand in the air and said ME ME ME, PICK ME. So I'm here to ask you to follow Road Dogs on Twitter and Pinterest for lots of heartwarming rescue success stories (and the occasional, "Wow, people suck.").
With Jackson going into high school (I KNOW, IT'S CRAZY, HE'S A FRESHMAN) and my novel finally being sent off to be read by The People Who Could Change My Life, it felt like high time for me to work full-time once again, thank you, Craigslist. So I put on my cherry-red Fluevogs and went interviewing. The first job I interviewed for was to be my own boss, i.e., supervisor of the branch I've been working at for five years already. I will frankly tell you that not getting chosen for that hurt, but it would have hurt a lot more if the woman they chose instead of me was doing a terrible job, which she isn't, she turned out to be the better choice, I am sort of weirdly pleased to say. So that sucked for a week or so and then I got over it, but then I still needed to find another job. I applied for some part-time jobs in the hopes that I could stay at the library and work two jobs, but nobody called me back so I went and found one, single full-time job that I will tell you more about once I start. I am very sad to leave the library (very!) but I'm looking forward to being able to walk to work, unless we up and float away when El Niño hits this year (which is predicted to be like "a river falling from the sky"), in which case I might spring for a bus pass so Jackson and I can slosh to the bus stop together in the morning and then take off in opposite directions toward our new adventures.
