Four Legs, Four Toes

Georgia post-surgery  (c) Shutterbug

I knew it was going to be trouble as soon as my wife spotted it.

Even though I am an experienced pet owner, I have given up trying to trim my dogs' nails. The dogs freak out, I'm unsure of how far back to cut the black toenails, and it's just easier on all of us to leave it to the professionals.

Georgia went in for her usual nail trim recently, which includes a difficult rear dew claw. Two days later my wife found a hard, purple abscess where her freshly trimmed nail appears to have cut into her toe, which has swelled to completely encompass the nail. Back to the vet, where my gorgeous girl's tail never stops wagging. She was placed on antibiotics and given a topical ointment as well, which I felt confident would be useless.

And so it was. More appointments and discussion ensued, and we came to the conclusion the only sensible thing to do was surgically remove the dew claw. No admission was made on the part of the vet techs for having caused this situation, which ticked me off.

Our vet had no surgical time slots for an entire week, which wouldn't work when I could tell my dog was in discomfort. Enter my lovely high school chum Dr. Jennifer Newhouse at the Taunton Road Animal Hospital in Oshawa (if you need an excellent vet in the east, do call her). She is an amazing veterinarian and a wonderful person, and she stepped up to fit us right in.

My wife drove Georgia all the way out to Oshawa in morning rush hour traffic to drop her off for surgery...and came home to discover that some brazen asshole had stolen our beautiful new e-bike from under its tarp on our driveway. We live on a main street, with neighbours on both sides who are home during the day, and I can hardly wrap my head around the balls and effort it took to steal this 400lb vehicle in broad daylight on a busy street. It's unreal.

Maybe this person did us a favour; I was very concerned about my wife being in an accident in downtown traffic. Perhaps an injury was in our future that has now been avoided. But it was ours, we had saved for it, waited for it, and treated it with care. People are just so disappointing. There have been workmen mucking around with a flip project across the street for months who park across our driveway and behave like assholes on a regular basis, so we think it must have been one of them. It really would have taken two people and a large truck to transport this thing away without a key.

We tried hard to keep it in perspective, and my wife fought rush hour traffic again at the end of the day to pick up our beautiful little Georgie, minus one toe. In the eight years I've had her she has cost me next to nothing and brought me boundless joy. I doubt I will ever know another creature like her; she is pure love through and through.

A $2,000 loss of the e-bike and another $1,000+ vet bill made for a very expensive day when we can ill afford it. Surely there is a winning lottery ticket in our future...

Starbucks Purgatory

Starbucks cup  © Shutterbug

It never ceases to amaze me that people whose sole job it is to make coffee and provide customer service are so often capable of doing neither.

I try to avoid the Starbucks located nearest to my house as much as possible, because it appears to be staffed entirely by idiots. Today I had no choice but to get my coffee there, since it would have been beyond the scope of my lunch hour to get to the location slightly further away with better service.

Throwing caution to the wind, my wife and I opened the door to find no lineup at the counter. Feeling encouraged, we approached the young girl at the cash wearing the friendly enough smile, and I carefully spoke our order. I try to speak slowly and clearly so as not to be one of those insufferable yuppie types who rattle off their complex orders at top speed.

"I'll have one decaf, triple tall, nonfat latté please," I said, pausing in between each word. I waited as she wrote the order on the cup, then added when she looked up again, "and one decaf grande nonfat latté". She grabbed a second cup, began to write on it, then picked the first cup up again. She looked at the cups, looked at me with a confused expression, and asked with a heavy accent "Ahh….tall nonfat latté?" I repeated the first order, whereupon she nodded vigorously and wrote more things on the cup. Then I noticed the second cup she'd grabbed was the same tall size, so I pointed to it and said, "That one is supposed to be a grande." Again the look of confusion as she held both tall cups in the air, then she shook her head and began crossing things off the first cup. I started to repeat the order for the third time, at which point she said, "Ohh, two grande, two grande," and reached for new cups. I decided I was not going to be able to complete my transaction. "Never mind, I can't deal with this today," I said, and we walked out coffee-less.

How is it possible that this is our experience each and every time we frequent this location, regardless of who serves us? I'd complain to the "manager", but he is often there, busy chatting on his cell phone while his staff gets weeded.

The best experience in that particular store happened a little while ago, when I found myself in line behind a distracted mother with a young boy about 3. She was so busy trying to select an item from the bakery case that she hadn't noticed her son wander over to the milk station and actually climb on top of the counter. Next thing you know, he is STANDING on top of the counter - you know, where people put their FOOD and DRINKS - and looking pretty unsteady on his feet. Worried for his safety but also appalled at the behaviour, I tapped the mother on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, your boy has gotten up on the counter over there." She looked over at her son, then back at me, and replied with obvious pride, "I know, he's just so ATHLETIC!"…and turned back to the cashier. I'm still speechless.

But I digress. Today's lunch hour ran into overtime as we rushed to the other location after the service fail above. The service was much better, and we returned to our car with coffees in hand. We'd taken our two dogs with us just to give them a change of scenery, and when we returned to the car we found our labrador retriever had jumped in to the front seat as usual. She slunk to the back seat when told, and we drove home making conversation and jokes to one another. Right as my lovely wife made a raunchy joke, my eye caught sight of my cell phone, which was sitting on the console between us. On the screen was my mother-in-law's phone number, and a clock counting the elapsed time of the current call. It took a moment for the situation to sink in…the dog had speed-dialed my mother-in-law's phone number during her foray to the front seat, and there was now a five-minute recording of our conversation on my mother-in-law's answering machine.

And we think we're ready to have kids…

Gotcha!  © Shutterbug

Have vet, won't travel.

Ebony after surgery  © Shutterbug

Oh, Ebony.

A friend once suggested I should have named this lovely Lab Paris, since her vet bill at the time was the equivalent of a trip across the pond. "Safari" is starting to sound more appropriate at this point.

Our latest adventure began with the sudden appearance of a cyst on her foot, which was clearly a candidate for surgery. I've started to make a game out of guessing the value of anticipated vet bills. I was a couple of hundred dollars shy this time, because we figured if she was going under the knife we might as well address the disfiguring lipomas on her torso. She was sent home with two unexpected, disgusting draining tubes hanging out of her main incision that the vet said "shouldn't leak much". Our carpet would beg to differ.

At least we're accruing air miles on the Visa towards Paris.