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...

Where Are My Keys, I've Lost My Phone

A lyric that Lady GaGa could have written for my lovely, if organizationally-challenged, wife.

We recently had the sort of week that left us shaking our heads, and wondering how there can be so many souls out there seemingly without a conscience.

Hoping to enjoy some fresh air on a clear spring day, I ran home on my lunch hour so that my wife and I could take our two dogs for a walk. We only had about twenty minutes, and just did a short route on the streets around our home. Our conversation covered the many decisions we're trying to make, how strained we feel right now both in terms of time and budget, and what we can do to reduce our stress. Most of it comes down to money, which I think is pretty common for married couples–even those who aren't spending thousands of dollars trying to make a baby, or caring for sick pets.

Shortly after returning from our walk, my wife realized her Blackberry was gone. Panicked, she retraced our steps in full in less than twenty minutes, but there was no sign of it. We did the route again later when I got home from work, and then tore our house apart to be certain her Crackberry wasn't mislaid somewhere indoors. It was gone, and the only explanation that makes sense is that it somehow fell out of her pocket on our walk without us noticing, and someone picked it up. It was fully charged and had plenty of contact names and personal information for anyone who found it to try to contact us, but no one called.

We placed ads on Kijiji and Craigslist offering a $300 reward, even stating that we'd be happy to just get the memory card back. If someone was that desperate for a used phone, they could keep it. One of the first responses my wife received to the ad was from someone who said they'd found a Blackberry in our area, and they would "let her have it back" for $600. We asked what the screen saver photo was to confirm it was hers, but got no response. Charming. We had no choice but to incur the unexpected expense of replacing the phone, but there was no way to replace the information on it that wasn't backed up.

A few days later, I realized that a credit card number was stored in a memo on the lost phone, so I went online to check my statement. Lo and behold there were two charges from a gas station in Scarborough that I'd never been to, dating back two weeks. This had nothing to do with the lost phone, I was able to connect it to visiting my mom in hospital, and using the card at the parking machine (which I noticed was out of order the next few days that I was there). What kind of evil person defrauds people trying to help sick relatives?! More time was lost dealing with the credit card security people, but the charges (including pending ones I didn't yet know about) were reversed relatively easily, and I was issued a new card. I lost a little more faith in people's innate goodness.

As if this weren't enough, we finally decided it was time to spend the last bit of money we'd received for our wedding, which were two $50 bills a friend had folded into origami hearts and stuck inside a picture frame. We carefully unfolded them, tried to use them for a purchase...and discovered they were counterfeit.

It's sad to run into this much dishonesty in the space of just a few days. I struggle with the idea of how I will raise a child to believe the best of people, be savvy enough to recognize when a person is bad, and not let it bring them down when they encounter a deviant. And how to stop my child from ever becoming one of the deviants...