Archive for February, 2007
February 5, 2007
Today was the first day at the new office, and I made it home to be with the dog in 8 minutes. Pretty fantastic.
Today when I was playing with him at lunch was the first time I noticed that he seemed to be getting bigger. It makes me really happy to know that because of us he is growing, we are nurturing a puppy to a large dog, and we get to be a part of the whole progression.
Tonight when we got home, Sarah started to work with him on doing different things like sitting, staying, and laying down. It was only a little while, but he seems to understand sitting pretty good so far in such a short time.
Started Jr. Pac-man sideart tracing
I used a good portion of my Saturday to work on the tracing, and got most of it done. I am so pumped. Richard has been supportive, telling me his is willing to take more photos as needed if I need detail shots. That is exactly what I needed, I needed some photos of the kite and of Jr. Pac’s shoes, so I shot him an email to see if he would have time.
Again, Richard came through and sent me two photos right away of what I needed. He is great, now I have to figure out how to scale those pieces and make them mesh with my pretty much finished version of the artwork.
Plus, even though I have mentioned that I am not a purist, I do want the artwork I produce to be remotely close, especially since Richard wants a copy of it and I know that he has a ton of respect for the games. I have found a set of the kickplate art for Jr. Pac-man on localarcade, so I am thinking that since I would be reproducing that as well, I will just take the colors from that in Illustrator so they match. Maybe I am lucky in that whoever did that set reproduced it and the colors are true.
The other option is to ask Richard if he could borrow someone’s Pantone chips and figure out the colors with me. That would be as exact as you can get. We’ll have to see if he is open to that when I am completely done.
February 4, 2007
Today is Super Bowl Sunday, and it was a big day for us since the Colts were playing against the Chicago Bears. We had some invites to go other places, but opted to stay home. I had traveled for each game, and was longing to be at the house, and having the puppy made it that much more inviting to spend time with him.
But I didn’t spend that much time with him, I worked for most of the day up and until the game. Sarah did though, the usual, she cuddled with him, took him out to go potty, etc. etc. It was a fairly nasty day, and he did a lot of squirming trying to get away, and then when we got him outside, he would stand next to or on our feet and whine as the brittle wind whipped through his frail body.
During game time, we both had our jerseys on, and he laid on Sarah in the beanbag. He was so cute, and we got quite a few good photos of him. (One of which we later got framed.) We did startle him a little bit, he would look up all surprised and excited when we would shout or cheer at the tv for what was going on.
It wasn’t the first time, but when Kellogg would get excited, he would respond to each of us. For me he tried to jump up on the couch to get me, and for Sarah he would try to eat her hair, twisting all around and nipping at it. Pretty cute stuff.
February 3, 2007
We alternated spending time with Kellogg today, I was gone to the gym in the morning, and then home for a little bit with him before I had to go into work to help move and some other stuff. We both spent time with him after dinner and then we had to get back to doing some of our respective things. Later on during the night, we took our first new “family” photo of the three of us together because Sarah was making it up for the class she was taking. He was so cute, we couldn’t get him to look at the camera but it was nice to have a photo of us all together, it made it seem like our future was ahead of us.
Our cute puppy story for the day was, Sarah noticed Kellogg doing something odd in the kitchen. He seemed to be doing some sort of Army crawl around on the kitchen floor through the pegs on the chair legs. He went through two before he would wander sideways out into the family room. We have no idea what it was all about, but it wasn’t the last time that he did it, and it was cute, but didn’t make any sense.
February 2, 2007
Kellogg was eating more this morning, which made us feel a little better. But, it was weighing on my mind what to do about his parvo test. As I have mentioned, from what little we know, it appears that waiting any amount of time can be fatal for a young dog, but leaving work for a day really isn’t a good idea either to have this sort of thing taken care of.
When I got into work I called two other veterinarian offices to try to do some fact finding. I didn’t get too much peace of mind, and what I kept coming back to was that Banfield had better hours in general than a regular vet office. I had been sick all week, so when my boss came in and heard what was going on, he told me to just take a half day, take the puppy in and get some rest. So that is exactly what I did.
I got home, fed Kellogg, and then rushed him down to Banfield to take his test. I held him close as I took him inside through the cold weather in his box. He was pretty restless in the office, whining and trying to get out of his box, and I had to reign him in. When the doctor came in she stuck a q-tip like thing in his rear end, and I held him as he yelped. Then, it was only a matter of waiting, it would only take 15 minutes to get results back.
Thank God, the results came back negative, I was relieved and I knew Sarah would be too. what this also meant was that since he had the shot earlier in the week, and this test came back negative we could get him on the wellness plan. This was a package they set up for new dog owners, especially geared towards puppies, to be comprehensive and take care of all of the shots, visits, and even the neutering for a very reasonable price we thought. We could go month to month, or pay up front for the whole year. I was still nervous, because of what had happened so far to do the year up front, so I just went month to month. It was the exact same amount either way.
Sarah came home right after school and was very happy to hear the good news. Kellogg just stayed downstairs with me. He was so sleepy and cute, I wrapped him up in my blanket and set him on my desk so I could watch him. We got some great photos of him sleeping upside down with his ear over his head.
We had some dinner, gave him some attention, and all snuggled for the rest of the night, watching some movies. Tonight was also the night that Kellogg got his first rawhide, and he just loved it. We loved watching him. I don’t think any toy he has had quite this response, he just chewed and chewed and did nothing else for the rest of the night until he had eaten it all. He would walk around with it, chew and make the squeaky noise, stand still and look at us with it hanging out of the side of his mouth like an errant doggie tongue, and he would even like to share it with us, climbing up on us laying down and working away at demolishing this resistant white flavored goodie.
Kellogg (Our Puppy) Photo Gallery
February 1, 2007
It was not a good morning. Sarah woke me up for work, and said “It’s time to get up, go out and have some breakfast and when you finish I have something to show you.” I knew it was regarding the dog.
After I ate, Sarah got out one of our extra containers that used to have parmesan cheese in it. Inside was a big piece of poop with a very long white something in it. She asked me if that was a worm, and I said that it is really the only thing it could be, it was really white and very long. We were upset, and thought maybe this was related to the growling. Sarah promised she would come home at a decent hour to get the puppy down to Banfield to check him out, and hopefully get him on the wellness plan.
Sarah was with him today though everything, she got Lori to watch the classroom and came home to be with at lunch, and when I got home they were gone to the vet. When Sarah got back shortly after me, the puppy was very sleepy, and Sarah was very upset, monotonously petting the dog in the same way and her eyes were bloodshot. I asked her what they said, and she said “Well, we have a very sick puppy” as she started to choke up.
She had taken the stool with her, and they confirmed that he had tape worm, and they did some tests on the stool and said that he has some bacteria that is consistent with parvovirus. This is a very serious disease that will eat away the intestinal lining, killing a dog in a matter of days. But don’t forget the worms, normally you won’t even see them, they just get eaten up by the acid, but when the case is advanced enough they can come out in his stool. So, we had a ton to think about. The parvovirus test at Banfield would be available during the day tomorrow, or not until Saturday. They didn’t have many of the test left, and it made things even harder. He could die so quick if it wasn’t caught early, but it was hard to just take the day off or work to get this test done, we didn’t have any sure answers.
We had gone through scenarios in our head of what could have happened. Even though he was eating less, he had started this weird habit of sitting to the side of the trash, looking up and whining. Even though he had made it into a seemingly too high paper recycle box, we knew there was no way he had gotten into the trash. We couldn’t figure it out, but figured it had no bearing on what was going on with him. (It wasn’t until later that we figured out he knew that his food sat up on the rolling shelf, and that he was looking up thinking about getting something to eat.)
He slept some more tonight, they had given him an oral medicine to help with the worms, so we are hoping he feels better tomorrow. We started putting chicken stock in his food to help him eat it, and even then he didn’t eat all of it. He must feel just terrible, and we felt horrible that he was having such a hard time. We did get some play out of him tonight, and treasured it that much more knowing what he was going through.
