Well, it’s the crack of dawn and I’m wide awake so instead of tossing and turning or drinking warm milk, I thought “what the hell, I’ll poke the Big Blue Mess”. Plus, warm milk just sounds gross. I mean, does that really make you fall asleep or does your body throw up a white flag and offer a truce, “you stop drinking that and I promise to make more seratonin”?

Anyway, this is mostly for Charla and mostly an update on Sam.

Sam, our little special needs beagle, just can’t seem to catch a break. We noticed her limping last week and after she spent 24 hours limping and had the pads of her paw checked more times than she’d care to, I took her to the vet. The good news is she has a tear in her crutiate ligament. The reason that qualifies as “good” is that it could have been completely torn. The bad news is that we’re supposed to keep her confined 24/7 for a week in her crate. I don’t know how many of you have tried to keep a special needs beagle confined for any amount of time, but it’s about the most miserable thing you can do. As hard as we try, Sam doesn’t quite have the vocabulary for “you’re injured and you need pet bed rest” – her vocabulary is limited to “uh uh”, “cookie” (which is a dog biscuit), “outside” and “go to your room” (aka the crate)” I suppose we can work on “you need your bed rest”, but I’m already having my doubts as to how well that will work.

What I got to aid us along are dog sedatives, which are just like dog placebos except Sam naps for about an hour before deciding some things are just too exciting to let a little tranquilizer hold her down. – like food. (And as an aside, she’s added a few new items to her food favorites – lettuce spines, green beans and homemade uncooked spinach basil garlic pasta that explodes all over the kitchen when you open the wrapper. Of course, broccoli is still disgusting and inedible – it’s up there with medicine, because it fails her refined “is it as good as poop” litmus test.)

On Wednesday she heads back to the vet to see if there has been any improvement on the tear. There will doubtlessly be a lecture on how we failed to keep her confined and her healing progressing much more slowly thanks to bad parents. Thankfully, Jay is taking her in. Of course, I personally think we should get a few kudos, because we mostly keep her bouncing in check (yay sedatives), which is quite the feat if you know Sam.

Anyway, that’s kind of the Sam update. I suppose I’ll see about falling back to sleep. I see a load of caffeine in my future.