Even at 13 weeks old, Kenai matched the rugged beauty of the Alaskan Kenai Penninsula he was named to honor! Here he’s in his element, with his head up, his tail out, and confident eyes! At 37 weeks old, he is still the outdoor type! Our new camera shipped Friday, so there will soon be new pics to enjoy.

Kenai has been bent out of shape about my chest cold. He was quite anxious with the wheezing and rattles for the first few days. Bless his heart, he was in my face sniffing, whining, the whole 9 yards, for 3 solid days. He doesn’t like the 2 a day “medicine baths” I’m taking either. I can’t use any of the OTC cold meds because of my thyroid disease, so what’s left is home remedies and herbal kinds of treatments.

I fill up the tub hot enough to melt plastic, dump in a bunch of Epsom salts, mineral bath stuff, and ground ginger (followed by myself) twice a day. I get a lot more junk out of my lungs then so the tissues are handy. I keep threatening to buy some Echinacea, though I try to keep the pills to an absolute bare minimum.

I got so disgusted swallowing handfuls of vitamins, supplements, and prescriptions for years and not getting enough relief to make it worth the cost. I have a “thing” about taking more pills than I can live without now. I do use a gentle detox liquid when I’m not doing well, which btw has a remarkably good pain reducing effect too.

Once I got off the regular use of pain meds a couple years ago, taking magnesium, Lyrica, and floressence has kept my pain manageable. Not gone by any stretch, but enough to grit my teeth through more often than not.  The liquid is too expensive to take every day, but when I need it, it’s there.

Oh I reach for the pills sometimes, but not before I’m ready to cry and not more than three times in one a week, because regular use of them actually heightens pain sensitivity. It also gives me migraine storms, which I could do without. That’s the cruelty of chronic pain—the longer you need pills to live with it, the worse you need them.

If I’m really having a bad few days, I’ll take the rarely used monster sleeping pills and go away for 8 or 10 hours. Believe it or not, once you loosen up the super stiffness from being semi-comatose, the fibro pain is usually less than it was. Good sleep is the miracle pill.

Kenai doesn’t care for my dunks in the drink, but he isn’t happy about my being sick either. The sooner I feel better, the sooner he can stop being a puppy pretzel. He didn’t want to stay on his bed in the kitchen the whole first half of the week, preferring to stick to my hip.

He’s decided he likes bread and rolls, even when it’s still dough. I caught him licking the mixer’s dough hook while I kneaded on another counter. That got a big “uh-uh”! He didn’t put the puppy tongue away until I really scolded him, either.  

Our toy time Tuesday lasted all of 5 minutes. Sometimes Kenai prefers a more direct interaction—if he can’t roughhouse with BB, he wanted to roughhouse with me and that wasn’t going to happen, either. If he couldn’t play the way he wanted, he didn’t want to play at all. Brat.  What he needed was a good detoxing run outside.

Hunting puppy did really well about not vanishing into the brush on me that day, hide and seek games being responsible for that. That and his wanting to keep track of every sneeze and wheeze. We had lots of fun between coughing spells, hugs and sore leg rubbing too. They seemed a little better that day, thankfully. The only thing running faster than Sir Speedy was my nose!

His majesty’s playtime took enough out of me Wednesday to need a nap between bread risings. Oh I did not want to get up. But if I laid there any longer than the 2 hours I had, the rolls would have risen and deflated into hockey pucks. That’s not good. The boys would have played with them, swatting them around before chomping. But I wouldn’t get my warm potato rolls, all buttered and light. I’m going to miss home-made bread when I go back to my restricted carbohydrate diet.

So down to the kitchen we went, and I closed it off so Kenai could play ball-in-a-blanket. That’s not what he had in mind. I picked the bones out of the stew, kicked the ball back to him, threw in some flour to thicken the now yummy broth, kicked the ball back to him, baked the rolls, and kicked the ball back to him. Did I mention he likes to have soccer practice with me? We have a good time, me and Brown.

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Thursday was the worst I have ever seen BB—he was howling, barking, whining for a solid 6 hours. Whining I would mostly ignore since nothing was going to quiet him. I just lay down in the room with the two pups between tasks to rest for awhile. Once he settled down into just whining, if I so much as moved, up he came and so did the volume. The strange thing is if I left for more than a few minutes, he would quiet down—that’s backwards from his usual behavior. What was happening was he had “shut down”, freezing up with panic when he was alone.

It was terrible, for all of us. He’d had a really bad week with a sick and crochety Mom, then a Thursday hit. Poor guy. Normally Beebs would doze off long enough for me to quietly go do something and be dozing still when I came back a few minutes later. He’s always upset when Mom’s gone, but as long as he has company from me and Kenai he handles it okay. Some days it’s even peaceful and fun. This was just crazy insecure. He never calmed down. Thursday was just a plain awful rotten day, and he was inconsolable.

Then came the dreaded Friday, his crucible beginning when Emily comes. There are only 3 more weekends after this one, so the end is in sight! Then Mike will be gone and Emily will not be coming to grandma’s for a long time. We’ll go see her and leave when we’ve played all we wanted. It’s not like she won’t ever see us again. She just won’t live with us for 48-72 hours at a time.

Anyway, Friday night meant a dinner at the café to avoid whatever manic energy Em’s brothers would bring through the door with them at the drop off. Mom and I don’t feel good fighting this cold, and are just too tired for the chaos ourselves. It’s just gone on too long, ya know? 24 weeks is a long time to have someone else plan out your weekends. A run to the café was mutually beneficial, for us and the pups.

The café was full, and we sat in a different place than usual, so it took Kenai longer to get around to relaxing. He popped up twice during the busy part of our stay as people came and went all around him, but as the place thinned out, he chilled. That’s my fault: I should sit in a different place every time we go so he can learn to be as relaxed anywhere as he is in our usual spot. Overall he did fine, just not as stellar a performance as he usually gives.

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As usual, several people commented how handsome or well behaved he was, or asked about his training, etc with good will. But every once in a while, you’ll come across a nasty person, like we did Friday night. “I think it’s disgusting to bring a dog into a restaurant” was her comment. I handled it politely, saying he was a service animal with a medical reason for being there, and left it at that. She never did get over herself.

Maybe I’d have felt the same way if a service monkey sat on the table and messed with the rolls or silverware for a person before I found myself disabled, I don’t know…It’s always different when it’s your foot in the shoe, I suppose. Some people don’t like dogs, some are very obsessive about perceived cleanliness, who knows what her deal was.

I hope for her sake she’ll figure out soon that dogmatic opinions (sorry bad pun, but it’s a good word), dogmatic opinions act like astringent to her own heart—grace and goodness can be found in all sorts of places you don’t expect, so if all you see is “I don’t like”, you miss it entirely. And you miss the good in people too, because you’re wrapped up in the great (un)importance of what you think.

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, that she may be a kindly mother, or a good friend, and just has a problem with dogs or dog people. But I have the sideways sad feeling she’s only good to people she approves of. It’s been my experience and observation that critical people don’t attract too much variety in friends, and certainly don’t have good skill at keeping those different than themselves for long.

Just look at my father’s life—the only person he approved of was himself, and not even he had the insolence to shoot off his mouth at a stranger walking past him. He had plenty of cheek and doctrine, too. He died pretty much alone, having run off anyone who would have cared for him with meanness.

Guess we all have our severity in some form or another. For me, it is hard to resist being indignant with people contemptuous enough to tell even total strangers what they need doesn’t matter as much as what “I think”.

Derisive people do terrible damage to the undeserving in this world, and that is what gets to me—it makes me angry for the undeserving, and sad for both. I’m not at all anxious that the lady had the presumption so be so derogatory about Kenai, don’t get me wrong.

I don’t mind the skin off my nose half so much as the skin off someone else’s who would be upset or hurt by stuff that gets said and done to them by the more calloused among us. So I have to check the indignation with disparaging people sometimes. Everyone needs to tell themselves to quit stewing and get over it, myself included.

There’s no getting through to people that adamant and abrasive, not with words or retribution anyway. Not until all their doctrines have been smashed by self-created grief and their opinions have become painful to their own hearts will the unkind re-think and learn a little kindness. Unfortunately, some never do, growing more and more caustic with life. There’s no telling what beauty and joy they passed up, or denied to others.

Maybe I’m wrong about the lady, and for the sake of all she knows and meets, I hope so. Like I said, grace and goodness can be found in all sorts of places you don’t expect.