Hi. Welcome back. I know it’s been a while and I haven’t even gotten any Japan pictures up yet, but since I’ve been home I’ve been crazy busy. Not just busy, crazy busy. So sorry for the delay. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled program. Oh, and sorry this post won’t be about Japan either. I mean to get some pics up since it was an amazing trip, but there are more pressing matters at hand. Actually, there’s one pressing matter. His name is Charlie.

Charlie is my dog. For the most part, he’s a good dog, he just has had some unfortunate injuries. Now you would think that since he spends 99% of his life in a yard with a fence, how injured could he get? Well here’s a picture of him that I took maybe 3 or for years ago.

He’s a handsome dog isn’t he?

Notice the white tip of his tail? Umm, yeah, that’s no longer there. Apparently one night, Charlie was chasing his tail and he got lucky…or unlucky I suppose. At some point, he managed, we think, to catch his tail and chomp down on it. Soooooo, to make a long story short, we had to take him to the vet and chop off the tip of his tail. So now his tail is a little shorter.

Fast forward to July, 2008. We were at Keao‘s sister, Cassandra’s, party at our house and we noticed that Charlie had a bump on his toe. It was pretty big, but we just figured if we leave it alone it would eventually heal and go away. Of course, as you may suspect by my great job of foreshadowing, it did not go away and it turned out to be a tumor. So we took him into the vet and had it removed. That part was easy.

We brought him home and put on one of those collar thingies (for the record, they’re called Elizabethan collars). Here’s a particularly evil looking picture of Charlie taken by my brother Stanton.

Note the pink bandage on his right paw

So we bring him home and we notice something a bit odd. The cone that’s supposed to be protecting him from himself doesn’t quite work right. It’s just a little too short. He can still reach his paw. Let that sink in for a bit. The protective cone doesn’t protect his paw. It’s useless. Of course since he can get to his paw we scold him everytime he gets near it.

Well yesterday morning we wake up and find that he did indeed get to his paw. In fact he got into his paw a little too much. The bandage was shredded and there was blood everywhere! Keao said it looked like a crime scene (except we know how the guilty party is). So we panic and call the vet only to find out that the vet is closed on Wednesdays. But she has a pager for emergencies and we figured this qualifies as one. Of course she calls back and doesn’t offer much sympathy. Like it’s our fault. We only had what she gave us. So she tells us to use some manila folders and to extend the collar. Umm, it’s a good thing we have manila folders…actually we don’t have manila folders so we had to get creative. Good thing I was a summer fun leader with a certification for arts and crafts.

After a few cuts with a scissors and some masking tape this is what we came up with.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine

I think he can now get cable on that thing (or at least hear very well)

It’s kind of gross, but can you see the blood everywhere?

So anyway, Keao took him back to the vet this morning. I’ll let her fill you in on the rest of the morbid details. Meanwhile I think we need to figure out how to permanently extend that collar.