Our Menagerie

We have a full house these days.

This is Linus. He's what a random guy at the beach last year called "the Shaq of golden retrievers." He's a month shy of 4 years old, and he's enormous. And acts like he's six months old and still weighs 20 pounds.

^ Case in point. ^

Trout is our old lady. She's going on 11. Just two weeks after Cory and I moved in together, my college friend brought her to us from her grandparent's farm. Her mama was a barn mouser. She's been a good girl to us for a long time and I hope she sticks around for a long time to come. She's slowing down a bit but she's still a weirdo, which means she fits in well at our house.

This is Dexter. He's the new guy. Not sure how old he is, but we think he's just about a year. He came to us through my sister, who works at a vet clinic. He came to her through the undercarriage of a car, where he held on for dear life while it drove 16 miles down the interstate. And he's none the worse for wear today (besides some tiny little scars on his pads where he was burned by the hot car). When we got him we called him Tiny, but now he's two pounds heavier than Trout. But we still call him Tiny.
He's going to be a blood donor. And it is super hard to take photos of black kittens.












Today I took our menagerie to the vet all by myself. (Work is still super busy for us, but C has it worse than I do so he went into the office while I took the two hours to fix everyone up.) We had a big list of things to do for all three. Linus has worms and a yeast infection in his ears. Trout has an upper respiratory infection. Dexter needs to be vaccinated. I was pretty sure I was going to have a heck of a time wrangling two cat carriers and a giant dog but it actually wasn't so bad. Trout puked and then peed in her carrier on the way there; I'm not sure if she was carsick or stressed or what but the poor thing had to stand awkwardly in there for half the car ride so she didn't have to touch any of her accidents. Linus weighs 99.3 pounds, which is way more than he should, so they took a blood sample to see if he has thyroid problems. Dexter was the only one who came away unscathed; I'm going to talk to the blood bank who wants his blood and see if they're going to vaccinate him for me instead.

The doctor offered to help me carry everything back out to the car, but I declined (it wasn't all that bad).  She said "it looks like if you ever have triplets, you'll be able to deal with them super easy!" Heh.