First of all: Happy Thanksgiving!
I keep forgetting that–it’s just another day here, and Nick is still in Japan, so there are no obvious reminders. To me, today is just the day I had my last wedding dress fitting (which, by the way, was awesome).
As the title suggests, Jolie has been ill, with some kind of mysterious gastrointestinal ickyness. It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster: we went to the vet on Monday when her symptoms made their grand entrance, and since then she keeps alternating really positive signs with mildly terrifying ones. I did a little more reading tonight, though, and I think I have an idea of what I’ve been doing wrong and what to do from here–she’s got a chicken breast in the oven and a huge pot of rice on the stove, and from here on out we’ll be doing super-bland food in small amounts.
The funny part is that she has been following the instructions pretty perfectly; I’m one messing up. After she threw up last night (which I didn’t even find out about until this afternoon), she declined breakfast this morning, throwing me into a complete panic. Apparently I shouldn’t have given her breakfast at all; I definitely shouldn’t have tried to dress it up with treats and broth I know she likes. I can’t imagine the will-power it must have taken to steadfastly ignore it for three hours, and then for two more when I scrapped and re-made it, all the while with me shoving it in front of her and begging her to just eat something.
The dog is much smarter than I am. And I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Her being sick, though, made me realize that I haven’t written much about her lately, and I would hate for anyone to think that my dog needs to vomit in her crate to get my attention, so I thought I would fill you in on how she’s shaping up.
I was worried at first that she wouldn’t take well to the sharp decline in attention that would inevitably come when she stopped being a baby. Much as with her stomach distress treatment plan, she was way ahead of me.
Her first trick is to stare. She’s always done it; it never stops getting people to stare back. I don’t understand what she thinks she’s doing, but apparently my job is just to shrug in a semi-apologetic “What can you do?” sort of way, and let the people pet the dog (it usually turns out that she has no interest in being petted at all; she just wanted to make them look).
Her masterpiece, though, is the tennis ball. I don’t fully understand this one, either–maybe French people reserve balls for games of fetch only, or maybe it’s just her ridiculous relative size–but everywhere we go when she has her ball in her mouth, there is a constant buzz of, “Oh! With the ball!” “He’s so proud to carry his ball!” and today (earsplittingly): “Raw-bert! Hurry and look! He has a bawl in his mowth!”
Plus all the big dogs try to coax her to drop it, and so she gets to be the star all around…which was, presumably, her plan all along.
She also still hunts pigeons, which I have chosen to turn to my sinister advantage. See, there’s a law against feeding pigeons in Paris, but no one ever enforces it, although we non-pigeon-feeders desperately wish that they would.
My dog, fortunately, is a law unto herself.
I wish that I could say that I feel some guilt when I see a maladjust in a gigantic sea of pigeons mindlessly throwing baguette bits and give Jolie all the leash she wants, but I don’t. I don’t even have a problem smiling cheerfully at them while we go on our way, as if I have no idea why they’re suddenly trying to hide their head as the sea goes airborne. Don’t. Feed. The pigeons. I hold her in if it’s mainly ravens or sparrows. What? It’s not my fault that my dog has turned me into an arcane sort of vigilante.
She did catch a pigeon about a month ago, which was horrifying: it was a rainy day, the poor thing was obviously sick or waterlogged or something, and Jolie was off her leash. Fortunately, she was so surprised when she caught it that she backed off immediately, and I was able to hook her back up before she did anything but sort of bat and sniff at it. I can’t swear that it didn’t have a heart attack sometime after she lunged at it again on the return trip, but at least there was no mauling involved.
Anyway, to close out this little paean, I will leave you with an older photo, which Nick took, of me and Jolie waking up from a nice long nap:
Notice how she doesn’t have even the slightest hint of bedhead. Her passport may say she’s Belgian, but that dog has become French through and through.