Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Smelling nature


Smelling nature, originally uploaded by Paguma.

This picture has been on my Flickr account since January and had never had a view until yesterday. Then it had 14 views yesterday and 14 views today most for a picture search on "hound smelling".

That's a little weird isn't it?

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Samuel's health issues

We're fairly lucky that Samuel has never had a serious health problem, but it seems he is constantly getting these weird ailments. Combined with Dina's "worrying" personality it means he has had more medical visits than probably most of you out there!

One of the first ailments he had was these weird warts that grew on the inside his mouth. I still remember when we asked the vet if they were common, his answer was something like "Oh no, I haven't seen this in years." He actually went to the vet for them twice, as they kept getting bigger. The second vet was not our vet because we were on vacation. The second vet recommended surgically removing them because he had never seen them fall off. I think now that he was trying to get some money, because sure enough two weeks later they fell off.

Last year when we were on vacation, he came down with a skin ailment and his skin was all blotchy. It was some sort of infection, but the antibiotics cleared it up real quick. Although the Dina's parents who were caring for him felt bad that it happened on their watch. It could have happened any time.

One of the health issues he is constantly being annoyed with is skin tags. It's basically just extra skin growing where it shouldn't be. It often looks like a wart or pimple. We've been told they can fall off on their own, and that if you surgically remove them they could still grow back anyway, plus you could leave him with the surgical scar. Generally the treatment is nothing, unless they are bothering him.

Well in the past few months, we noticed he had a skin tag growing on his eye lid. We noticed because his eyes would be full of goop from the irritation. Unfortunately, it's not a good place to be removed anyway, as there isn't much tissue on an eye lid. Even worse, one day a few weeks ago when I investigated, I noticed he has a whole cluster of them on the inside of his eye lid, and that's most likely what has been irritating his eye, not the cosmetic one on the edge of the lid.

We did not panic yet, and have been giving it a bit of time, and we both swear in the past two weeks it looks like the cluster on the inside of his eye lid is shrinking. He's also had less goop in his eyes. This is good news, because I'm not sure what they could have done about it anyway. I'm just glad my boy's eye is bothering him less.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Enjoy every drop


Enjoy every drop
Originally uploaded by Paguma

Hey, I finally got my "blog this" feature at Flickr to work with Blogger.

This is just my test post, so I thought I'd grab what is currently listed as Samuel's most interesting photo according to Flickr's mysterious interestingness algorithm.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Samuel interupts photo shoot

I was taking pictures of my wife last night, trying out some new flash units when all of a sudden Samuel walked into the scene.

Retro dog

I think he thought the orange balls in her hand were cheese or some sort of toys.

It made for some interesting shots.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

I felt bad

I got up around 5am, to um, take care of business. When I was crawling back into bed, I didn't realize Samuel had stretched out and I laid down most of my weight across his leg. He let out an ungodly yelp. After that neither Dina or I could get back to sleep. Samuel on the other hand was snoring within minutes...

Friday, February 8, 2008

Okay, that's a little too close

So one day this week I woke up spooning my wife. I'm not exactly sure how that happened!

Anyway what was weird about it is that Samuel was behind me, spooning me. Usually he curls up besides you and leans into you, but in this case he was all stretched out and leaning into me.

weird

Monday, January 21, 2008

Introducing Samuel

I will talk about my dog Samuel a lot, so this is a quick introduction.

Samuel is a Treeing Walker Coonhound. We rescued him from a local animal shelter. He had three previous owners before us and was at the shelter for over a month before we selected him.

What we didn't know at the time is that Samuel suffers from separation anxiety. Another of his quirks is, true to his breed, he will run off and hunt if left off leash. However, besides these two issues he is an absolutely fabulous dog.

Samuel