This week, I have to brag on my good boy.
My dog, Baldur, has some issues. He has a sensitive stomach and sensitive skin, and he has seasonal allergies. He's actually very much my son. But, unlike me, sometimes he does things that aggravate these issues.
Jason's parents live on a lake in Central Georgia. When we go down to see them, we always take Baldur. My boy is a wanderer, an explorer. He loves to go roaming around in the weeds, and rolling in the grass. His mommy avoids weeds, and never walks barefoot in grass, and for that matter tries to avoid walking in high grass without closed shoes, socks, and long pants on, because grass makes her skin itch.
A few weeks ago, 2 weeks in a row, we went down to the lake and let Baldur hang around outside with us. Despite having a bath when we got home, both times, he kept scratching himself - a lot - after those 2 weekends. This came to a head last weekend when he just couldn't stop scratching for more than about 30 seconds. We rolled him over onto his back so we could look for bug bites, and we found several places where he had scratched enough to break the skin.
To make a long story short, the vet prescribed some ointment, and antibiotics and prednisone for him. But this required him being rolled over onto his back twice a day to get ointment on several places on his tummy. He doesn't like being on his back - it makes him sneeze, and usually he's not good about following directions. Plus, I can't tell him to roll over, because for Baldur, "roll over" is a feat of athletic prowess that would get him a gold medal in the Olympics, if he could stick the landing.
But over the past week, he has very patiently come to me when I call him in the morning and evening and slowly (though not always elegantly) flopped over onto his side, and let me take his little chicken-thigh legs in my hands and roll him over like a lamb on a spit. He always gets a treat for this (and by "treat," I mean a pill cleverly hidden in a ball of wet dog food).
I'm always fascinated by animal personalities. The things they like and don't like, how they think, their little quirks and excentricities. Baldur hates water, but he enjoys the process of being dried off. He will sit in the tub with a sad, resigned look on his face, but when he gets out, oh, he loves his carpet surfing! After he's been towel-dried, he goes running around the house, sliding around on the carpet and rubbing himself drier.
Murphy, the little Maltese we had when I was in high school and college, was a problem solver. She didn't like jumping down off the couch (as small as she was, that would be like you or I jumping down almost a full story). She would push one of the decorative pillows off the couch and jump down onto that. But sometimes it wouldn't land right - it would hit at a diagonal against the coffee table. She would let out an exasperated "huff" and go down to the other end of the couch and start over with another pillow. She was also a stickler for schedules. In her later years, she developed high blood pressure, and got a pill for this, every night at 10:00. She always knew it was time for her pill and would come remind us. Then, if more than 15 minutes passed before we got up and started getting ready for bed, she would come to the foyer, where she could both stand at the bottom of the stairs and look into the TV room at us, and huff or bark impatiently until either we got up, or until we told her to go on up.
My mom's cat is fully grown at 7 pounds. But in Willow's mind, she is a 700 pound tiger. She flips the heck out at other cats in the back yard. She mercilessly stalks any bug or lizard that gets onto the back porch with a determination that rivals an army sniper. She is so active and fearless (walking the hand rail on the balcony of my parents' 2 story family room, for example) that my mom considered naming her after Edmund Hillary, the first successful climber of Everest.
Some of the most interesting people I know are animals. Because to me, they are people. They are clever and sweet and weird and opinionated. And sometimes I turn to them for character inspiration.
Please tell me about the animal characters that live at your house.