Raccoon

While walking in the park tonight we caught a glimpse of a raccoon in a tree. He was on the small side, very cute, and quite maneuverable with his tiny opposable thumbs :-)

¡Los Tres Amigos en San Antonio!

A couple of Scott's friends from Lincoln happened to both be in Dallas for different reasons this past week so they took the opportunity to take a road trip down to San Antonio to visit Scott. They crammed a lot of activities into two days...Renee just tried to stay out of their way!

They started the weekend with a tour of Scott's work. (Cody was the photographer, notice his pictures were very artistic!)

Cody.
After that they visited the Alamo...
Saturday afternoon they flew to Mustang Beach for some seafood.
Downtown San Antonio.
The beach.

Coming in to land at Mustang Beach airport.

The marina at sunset.

Coming back to San Antonio at night.

Sunday morning they went to the river walk before it got too hot. We've tried to go a couple times (the day after Thanksgiving when they turn on all the Christmas lights and New Year's Eve) but it was so busy both times we bailed.

Dana.

A tour boat.

An amphitheatre (notice Scott running up the stairs to the right).

We then drove through McAlister Park so amidst all the aviation talk Dana got to enjoy some deer sightings.

Sunday for dinner we all drove to Cooper's in Llano. From there Dana and Cody went back to Dallas and we went back home.

It was a ton of food, but they were troopers...

You, me, and an incontinent beagle makes three....

Two weeks ago Bridget was severely ill. We had gotten the vomiting under control with a nightly Pepcid AC, had switched her food yet again, and things were looking up in the beagle health department. Then out of the blue two weeks ago she started not only vomiting again but suffering from sudden and violent bowel evacuations. Of course we rushed right to the vet but it took about 12 hours for the medicine to start getting things under control, and they were the LONGEST 12 HOURS OF OUR LIVES. You might say to yourselves, "can't you just contain her in her kennel until the situation is under control?" Yes, that is what we did...but you have to understand that if we turned our back for literally five seconds while getting ready to take her outside there would be a new problem on the carpet somewhere. And we soon also learned that her being in her kennel wasn't enough due to the explosive nature of the problem (the kennel has slots in the side and not only the carpet but the walls suffered casualties). So anywho, we quarantined her in the middle of the kitchen, took her outside every half hour, and cleaned her kennel and switched out the sheets several times that day. We switched her food to Science Diet (the vet suspects a food allergy), continued with the Pepcid, gave her the medicine, had our carpets professionally cleaned, and things went back to normal (except Bridget didn't care for the Science Diet so she went on a hunger strike and no longer got people food and ice cream, but too bad, life's rough sometimes, which we patiently explained to her).

Until last Wednesday, when it happened all over again.

We wasted no time quarantining her in the kitchen, rushed her from the kennel to the door at breakneck speed every half hour to go outside, and called the vet. We got her on fast-acting liquid medicine and had only one small incident in the living room, which we were able to clean and sanitize ourselves. We now have her on allergy-free Prescription Diet food (bland as bland can be but she seems to like it more than the Science Diet) and are hopeful this will do the trick. We'll see what happens when her pills run out and cross that bridge when we get to it. She isn't acting sick at all now, is full of energy, and is very put out at not getting any tasty people food. Anytime she's sick you have to feel terrible for her because you can tell she is just so ashamed and embarrassed, but shame and embarrassment don't help to lift beagle poo stains at 2am. So it's to the kennel with her, which she whines about because she hasn't been locked up anywhere for years but that's the scary new world we live in now and she'll have to deal with it :-).

She's back to 100% now...
and looking quite svelte since her hunger strike!
We also (horror of horrors) collected a stool sample to have tested, which came back negative for whatever it is it tests for. We also had a blood test done which came back normal. We'll see how this new food works, hopefully it's a winner!