Carina's Diary, Part 2

Here are some more excerpts from the diary of my 8 month old golden retriever, Carina.

Day 210: I am way faster than my owner now. When he wants me, he has to stand there and call for me to come because chasing me serves no purpose. Usually I come when he calls but sometimes I like to try to make him chase me. I shouldn’t though; it’s just not fair to do that to a slow clutz like him.

Day 214: I have definitely identified my owner’s wife as being the weaker of the two. She finds my “cuteness” irresistible and cannot say no to me. While they are eating I lay my head on her lap and she gives in and slips me some of her food unless my owner sees, then he doesn’t let her. When he’s gone, though . . .

Day 216: My owner was gone again today. I am sensing a pattern. He is gone every third day; where does he go for a whole day at a time? He must get bored and lonely without his trusty dog with him. He better not be playing with another dog while he’s gone.

Day 220: I do not understand what happened today. My owner took me back to the vet’s office and left me all day. They brought me into a room with a bunch of people who were all paying attention to me; I love attention! But then I started feeling really tired and I took a long nap. When I woke up, I did not feel good and my stomach hurt. My owner came and got me and took me home. I have been feeling a little better since supper.

Day 225: My owner played hide and seek with me in the house. I always find him fairly quickly, except when he hides in the closets (I forget that they are there). Well today he went running into the closet in his study to hide and forgot that there was a shelf at the level of his forehead. I jumped on him when he fell on the floor so he would know that I found him!

Day 230: My owner found a new way to be cruel to me today. I don’t know if he intends to torture me or it just comes natural for him. My owner and his wife prepare their food in the kitchen every day and it smells so good, but they never let me taste any; I just eat the same old pellets every day. Sometimes I am in the yard when they cook so I don’t have to smell the food that I can’t eat. Today my owner bought a grill and when he cooks with it the smells spread across the whole backyard. I can smell the tasty meat that's up there on the grill but eveytime I try to check it out I get smacked. One of these days when he's not looking . . . It's not like it will hurt me or anything.

Day 231: I don’t mean to complain; all in all my owners are pretty good. The other dogs in the neighborhood complain that their owners never play with them or don’t allow them inside. I must be pretty special.

Traitor

I am officially a traitor. My dog has trusted me with her needs and safety and yesterday I betrayed that trust. I came home from work to my normal enthusiastic welcome from Carina then grabbed her leash and started for the door. She loves to go for rides in the car. She drools a little bit from being nervous but she is getting better about that. She always sits up tall and watches the cars and people as we go by.

Yesterday was different; our destination was the vet's office for Carina to get spayed. She was bouncy and happy like a golden retriever puppy should be as she tried to get everyone we saw to pet her; she was even excited to see the three legged cat again(who was not so excited to see her).

She was at the vet's office all day until I picked her up at 4:00. When they brought her out, she was still woozy from the sedatives and her tail was missing the usual "I'm so happy to see you" wag. I felt horrible when she would look at me with her big, brown, adoring eyes and I imagined her wondering why I had allowed them to make her sick. The fact that she doesn't understand what was done to her and why it was done makes it even worse.

I feel really, really bad.

I brought her to work with me today so that I can keep an eye on her. I don't know if I am really allowed to have her here but since it is a one time hing I guess it is easier to ask forgiveness that npermission. She is in her cage in the garage. I think I've been out there 20 times to check on her already and it's not even 11:00 yet.

After yesterday I don't think that I can have kids. Carina is only a dog and I was so worried about her yesterday and I feel so bad for her when she's sick. How would I feel if my child was going through that?

One of my coworkers is in Charleston today for her son to have heart surgery at MUSC. They are going to go into his heart and "zap" a section of his heart to keep him from going into recurrent SVT (rapid heart rate). I would have to be sedated to be able to sit in a waiting room for hours while my child was going through that.

Yep, no kids for me.

Happily Married

Sarah and I returned safely from New England without any major mishaps. We landed in Boston on Thursday around lunchtime and met my aunt Cindy for lunch at Legal Seafood on the waterfront. The food was good and the location was great and we were able to catch up a little. We had hoped that we could spend a week in New England but it didn't work out this time.

After lunch Sarah and I went to the New England Aquarium and spent a few hours there. They have a large variety of animals and it is well presented if a bit outdated. We also saw Fanueil Hall, which was a meeting hall and marketplace in colonial Boston and also served as a signing place of the Declaration of Independence. We have now been to two of the three surviving buildings in which the Declaration was signed, the other that we've been to being in Charleston. Now we need to visit Philadelphia.

While we were in NH we stayed in a cabin on a lake owned by a friend of the bride. We were able to do some swimming and canoeing. The swimming was a little bit cold, but still refreshing.

Nathan and Elizabeth's wedding went very well and it was really a beautiful wedding. The ceremony was in an old New England church, a big white clapboard building with a tall steeple. The church even has an old carriage house in back.

The reception was held at a house owned by a friend of the family. The house was beautiful, to say the least-any house with a 4 bedroom, built in servants' quarters has to be fairly stately. The resception was very classy and the food was great.














We wish the new married couple the best as they begin their life together. I, for one, definately recommend married life.

Prayer Requested

Please pray for Sarah and me this weekend. We are leaving tomorrow (Thursday) morning for Sarah's brother's wedding in New Hampshire. We will be back on Sunday.

New Links and a Quote

I have added two new links on the right hand side of the page. They are linked to directories of bloggers from Northland and bloggers from BJU. I will be adding more links soon as I find more friends' blogs.

On another note, this is my 50th post. It is almost a waste of a post to tell everyone about the links that are on the same page as this post.

I have found a quote that I really enjoyed so I will add that here so as not to waste a post.

"When someone wrongs you, ask yourself: What made him do it? Once you understand his concept of good and evil, you'll feel sorry for him and cease to be either amazed or angry. If his concept is similar to yours, then you are bound to forgive him since you would have acted as he did in similar circumstances. But if you do not share his ideas of good and evil, then you should find it easier to overlook the wrongs of someone who is confused and in a moral muddle."
-Marcus Aurelius

The Rest of the Picture

Since I misused the picture of Lianna on that last post I will post the entire picture. This is my little(or not so little anymore) sister with her horse Corazon. She also has another horse named Boo but he wasn't feeling photogenic that day.

Lianna is an accomplished and much-awarded artist and plays violin and piano. Here are two pictures that she painted for us.

It's a zoo in there!

Saturday Sarah and I enjoyed a rare day off together. We have been wanting to visit the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia so we headed down that way; we have a zoo here in Greenville but it is pretty pitiful at this point. So after getting up really late we headed out around 10:00. Everything went well until about 30 miles from Columbia, then it all came loose. The traffic came to a stop and the thunderclouds started rolling in. It was a mess. The last 30 miles took us 90 minutes.

We were very surprised that when we got to the Zoo it hadn't even rained there and the sun was out. The zoo was actually very nice. It wasn't on the level on the DC zoo but it was much better than Greenville. We were able to see a bird show and a sea lion show, and we also saw them feeding the fish in the aquarium and feeding the penguins. They had a fairly large variety of animals, especially the reptiles.

Twins-separated at birth.

These two are definately related.

Who do you think these remind me of?

Hey, look who I found!

Sarah and I had a blast at the zoo. We didn't see a drop of rain while we were there.

When we got back home we had another surprise birthday party to go to for our assistant pastor. We had a great time (and this one was a successful surprise too) eating ice cream and shooting hoops and talking. It was a very enjoyable Saturday.

Ethics and Birthdays

I have been battling with a moral dilemma for the last few days. Is it ever acceptable to lie to your wife? Is it ever acceptable to scare the living daylights out of your wife? Well, after much anguish over the ethics of the situation, I decided to go ahead with my plan and throw a surprise birthday party for Sarah last night. Birthdays bring up so many ethical questions that we would not normally even think about. I started plotting with some friends at church a few weeks ago.

This was Sarah's plan: Sarah and I decided that after she got home from work last night we would go to downtown Greenville and eat at a nice pizza place and walk around the beautiful downtown area.

Here is what really happened: Sarah came home from work early yesterday and we went shopping for frames for the oil painting that we bought in Italy (which is going to cost more than the painting itself). We visited two framing places here in town then we made a quick stop at Lowe's so Sarah could get some ideas on how to spend her gift card that her coworkers bought her. I though she should put it toward a grill, but she wanted to spend it on boring landscaping stuff.

After we had killed some time in Lowe's, it was 6:00 and everyone should have been at our house by then. At that exact moment I "happened" to have a slight asthma attack and realized that I had "forgotten" my inhaler at home. When we got home I got Sarah to come in the house and there she got a little surprise . . . and she almost passed out.

We had a great time; ate some pizza; ate some ice cream; all the good party stuff. The party lasted long into the night (10:30- I must be getting old). Sarah got some cool scrapbooking stuff, some money, a gift card to Michael, some movies (The Love Bug and The Parent Trap), a bluetooth headset for her new pink razr phone, and some candles (and a really big surprise).

Happy Birthday Sarah!!

Today is my beautiful wife's birthday. Last week was, of course, our second anniversary. I now know why she wanted to get married in the end of May- so she could get a lot of presents for birthday and anniversary and they would be perfectly spaced out from Christmas.

Sarah and I in Venice in April.

I learned something new this morning. Don't RSVP to attend a conference on Acute Myocardial Infarctions (in the vernacular: heart attacks) at 8:00 AM after you have been working all night. If it were a large class I could get away with sleeping if I needed to- if you don't believe me ask the people who sat next to me during my college years. However, today's meeting was around a conference table and since I was the third person to arrive I couldn't exactly sit all the way at the other end of the table.

To make it even worse/better, they served us breakfast. After some fruit, a muffin, and a Krispy Kreme donut (which is in my diet) I was ready for a long nap. Fortunately they also provided fully caffeinated coffee, of which I eagerly partook. As a result I am now half asleep mentally but typing quite fast. Unfortunately, my typing skills are not up to par with the speed that I am typing so I am having to fix a lot of mistakes.

It turned out that the "conference" was actually the hospital 's way of picking our brains for ways that we could work together with them more effectively as a team. It was also an attempt on their part to try to use us to win customers from the other hospital here in town.

In the end, I really did enjoy the conference and even learned from it; it was very informative for me as a future EMS director (yeah, you can laugh now).