Thank you for your kind notes and posts about Miss Molly yesterday. We’re really at peace with everything and we wanted you to know that. She seems to be in pretty good shape (especially for a pup going on 14 years old) and we hope she’s going to be around for a good long while – just as long as she enjoys her life. That’s all we want.
 
Of course, if you know anything about me and my husband, Rob, it’s that we always find the humour in even the worst things. Don’t forget that the night of Lauren’s first memorial in Ottawa (there was a second ten days later in Toronto), when something that was on the menu at the bar in our hotel was no longer available, we told the smiling waitress that this was the worst thing that had happened to us all day! I mean, if you don’t laugh…right?
 
So, Molly’s head has been cocked at about a 45 to 80 degree angle since being diagnosed with these awful crystals in her inner ear. Mind you, the angle has lessened with each passing day, so that now she can run around outside and if you didn’t notice that she was going in circles, you’d probably not even see the angle her head is at. But it’s been going on long enough that we’ve given her a nickname that sounds like the phrase “I lean.” Yes, there’s a lot of “C’mon Eileen” being sung around the house these days. Poor sweetie.
 

 
You’d have laughed at us as we were trying to fulfill the vet’s instructions when first she was diagnosed: get a pee sample. Wait, what? As a human, it’s a fairly easy endeavour (especially if you’re lucky enough in this instance to be a guy). But a dog? Keep in mind that Molly is a little dog and is very close to the ground to begin with. What was I going to use – blotter paper?
 
The vet said when they get samples, they use a soup ladle. (“From the Dollar Store,” she added, as though I thought she was hauling out her grandmother’s silver.) But I thought, There’s no way I can slide a ladle under the business end of our pup without distracting her entirely from the job at, um, hand (mine, I guess). So I had to come up with something better – and I did!
 

 
Meet our corn on the cob dish! Okay, let me rephrase that – our former corn on the cob dish; we have ceramic ones that I was given by my sister, so we retired the plastic set. But when I needed something long, lean and shallow, that’s what came to mind. It worked perfectly and even had a little pouring spout at the end so I could hit the sample bottle when we were ready to fill it. 
 
Sometimes I’m just too smart for my own good, wouldn’t you say? Tuck that idea away. I don’t know if you’ll ever need it, and I hope you don’t, but I was pretty darned proud of myself!
 
Talk to you here tomorrow with a welcome to summer that is quite likely just down the road from you.