On Beagles and Butterflies

I was going to write this whole thing about how, when I was very little, I had a book whose cover featured a beagle with a butterfly on its nose, and from that moment on, my heart was on fire. I so desperately wanted a beagle! Of course, you know I eventually got one.*  Life dream realized! The apple of my eye!  Littlest Love, Littlest Only in Stature!

But when she died earlier this month, the morning after my father died – on opposite sides of the country, how cruel! – and when I got back the viewing window had fallen out the Ducati's front master cylinder (really!) – again, how cruel!  Well, the whole point of the thing was to be that soon thereafter, this butterfly (Yes! A butterfly! Just like the book!) came into my life, by way of a newly acquired milkweed plant – how strange! At least it will be a butterfly soon, I’m told, and it lives here with me now, and I’m waiting, waiting, waiting for it to happen.

Queen Butterfly larva (Danaus gilippus), currently in my safekeeping.

Yes, I was going to write a whole long thing about it all, but I can’t. I just can’t. What if it dies?

The Beagle Entries:

You met her here.

You saw her briefly here.

I worried and worried about her here.

Beagle in recovery here.

Here I worried and worried, again.
Caterpillar/Butterfly update.

A Reprieve and an Irish Cottage Pie

I was sure she was going to die. In truth, she may still. For 10 days, she has done little more than sleep, taking in no food, and only the most delicate sips of water.  I carry her to the sunny places in the morning, and to the shady places in the afternoon, where we sit together. I offer her tiny spoonfuls of her very favorite foods. I supplement her fluids. I carry her back to her soft, fleecy bed.  Nothing.  I had been treating her for a UTI, but aside from that, I have no real explanation.

And then, yesterday, she barked. One solitary bark. "Where are you??"

Have we turned a corner? It is still too risky to hope. Miss Molly is nearing her 15th birthday, and, having survived cancer not once but twice, as well as currently sporting a heart murmur that can be heard across the room, early chronic kidney disease, and not one, but two ruptured ACLs,* I'd call her "One Tough Cookie.**"  But still.

For each meal, I cook something I hope she'll eat. Inevitably it becomes my own dinner. Roasted chicken, fish fillets, omelets, pizza bones, and on and on. Yesterday I browned some $8/lb beef***. She took a morsel, but no more. Inspired by a recent trip to Ireland, I made a cottage pie for myself.  What luck that it was cold and rainy****!  I offered her a tiny taste, onion hazard be damned*****.  She wanted more! And this morning? More please!  So today, I'm making her her own cottage pie, free of all alliums.

And I hope.******

*Those are her little knee ligaments. Surgically fixable, unless you have both heart and kidney disease.  Still, tough little tractor that she is, she does what she wants, and is downright heroic during her underwater treadmill rehab sessions!
**Meanwhile, a surgeon half way around the world has said the same about my father. 
***No factory farmed meat for us, ho, ho!
****No, not in Tucson. I'm back at the farm in Utah.  The Ducati is soon to follow.
*****Heinz body hemolytic anemia, anyone?
******Turns out that UTI is being caused by a resistant strain of bacteria, so the antibiotics I had been giving her have done nothing. Though I just got a different prescription for her, the only one both effective (albeit slowly) and safe for her little kidneys, I do believe my tough little cookie has already begun winning this battle on her own. 


UPDATE:
My girl did indeed recover, although it was quite a bit later than when I posted this. It was a tough road, but she was tougher.
Here she is, recuperating:

The Daily Special: Dessert

You know your beagle’s got grit when she’s rattling the cage bars earlier than anticipated, after a major piece of surgery.  Bless that little goblin, but she sailed right through the cross-your-fingers-operation and the critical recovery period, and is home a full one to two days ahead of schedule.

Beagle Resting Comfortably

I think I’ll just let her sleep in that place right between the bedroom and kitchen while I put some bits and scraps from last week’s birthday cake to good use.

Whoopie!*  I’ve never been so happy to drain my bank account and not ride the Ducati to Colorado in my whole life!

*Whoopie Pies: Dig around your cookbooks and the internet for a chocolate cake/cupcake/whoopie pie recipe that uses your one remaining egg, and your extra, now untempered chocolate.  Bake off into little UFO shapes and fill with your leftover Strawberry Cloud Cream (or whatever you might have left in your pastry bag.)  Aren’t you glad you stabilized it? I’ll freeze them and call them fancy ice cream sandwiches.

The Daily Special (Chinese Steamed Buns)

When you’ve canceled today’s planned motorcycle departure to Colorado, because your beagle is in surgery for a “large grapefruit sized” tumor on her little liver*, and you are so tired, but can’t sleep, and all you can do is knead your worry into bread dough, but it’s too hot to fire the oven for an hour or more, plus you have little bits of pork with chile paste leftover from last weekend’s birthday party, then what you do is add some sautéed mushrooms and onions, those remaining shreds of cabbage in the crisper drawer, a bit of garlic, ginger, soy, sriracha, and sesame, and make char siu bao**.

Plus, you have a few crappy archival photos from last time you made them. (No beagle in the hospital that time.) 

We’re not out of the woods yet, but the surgery went really well.***

The face I see when she's at my feet in the kitchen.

Another thing you can do is paint your bedroom pink. I did that yesterday.


*She didn’t tell me about it at all. I found it during a belly rub. 
** Use any simple, soft, white, yeasted bread dough recipe.  I'll often fly in the face of convention and add just a small fraction of whole wheat flour.  Let it rise a bit, portion it out, roll flat, fill, wrap them, then steam them for 15 minutes or so. Silly, puffy, good!  They’re also really inexpensive, which is handy, since I just completely emptied my wallet for this little veterinary adventure.  Beagle repairs, as it turns out, are significantly more expensive than Ducati repairs.
***If she makes it through these next critical 48-72 hours, the prognosis is very, very good.  “Littlest love,” I reminded her right before she was admitted. “Littlest only in stature!”
UPDATE - see "Dessert" here.

No Excuses. Well, yeah, some excuses. (A Number of Occasional Other Matters)

If you’ve been following my Sort Of Sabbatical Phase One By The Day Posts, you probably decided long ago that I finally succumbed to the spectacularly distracting Pacific Coast Highway views and crashed the Ducati into sparkling azure sea.

I didn’t.

So that's good.

Today I thought, as a writing exercise, I’d relate the long list of excuses that brought my posting to a halt.   Do enjoy!

My computer has been acting suspiciously since my return from Sort of Sabbatical Phase One.  Specifically, it has been giving me error messages when I back up my data.  I have, mostly, been successfully ignoring this problem (Me - 1, Computer - 0!), except for the minor side effect that I am not particularly motivated to work on my photographs if there’s a decent possibility I might lose all my work.  Surely you understand.

Then I went on Sort of Sabbatical Phase Two.  Of course I took photos. You’ll see them later.

Then I came back.*  My computer did not fix itself in my absence.  Harrumph. (Computer - 1, Me - 0) After some time-consuming yet unsuccessful attempts to rectify the problem, I went back to my original plan, namely, ignoring the problem.  Not surprisingly, this tactic brought on those same pesky minor side effects.

Then I went on Sort of Sabbatical: Epilogue.  Of course I took photos.  You’ll see them later.

Then I was sequestered, pretty much without internet or phone, for a week in a tiny town in northern New Mexico.  I lived in a retrofitted Airstream trailer, complete with kitchen and farm animals.  I didn’t eat any of the farm animals, but I did  have some two-thumbs-up tapas at La Boca in Santa Fe.  Overall, the week was fantastically hilarious.

It's not often I open an Airstream trailer door.  Even less often do I find a horse begging for a snack on the other side of said door.

Do I have to say that by the time I finally made my way back to Tucson, my computer still wouldn’t back up correctly?**  Heal thyself! (Please?)

Then there was the matter of my last post.  I was, for a time, rather distracted by it all.   Recently, I saw a dead dove in the middle of the street.  Its body was crushed, with one delicate wing miraculously still reaching skyward.  I wish I had taken a photo of it.  Because that’s exactly what it feels like to be run over by a bus.  I know, because just as surely as Julia was betrayed by Winston,*** I was thrown under the bus in a manner so clever I almost admire it, by someone who was (supposedly) my greatest ally.  Pfft.  Not exactly the stuff of superheroes.

Then it was September.  It’s generally a lovely month. I ease myself gently back into work, while enjoying all the local day rides I haven’t seen since May. Except this September I was leisurely repairing the Ducati in time for a track day at the end of the month.  (You’ll find out why the Ducati needed repairs round about, oh, Sort of Sabbatical Phase One Day 25, give or take.)  Leisurely making repairs?  More along the lines of “leisurely inflicting further damage.”  No, I didn’t have it fixed in time for the track day.  I still don’t have it fixed.

Then I decided perhaps it would be more efficient to drive 26 hours to retrieve my Kawasaki, which had been residing in TX, than to fix the Ducati.

Then there was the short but all consuming project of my very first paid food photography gig.  I was actually paid (still waiting on the check, to be honest) to cook and photograph the process of making a certain risotto recipe****. I borrowed a decent camera, turned my little house into a photo studio, cleaned my stove, and took the requested five specific photographs.  If I’m lucky, it’ll boil down to minimum wage.  But it was amusing, and I got to eat a great deal of risotto over the next few days.

The ingredients. And a cookbook.  Although I didn't actually use a recipe from this book.  Do you suppose the Risotto page would lie nicely in the middle of the book like this?  Of course not.  Hurrah for color copiers and tape.

It's quite a trick to pour broth AND stir AND release the camera shutter with your toes or teeth. (I know about self-timers.  Couldn't use it. Long Story.)  The lighting on shiny pans can be rather problematic.  After spending hours getting it right, the sun had moved into the kitchen window. Argh.

Then October hit me like a 12" All-Clad Saute Pan.  I’m still standing here blinking stupidly from the how-did-I-not-see-this-coming avalanche of work.  Speaking of side effects, however, it is nice to finally have some paychecks rolling in.

And my last excuse?  I have a new friend in my life!  Remember this sad day?  Well, I’ve been dog-less and dog-longing ever since.  (No sense in getting a dog before the Sort of Sabbatical).

“Miss Molly” arrives and my heart sings!

My nine year old darling came from Southern Arizona Beagle Rescue.

There she is! All 42 pounds of her!  She's already discovered that I'm immune to the sad brown eyes trick. (Boo!)  But I like to walk. (Yay!)

Hard to say who is happier.  What a lovely, lovely conundrum.

There.   No more excuses. Except neither the computer nor the Ducati work yet. And now I have to borrow a proper camera to get a proper beagle portrait.

*By that I mean I continued on to UT.  To work.  A tiny bit.  And ride more.
** Yes, I should just buy a new one.  Or at least reinstall the OS to rule that out as the problem. (I really don't think it is.)  But the amount of work (and frustration) required by either of those things makes Ducati repair seem like fun.
*** "Do it to Julia!" he cries, when faced with his greatest fear, in George Orwell's 1984.  To be fair, Julia also betrayed Winston in Room 101, we just have fewer details. I still hold some respect for both Julia and Winston, though, based on their circumstances and the final scene where they actually own up to it.
****Shrimp, chile, pine nuts, carrots, and black olives?  Really?  I suppose I wasn't paid to approve of the recipe, just to make and photograph it.  What a silly use of some expensive ingredients.