Home and Garden Diva

You are here: Home / Archives for The Diva

My poor dog’s been sick

by



My Labrador Retriever has been sick on and off for close to two months. She’s had me quite worried!


We’ve had her back and forth to the vet three times and made at least one extra visit to the vet on our own just to pick up medication in that time as well. It’s been a worrying and expensive two months with our pup Midnight.

Whatever her “illness” is, it doesn’t seem to be extremely serious, but it’s troublesome. Her appetite started to be poor which for a Lab is very unusual. Then she started have diarrhea quite often and one day she vomited quite a bit and just wouldn’t move. She also seemed to have a fever. It seems that she has yeast in her stool – the Candida Albicans variety .. which can lead to leaky gut syndrome. So we are treating her for the second time in two months with an antibiotic targeted to the bowels. This time she’s on the antibiotic for a whole month! That cost us a bundle!

This last vet visit was the worst. I thought Midnight was going to have to have surgery. We were about to take her for a walk because she hadn’t been acting normal for a few hours and we thought that if she did her business she might feel better. However, once we got out the door she started spinning in circles and yipping in pain. My first thought was that she had a bowel blockage or a twisted stomach. We took her to the veterinarians office immediately.

Lucky for both our dog and us she started passing gas at the doctors office so the doctor just thought it was gas that was bothering her. He gave her an injection of pain medication and gave us enough pain medication to last her the weekend as it happened on a Friday evening. I do now think that she has a partial bowel blockage that evening because she ate a ton of grass that afternoon and she didn’t pass it until the following Tuesday and she was in bad shape until she passed it. I have Crohn’s and I get partial blockages myself quite often so I know the signs and I’m sure that’s what was going on with her. So we are very lucky she didn’t end up having surgery. She was a dog in bad shape those four days though .. She was passing gas and having diarrhea so her bowels were working to some degree but she was obviously in pain.

That was about two weeks ago. She’s doing a lot better now. She’s still on the antibiotics and she’s also getting probiotics to help clear up the yeast and combat the effects of the antibiotics on the good flora in her bowel .. so hopefully she’ll be in good shape again in a couple of weeks.

Man I hate it when my dog is sick. She’s my baby.

Summer in the city

by

Toronto is such a great city. There’s so many things to do – especially in the summer. I like trying to go out to some of the food festivals and some of the music festivals. There is also several cultural and arts events going on.

Well there’s so many things going on it’s hard to keep up. You could do something almost every day if you wanted to and most of them for free.

One of the things that I haven’t done in quite a while is use Toronto’s fantastic bike trails. I have a pretty bad hand injury right now so I can’t ride my bike at the moment but when my hand is feeling better I think I’m going to put the bike rack on the car and get my bike and go and visit one of the great bike trails and take a long bike ride. It’s great exercise and the trails are quite lovely.

in the meantime, though, until I can get on a bike, I see what else is happening in Toronto and go and enjoy one of the great events that’s happening in the city.

You have interesting things happening in your city? Do you try to get out and enjoy local events?

I Have to get a new TV

by

I just discovered that the TV in one of my spare bedrooms upstairs doesn’t work very well. I guess I’m going to have to replace it sometime soon.

It’s an older TV. A small 13 inch TV. It used to be my mother’s and I inherited it, and put it in our spare bedroom. I have it mounted on the wall, so it’s high up and you can watch it from bed.

I suppose now if I’m going to replace the TV I’ll replace it with a flat screen of course I’ll have to replace the wall mount, which means I’ll also have to look at flat screen TV mounts as well. I have an old TV in my bedroom, I think it’s a 20 inch, it doesn’t work very well either. Maybe I can find a deal and replace both TVs at the same time with flat screens. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Of course these new TVs and wall mounts will have to wait until there is a little bit of extra money which of course there is no extra money right now. I don’t know when there will be. I’m sure it will be a little while before these changes happen.

I think we need to do more renovations

by

We’ve been doing a lot of renovations on our home over the last several months and unfortunately I think I’ve just discovered another renovation that we need to do. Actually, I’ve known about this renovation for quite a while. I mean, I’ve wanted to redo the bathroom but I didn’t know we actually needed to redo the bathroom. You know what I mean?

The problem is our basement bathroom. It’s a tiny little bathroom with a tiny little shower and last week when we had a house guest. My husband suggested that our house guest use the upstairs shower because he was afraid that the floor of our basement shower would crack. Nothing like telling a house guest that you think they’re a little bit too heavy! I am sure he could’ve found a better way to say that.

So if my husband thinks the basement shower is pretty much falling apart and can’t withstand the weight of slightly heavier people I think I had better start looking into some ideas for bathrooms and try to find some new shower stalls that would fit the space.

This wasn’t a renovation that I was planning to do right now but I definitely like having to fully working bathrooms. So I think I’d better do this within the next few months. What’s a few more renovations anyway, this house is full of renovations lately.

New houses going up fast

by

There’s a lot of construction going on in my neighborhood. It seems that any house that used to be a bungalow is being purchased and turned into a two or three story home.

The house down the street, one that used to have very undesirable renters in it for several years, has been torn down and in it’s place two three story houses are going up in it’s place. Apparently the man who owned the former home has been trying to get permission from the city to rebuild there for years – and probably trying to get his renters out for that long too.

Anyway once he finally got permission and got his renters out it seemed the houses went up in no time at all. I think they tore down the old house in March or April and the new houses are up and just about finished already. There’s even signs on the property trying to sell the houses – I’m assuming at some future date when they expect them to be finished. Man that was fast.

Of course there’s still lots of work going. From my house I can see everything from Cement trucks going back and forth to back hoes and a used skid steer and several other pieces of heavy machinery.  I’m just glad that it’s way down the street so I don’t have to hear all the noise!

Meta

Tags

basement bed bedroom clean cleaning clutter dog exercise family fitness flowers friends Furniture garden Health help home house husband ideas Kitchen laptop Lighting money Music neighborhood neighbors party plants room Shopping sick skin spring summer tips tired Toronto Travel tv Vacation walking warm winter work

Pages