~*~ For some reason, the large photos at the beginning of my posts are getting distorted. Until I can resolve the problem, if you click on the photo, you will see it the way it is supposed to be. ~*~

To really get 2011 off to a good start, I think a new Pascal story is in order~  Though he turned eleven in July, (4th,)  Pascal hasn’t lost any of his funny quirks; if anything, he’s been busy adding new ones & refining the old ones.  Last night was a perfect example of a classic “Pascal” maneuver~

Every night, I prepare his dinner when I prepare mine, so we both eat dinner at the same time. He eats very slowly for a dog, but being a slow-eater myself, he always finishes eating before I do. Every night as soon as he’s finished his dinner, he comes over to where I’m sitting at the table to let me know he’s finished so I can wipe his face- ( I discovered early-on  that he really likes to be clean, so if I don’t wipe his face when he’s finished eating, he’ll wipe it himself- by running his chin along the cushion of the couch!)  Once I’ve cleaned his face I finish my dinner while he sits on the floor at my feet,  patiently waiting for me to finish eating.

Because he’s always been such a “picky” eater I have to have something I can use as a bribe to make sure he eats his dinner,   as  his medicine is mixed into his food. Once I’ve finished eating, I take both of our plates into the kitchen & if he’s eaten, give him a treat to eat in the other room while I wash dishes. Normally his treat is potato, but occasionally I’ll give him a small dish of sherbet,  which is what I usually eat while I do dishes, however he doesn’t usually see me, because he’s in the other room eating his potato.                                          

Last night I brought him his potato & went back to the kitchen to wash dishes. I had taken sherbet out of the freezer but hadn’t put it into a dish yet. Standing at the sink while it filled with water, I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone.  I turned around, and guess who was standing there staring at me?  “What are you doing?” I asked. I had just given him his potato, he couldn’t possibly have finished it! He continued to stare at me. I thought maybe he needed to go out,  so I asked~  No- that wasn’t it. He wouldn’t follow me to the door. He just stood where he was, not moving . I walked into the dining room where I had given him his potato.

At first I didn’t  see his dish where I had left it. I walked closer to take a better look. Nope! No dish. No potato! BUT I saw the plastic bag that I lay under his cloth placemat,  & his placemat-  both were pushed way back under the wooden stand that holds his water dish, carefully arranged in a lump-  over the dish with his potato in it! He had done a great job! He hadn’t left one bit of dish sticking out from underneath the placemat & plastic bag!  I lifted the placemat. There was the dish with his potato-  completely untouched!

While I was in the dining room looking for his dish,  Pascal sat totally still in the kitchen. He hadn’t budged-  I knew what this trick was about, he’d done it before,  but I pretended that I didn’t. With his dish in my hands,  I walked up to him & said,  ” No potato tonight, huh? What do you want?”  He stared at me~ “What, Pascal?  Show me what you want! Do you want ice cream?”  Suddenly the statue broke it’s silent stance! He  stood up,  tail wagging in circles excitedly-  I showed the carton of ice cream  to him and asked,  “This? Is this what you want?” I got a chorus of barks & a fanfare of tail wags. Clearly, I was on to something-  something good!

Pascal got a small dish of ice cream~  and oh! Life was good!

Nice job, Pascal!

Sew? I haven’t. I’ve been knitting Pascal a sweater-  For the past ten years I’ve been knitting Pascal a sweater! So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I finally finished it last week. Ten years to knit one little dog sweater is, well, at the least, a long time—–  but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. It’s not like I’ve been working on it non-stop for ten years & just finished. This is what happened.

I actually started the sweater eleven years ago, and it wasn’t for Pascal. It was to be for the dog I had before Pascal, a schnoodle named Shadow. Shadow lived to be 18; a long life for a dog, but not long enough for his sweater to be a reality.

The first winter that I had Pascal I thought,  it’s cold and we have a long winter ahead. I should finish the sweater I started for Shadow, for Pascal! I pulled the bag with the beginnings of Shadow’s sweater in it, out of the closet. It was indeed a beginning. I’d knit only about 4 inches of the back- and that was it!  I had started the sweater on a whim, thinking it would be a good way to use up left-over yarn as well as help Shadow stay warm during the cold months. I had never knit a dog sweater before, but I decided that I didn’t need a pattern to make one- it couldn’t be very difficult-  I measured Shadow’s back and started knitting.

When I picked-up the beginnings of Shadow’s sweater a year later to finish it for Pascal, I had nothing written down to follow- I hadn’t even left myself notes.  I hadn’t gotten very far on it for Shadow, so I measured Pascal, and continued knitting-  for a few days. I had planned to knit the sweater in my time off from  hand-smocking & embroidering the girl’s dresses I sell. As the days passed I got busier & busier with my dress-making and never seemed to find “time-off” for working on the sweater. After weeks of dusting around it, I finally put it back in the closet to wait for “time off”. Each succeeding year I’d pull the sweater enthusiastically from the closet telling myself- and Pascal-  “O.k.! this year- soon- I’m going to finish your sweater!

But every year the same thing happened-  although each year a little bit got added to it. This year when I pulled it from the closet I realized that all I had left to knit was a small portion of the underside and the two sleeves. THIS was going to be the year!~! Pascal was going to find himself toasty-warm in the middle of a new sweater!! This time I put my sewing aside to finish my knitting. And finish, I did! Twice, actually!

Here is a photo of my first finish~ (Notice, he’s smiling~)

I couldn’t wait to put it on him once I got the pieces sewn together. Interestingly, he seemed to be as excited to try it on as I was. As I slipped it over his neck I saw right away that the neck was too wide. Four inches too wide! Hmmm…….

I made a tuck on each side with my hands to see how that would work. Perfect! I slipped it back off his head so that I could figure out how to make a permanent tuck on each side & still be able to easily stick his legs through the sleeves. I needed something that I could open & close~ like a tie-  Aha! I’d crochet a tie, make a tuck again at each shoulder & tie it shut! That worked perfectly. If Pascal were a bit concerned about having a bow on each shoulder, he didn’t show it. He actually seemed very pleased with it. In fact,he did something he never does; he sat there willingly and posed while I took pictures.

The more I looked at him the more I was aware that something just wasn’t quite right. Pascal’s sweater from the front, looked more like he was wearing a pair of pants. It wasn’t yet quite a sweater, it was a “pantser”. The neck of the sweater looked more like the waist of a pair of pants. His sweater needed a turtle neck!  I took his sweater back off, picked up my knitting needles and started knitting again~ Two days later Pascal had a full-fledged, turtle-neck, soft warm sweater~  It was everything we both had hoped it would be! I pulled out my camera and once again, Pascal did what he never does; he sat still and posed, looking very proud~  the perfect model!

It’s been awhile since I’ve written.  Pascal and I had a little ordeal to get through,  but we made it and I’m happy to say, everything turned out well!  Pascal managed to avoid two weeks worth of walks, as well as a trip to the groomers,  so, with the extra attention and as much sympathy from me as he could get, I think he didn’t consider it a totally bad trade-

One evening I noticed that the upper corner of hisl eft eyelid looked red. My first thought was that it must be an eye infection.  I hoped that I could put hot compresses on it and it would go away. After applying hot compresses several times a day for five days I saw no improvement at all. I started to think that maybe it was something else;  a spider bite, perhaps, or-?  I was stumped~!  When my daughter saw it she said that one of her dogs had something that looked like that & it turned out to be a tick- Tick? I hadn’t thought of that-  Uh-oh—— I don’t deal with ticks! I decided that I’d better make an appointment with the vet.

I brought him in the following day and was shocked to hear that this little red bump was a tumor. I was told they are usually benign and it could possibly remain there as long as it wasn’t touching the cornea~ and his wasn’t. We decided to try antibiotic drops in his eye for a week and see if maybe they would shrink it a bit. I was supposed to call back the following week & report on how the eye was doing. The day that I brought him in, (the picture on the right,) it really didn’t look very big to me- But six days later, after using the drops to shrink it all week, this is what it looked like~(the photo on the left.) Not a pretty sight!

When I reported this to the vet he said to bring him in & he’d remove it. So~ I spent 2/3 of the next day in the waiting room at the vets while Pascal was in surgery. Finally, after what seemed like forever, they brought Pascal out to me, groggy & miserable,  with stitches in his eyelid and a “cone” around his head. I carried him carefully to the car and strapped him into his seatbelt, where he lay down, moaning & breathing funny; making the entire 10-minute ride home feel more like 30 minutes.  It was awful to see him like that. The first two days were rough, but I could see improvement each day and by the third day he was  himself again, running to the window to bark at squirrels, and picking through his dinner, Pascal-style, scattering it around the dish so that it would look like he’d eaten more than he actually had- and thus garner his favorite treat, some baked potato.

I took this picture two days ago and you can see, other than the skin being a bit pink,-  and that’s probably because all of his fur hasn’t grown back yet from where it was shaved, his eye looks “like new!”

The weather has finally cooled off, so I’m hoping  he’ll be ready to  go for walks again~  as long as it’s not too hot or too cold, or raining, or windy, or muddy- or too many prickly stickers, or~~~~~never mind! Feeling good!! C’mon Pascal,  let’s go!

By today, I’d already forgotten about it.  I took him for a walk downtown and it seemed like everyone we passed was staring at us. I am sort of used to that, as Pascal, being a rare breed, always draws stares, but today seemed much worse than normal.  A few people actually stopped us, after staring at us for half a block. Looking at Pascal, one said,  “Is that a, a, a terrier, a,   one of those?” “Yes, he’s a bedlington terrier” I replied, as Pascal started barking his own response . The next person was waiting on the corner for the light to change and she stared at us until we reached the corner. “What is that?” she asked, her eyes on Pascal. I told her and she looked again and said, “Is their hair always cut like that?” I explained that this was a bit shorter than usual  and she looked at him again, like she couldn’t really believe what she was seeing. Then she asked me if he was a showdog – like maybe that would explain his eccentric looks. I told her no, he wasn’t, but the breed is seen in dog shows.  This time she just looked at me, looked at Pascal, sort of shook her head and muttered, “unusual~”

We were walking the final block to get to our car-  Towards the end of the block a woman was putting money into the parking meter, but I’m not sure exactly how she managed it, because the whole time she was feeding it coins, she was staring at us. As I got closer I had a feeling that a comment was coming- (I’m getting pretty adept at predicting upcoming comments-)  Just as we got opposite each other,  she got a big grin on her face and let out a little laugh- “I was about to ask you what kind of dog that is, but now that I see it up close, it looks like a goat!!”—–and she laughed again, as did I. Pascal barked and then she really started laughing. I could hear her laughing all the way down the sidewalk. I’d love to hear the story she tells people about what she saw downtown today!

That was it for Friday’s collection of comments. We reached the car. I opened the door and scooped “Billy Goat Woof” into my arms, deposited him into his seat and strapped his seatbelt. Driving home I was lost in thought, my mind replaying our morning’s encounters. I realized that I was smiling to myself. I glanced at Pascal sitting next to me and had to laugh out loud. He was looking at me with a HUGE smile on his face.

I imagine that he too had been thinking about the morning’s walk and laughing to himself. I really believe  he has as much  fun being a bedlington terrier, garnering stares and comments from every person he passes, as I have, watching people watch and enjoy him! Oh the joy of having an eccentric dog!!!