Nine Goblins is on iBooks! You go to the app, you type in “Nine Goblins” and it’s THERE and it’s a BOOK! WOOO!
*pant pant pant*
No love from Kobo yet, but you can’t have everything.
Far more importantly, if you ask me, Brandon the border collie is back from the vet. We have been very nervous in the House of Wombat because he’s started falling down the stairs and occasionally wiping out on corners at speed, and that is Not Good in an old dog, particularly a Jumbo Size one in a breed with known hip issues. And once he goes down, being Jumbo Size and somewhat arthritic makes it hard for him to get back up. (He’s also got dormant Lyme, so his joints are creaky anyway, but his fear of stairs has gotten a lot worse in recent weeks, and we were getting very worried.)
So it was with great relief that the vet informed Kevin that Brandon is, in fact, blind in one eye. His hesitance on the stairs now is probably not pain but the simple fact that he can’t SEE the stairs very well–he takes the shorter flights fine, but the big staircase in the middle of the house is just a mass of wood-grain stretching to infinity. Adding non-skid tape to them probably helped, once he got over his initial alarm that Something Had Changed Without His Approval, since there are now large black bars marking the treads.
(That last is totally a border collie thing…the beagle could be utterly blind and would cheerfully hurl himself down the stairs because they’ve always been there BEFORE, right? But Brandon is very intelligent and also has limited respect for his humans’ intelligence and prefers to think his way through things himself. He has no problem going UP the stairs, probably because the next one is always at eye level.)
There is no treatment for the blindness—we could spend a lot of money to find out if it’s the eye or the brain behind it, but since they couldn’t fix it either way and his bloodwork’s not turning up scary, there doesn’t seem to be much point. We were already planning on moving Kevin’s office back downstairs so that Brandon can be with his human most of the day without having to tackle stairs–god willing, he’s got at least two or three years left, and this’ll cut down his stair adventures to morning and evening.
So, err…yaaaaaay!
Kind of like when we suspected the old husky had hearing issues – we tested her by calling her from the kitchen. No response=hearing problems. The vet concurred that given her age and probable causes it was sufficient as a diagnosis.
She was another very smart dog, and she used our other husky as an assistance dog, but the he’s of average dog intelligence. Yours has probably decided the beagle isn’t smart enough to follow. 😀
If you call a Border Collie a “Jumbo Size” dog (I would say “medium on the small side”), what would you call a Saint Bernard, Great Dane, or Irish Wolfhound? Or for that matter, a regular Rough Collie?
Is this a case of size-inflation, as with the local pizza parlor whose smallest pizza (8 inch) is a “large”, presumably followed by “gargantuan” and “infinite”?