not a dog gone good time (part i)

so, this weekend has been a rough one…

…hopefully we get a chance to mentally recover before any more bad shit happens.

so, puck, who was nik & os’s dog before they met me (he’s officially a corgi/chihuahua mix) hadn’t been eating, which is the opposite of our typical problem with him (he’s been overweight for years). he wasn’t losing weight, he just wasn’t eating. we got him to eat a meal of cooked chicken and white rice, but the second one of those didn’t stay down, so he went to the vet friday and was diagnosed with final stage kidney failure. so, he had to be put down.

if i may be selfish for a minute, i will wholly admit this was gonna hit nik & os a lot harder than me. a LOT. i think i’m still kinda in shock, but what sucked was they decided to take him to the vet while i was out getting a car registered, and then when we got the news, i ended up going to work “to try and make some money instead of just sitting around and watching them cry” (nik’s words) but it meant ultimately i got zero closure and no chance to say goodbye to the little guy. while i wasn’t super close to him, i was his dad for eleven of his thirteen years, and he (lately) had been the one that would stay out and wait for me to get home from work. and then, he was gone.

this was the last pic i ever got of him

my first interaction with him was at nik’s apartment back in 2012. os was eight years old, and i’d gone over to have dinner. after the boy was asleep, and nik was about to go to sleep, we were saying our good-byes in the apartment kitchen, which was part of a larger “open format” room that was separated off into the living room, dining room, and kitchen. the boy’s bedroom was off to the right as you walked in. when our salutations started to get a little heated, we heard a little bark, and looked down to see puck. he started doing this circular pacing alternately staring at us, then os’s door, and back again, as if to say, “keep it up and i’ll wake the boy”. when i physically took a step away from my future wife, he walked off and lay down, further verifying that was his message.

this earned him the first on many nicknames i would give him, “the original cock-blocker spaniel”. over eleven more years i would rarely call him by his actual name. predominantly calling him “puckles”, i also called him “puck daddy” when he got bossy, and for the last couple years, “puck-a-chu”. i never wanted a dog that small, but he held his own against the pits, and had a pitbull’s worth of personality in a much smaller frame. he will be missed.

and then, there’s the budnik issues…

(to be continued)