Brooke here. Time for yet another Disasterhouse blog reboot. I’m paying Real American Dollars to keep the invasive ads off the site, so that’ll help me stick to a posting schedule. If they force me to pay them my dollars I will fill them so full of words they will choke…

Anyhow.

Part of rebooting a blog is going through old posts and seeing what you’ve covered and what you haven’t. That’s harder than I expected: we lost Zu about a month ago. Zu came home as a puppy not long after we bought this house. He loved Cutter John, our old dog, with a deep abiding puppy love. When Cutter John passed, his latent anxiety flipped into overdrive and he became something of an overcompensating terror. So we got our dog a puppy (…ffs it hurts to write that, but he needed something within the household to focus on), and that worked for a little while, until he had his stroke. The stroke leveled him out a lot, but then he got cancer, and required a foreleg amputation.

He adapted pretty well to the surgery.

And then, he had a day where he was a little slow in the morning, a little slower in the afternoon…and then his hind legs stopped working altogether. We spent a good part of that night at the same specialty vets’ offices where he had had his amputation surgery. There were options, but none of them were good, and he was terrified and in a lot of pain. We decided that “wait and see” would have been in our best interests and not his.

To be honest, he was a terrible dog. He could be dangerously reactive. He had explosive, sudden biological functions from both ends, often without warning. He ate two nice leather armchairs and a very nice leather couch, jumped through three windows (and a screen, because for some reason we figured a dog that could shatter glass would be stopped by a screen?), knocked down fences to go play with other dogs, and was a general walking trainwreck in spite of three years and many thousands’ dollars worth of competition-level training. But he had an enormous heart and a doggy soul to match. Everyone who met him loved him. We wanted more time with him. He was one of those weirdos who put more love into the world than he took out of it, and we’re all a little poorer now that he’s gone.

Anyhow. A friend says that–if you’re able to do so–the best gift you can give to the memory of a beloved pet is to open your home and heart to care for another pet. There will be another puppy around here as soon as we feel capable of giving it what it needs.

Did I expect the first post on the rebooted blog to be a eulogy for a Very Good Boy? Nope. We’ve got flooding problems and mold problems and there are three jacks holding up part of our roof, so I’ve got plenty to write about. Seemed proper to bookend the life of a friend who had a big presence at the Disasterhouse, though.