Magic door

Our tax refund arrived last week, so we braved the mall on Saturday to get the most wonderful device: a garage door opener. An extremely nice man came and installed it today, and it's fabulous!

You press a button and the garage door goes up.

And then, here's the best part: you press the button again and the garage door goes back down.

And all without any stooping, lifting, having to jump out of the car or getting mud all over my hands!

Truly modern technology is a wonderful thing. I haven't felt this childishly giddy since I got a car with remote locks. For those of you who can't quite see why I should get quite so excited about technology that's been around for forty years, bear in mind that in the house I grew up in, I was the garage door opener. My parents didn't bother to invest in anything higher tech until I left home, so this is the first time in my life I've had anything else to open the garage door (except longstrider, of course, but he selfishly refuses to live 24 hours a day in the garage just in case I should need to take the car out).

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I talked to my mother today and discovered that Carbon, the family's 13-year-old black Lab, isn't doing too well. It's getting harder and harder and more painful for her to walk and my mother is wondering if it might be nearing time to put her out of her pain.

As painful as it is to contemplate, I can't blame my mother for considering it - my parents just aren't capable of taking care of a dog that can't walk. And while I've heard of pet owners who lovingly carry their pets around, it seems 1, cruel to the animal to force them to live in pain with a very low quality of life just because we can't bear the thought of ending it and 2, impractical, given that Carbon weighs 100 pounds. We haven't been able to pick her up since she was four months old.

So I asked my mother to hold off until I come up for Easter so I can say goodbye unless it seems too inhumane to wait. I can't say this is coming as a surprise. She's thirteen after all, and has been declining for the past several years. When I called strephon to tell him, he said that he had assumed at Christmas that it would be the last time he saw her.

But it's still upsetting. I remember her as the 15 pound, 8 week puppy we brought home when I was 16, the same puppy that was 60 pounds by Thanksgiving and 100 pounds by the next May. She grew from a hyperactive but sweet puppy to the mellowest dog in creation, who loved nothing more than to be near us and be taken for walks in the woods. She also loved to cuddle things, which often resulted in her stealing our shoes so she could take them under the coffee table and rest her head lovingly on them.

Even though I didn't grow up with her the way I did with our previous dog, I was actually much closer to her because I was old enough to have an active hand in her training. And even though I haven't lived with her in a long time, I'm really going to miss her.