Well damn it.

So today, Maxine got put down.

She was living high on the hog since her diagnosis. I bet she consumed more calories in a day that most of my friends in the same timeframe. We pulled out all the stops. One day, Eazy's work bought a 'sack' of Egg McMuffins for a class on not spitting on children, and she came home with like 6 of them. Pardon me, they were Sausage McMuffins (the cousin). Every day for a week, I'd tear up one and throw its pieces on the back patio for M to find and eat. Add to that about a hundred pounds a week of restaurant leftovers and you can just see her teasing other dogs at the park about how their lives suck it.

Yesterday, Melissa came home from work and Maxine didn't come into the house for her usual obnoxious greeting, nor did she get all wiggly for her walk around the lake. Elissa called me in tears, so I rushed home to find M keeping the weight off her tumor-side leg and not able to run more than a few steps before returning to a subtle limp. We made an appointment for the vet, fake-hoping that there's something they could do.

This morning, I tried feeding her half a sausage and she couldn't slink through the dog door because of the weakness in her leg. I knew she wouldn't make it to the end of the day, and Eazy had plans to head out of town for a family funeral. So I didn't say anything to Elissa, and, after getting off work early, found M in the same sad state.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we brought M in at 3:30. We waited for a while for the doc. Maxine's whole thorax was full of fluid, and her x-ray from the last visit is a legend at the office. Her heart was beating visibly, on the opposite side of her body from where it belonged because of the size of the tumor. They gave her a sedative and I ran through her favorite routines ('pick which hand has the treat', "Where's Donnie Chubb?", the high five, "Gertie Gertie Gertie", and some others) as it set in, to keep her tail-stump wiggling. Then the vet came back in and, having no luck on veins in both her back legs, shot some poison into her front leg and she was dead, right in front of us with her last high-five still in my hand, in about another 90 seconds.

It was sad as hell, I have a derivative of diaper rash around my eyes and nose from crying so much. At the end, I said something like "Now we have a dead dog, this sucks. Let's split.", and me and Melissa headed home in silence. I folded my clean laundry and we started joking about how I'm going to get a bloodhound while Elissa is out with her family. We talked later about how we both independently secretly thought it would have been fun to have pictures of Maxine and Killer Graham before she kicked it, but that won't happen. My little black bird is just a funny story now.

Long Live the M. If you're bored and have some time to kill, read this.

Burning Down the House

The house construction is on hold. Really long story...

We fixed up the old house and put it on the market using Redfin, the new whizbang discount real estate agency. Saving the litany of complaints for those truly interested, suffice it to say that those people couldn't sell air conditioners to Arizona. The house sat and sat with no attention (at least none that I heard about).

A month into it, 3 weeks ago Monday, we went with our friend Diane to take over the listing. She's great. We got immediate attention, but the vacant lot next door has scared off multiple potential buyers. As much assurance, colloquial and legal, as I can promise, it's still a risky proposition. We have to wait for 'the right buyer' and we'll be rolling around in money.

No we won't. Reality set in and we're not going to be able to pay off the lot with our profit on the house. Truth be told, the $40k I put into repairs earned me nothing. At the current price, we'll still owe something like $75k on the lot, and anything else people require of the price just adds to our debt.

That said, it's important to note that our architect-built house is now very far from our reach. The custom build process would push us way out of our budget, potentially into a worse spot than the one that forced us to consider the process in the first place.

Our decision now is heavily in the court of Timberland Homes. They build modular homes, where they take your order (marginally customizing their existing floor plans) and build the house on their own lot. When the house is 75% done, they cut it up, load it on trailers, and drop it on your foundation with a crane. Despite the yawn prompted by their literature, they actually do some pretty cool work. Additionally, they're extremely flexible with their floorplans. The examples they have can be reconfigured to face our view, and there are tons of options that will cost/save money at every decision. We're excited, the difference in cost between this and the custom design is about $200k.

Stay tuned on this. It all seems too good to be true, and we're not going to press with the Timberland people until we have an offer in the financing stage for the old house. There's still a possibility that I scrap the whole deal and sell the house + the lot to some developer and we move into a nice house somewhere else.

Baby Health is a Go!

Everything is going great with the baby. Knock wood for us, but we seem to be having the template experience with this pregnancy. Not to take credit for anything, Elissa is a heck of a gal. She's getting uncomfortable and self-conscious, but she's walking the 3-mile Green Lake loop every day and she looks great.

Last night we went to a baby class to learn about emergency pre-term labor and all the early gross stuff. When they talked about the water breaking, they asked us to remember a mnemonic to help with what we tell the doctor. You're supposed to remember the time, amount, color, and odor of any liquid that comes out. I should have been dry-heaving at the thought of a variably-odorous liquid spilling from my wife's up-there, but I was just hungry for tacos. Mmmm, I love a good taco.

Big Bad David Lee is Sweet Graham Lucas now

After months of failing to agree on names for David Lee, Elissa and I agreed on the name "Graham Lucas Roche". His nickname will be 'Killer' (Killer Graham Roche), and we're pleased as punch.

Our process was kind of novel. We fought and fought over names that were too close to famous flamboyant lead singers (mine) and dogs (Elissa), and finally decided to bury the hatchet. One night when Elissa was out at her book club, I told her I was going to parse through the baby name books and write down every name I liked. When she got back, she did the same thing, but without looking at my names. After we both settled on our own short lists, we traded papers and came to a shorter list of possibilities. Add to that Elissa's exposure to the obscure/trendy names of the 2000's, and we came up with the name Graham Lucas Roche.

I didn't bust out the 'Killer Graham' bit until after Elissa told people, because she hates when I have fun. I win again.

Maxine is what you call a trooper

The lump on her side is now a full-fledged fist, but she's not showing any signs of pain or sluggishness. We had our first really hot week this week, so she's as panty as any other dog in town, but as far as her carrying 6 lbs. of cancer? No sign of anything degrading.

This has us pretty happy. I always envisioned Maxine and David Lee Roche laying together on the couch, and I just might get my wish. Fingers crossed.

It's still sad to do stuff with Maxine. We climbed up a mountain when we were on the coast for the 4th, and, like I said, she showed no signs of disease. Still, every time we take her somewhere we know it could be the last time. For now, though, she's still a buster.

Flood of Updates

Above you'll see a flood of updates on our favorite three topics: the house, the dog, and the baby. Sorry for the vacuum of posts, it's only recently come to my attention that more than one person reads this besides me ;).

Maxine: Bad, but not as bad as it could be I guess

I got 'the call' from the vet. Maxine's fucked. The lump on the outside of her ribs, which is the size of 2 rolls of dimes or so, is only 10% the size of the bulk inside her rib cage. It would cost a lot to find the academic cause of the cancer, but it's more than likely a tumor related to her blood vessels, since other cancers rarely bleed at all, and hers is.

This fucking sucks. My little scared buddy is going to die soon. I got her when she was really little, and brought her to work every day for 5 years where she laid under my desk and barked at my co-workers. Now she's helpless, after a lifetime of being scared of her own shadow.

Maxine's Sick

Real sick. We think it's cancer.

I felt a lump on her side, behind her left front leg, a couple weeks ago when she was laying on her right side. Then, after we got back from Charlie's wedding, she was puking more than normal. The two sets of symptoms are likely unrelated, but they prompted us to make a trip to the vet. We took her this morning.

The vet was immediately concerned. First he checked her out and noticed that the lump has a heartbeat, and that the lump was stuck to her rib cage. No-worry lumps are typically stuck to a dog's skin or floating somewhere in the fat layer, I've since read. Then he took a prick of the lump and noticed under a microscope that the cells he isolated had 2 nuclei, meaning that they're dividing in front of his face. Cancer!

He kept her to put her under anesthesia and get some x-rays. When he reported back, the x-rays showed that the lump is swelling on both sides of M's rib cage, right alongside her heart. Luck be a lady, the transient animal cardiologist was scheduled to make an appointment to their office today, so they kept her to get an ultrasound and a diagnosis from an expert. We're waiting on that report.

She's gonna die. Even if it's the kind of thing where Maxine can stay doped up forever, she's not going to live much longer without pointless surgery. I've prepared for this ever since I fell in love with her, but I thought we'd have a baby to worry about before my little M started showing her age. Not so.

Elissa is all torn up, and I can't talk about it without getting misty. I'll update this post if we hear news today.

Baby Boy Roche is a winner

We went to a doctor's appointment yesterday, and everything is honky donkey with David Lee. No problemos, he's actually running on the big side and Elissa is cold rockin' it. Heartbeat, check. Dancing machine, check.

Meet my new friend Andre

This is Andre.

click any of these pictures to enlarge
We saw him at a bar after my brother Charlie's wedding last week in Somers Point, NJ. He was there by himself, looking good as hell. After doing a pass for the ladies, he put his hair in a pony tail and got down to some serious dancing. I tried to take a couple James Bond photos, but he's like an eel out there. What I did manage to catch is documentation that I wasn't the only Andre fan in the place. If you look around him, everyone was like "Who is that magic little man?".



After twice capturing only passing glances of his splendor, I just tapped him on the shoulder, showed him my camera, and said "Can you take your hair out of the pony tail? I'm going to take a million pictures of you.". He did. I did.



After making love to my camera lens, we set him loose after a quick teaser to get into the video portion of tonight's presentation. If these videos are too dark for your monitor, you can check them out as AVI files from here:



Now, it's Andre. First, he hams it up with a couple hotties. Then they walk away disgusted, and he again makes it happen for my pregnant wife and her tiny camera.



And finally, his swan song. After this, his pink limousine showed up and took him to the excellent future where everyone in the world has this hair cut. He's on in this one. If you listen closely, you can hear me yell "You're a dirty dog, man."