Pucks and Pups

My boy has hockey tryouts today, for next season. The coach recommended he go out for the A team. I'm nervous for him. Nervous he'll make it and whoa, it's the A TEAM, holy skating. And nervous he won't make it and be disappointed. His coach has basically said he'd be a B if he doesn't make the A's, which hasn't really registered with him yet. Either way it's a step up but I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for him. Would you mind crossing a finger or two between noon and two?

So the dog is well. We don't have the biopsy results back yet but the surgery went well. He's got alot of stitches and is wearing one of those elizabethian collars. Today he snuck down into the cellar to lie in front of the woodstove. Let's just say he enjoys lying with his front paws on the bricks and with his body, like, 10 inches from the stove. And he's black - a veritable heat magnet. He generally comes upstairs panting, just about to pass out and he's so hot to the touch that it HURTS. The dog freakin' burns us.

So today the girlie lets him in from outside where, earlier in the day, his first time out unsupervised - he breaks the collar. The $20.00 collar that was barely 12 hours old. Okay, so in he comes. I'm upstairs getting dressed and a few minutes go by...I remember I forgot to blockade the cellar door...the gateway to hell (and yes, it sometimes IS that hot down there). I run downstairs calling his name. I get to the cellar and I see the dog, in front of the stove, loathe to move. The goddamn collar is melted. It's all warped and soft and burning hot. Baxter is blissfully unaware. I scorch my hand trying to reshape the dang thing before it cools off.

So, a day in to this ten day collar wearing thing he's looking like a jucket. All duct tape and warpy. (Jucket is a very regional term for, um, a bub. As in a 'bub jucket'. How to explain...Sort of like a backwater, hillbilly type - I guess) See, learn something new every day.