The Great Spackle Caper

       The Great Spackle Caper






Another doggone snowy Sunday, but at least it’s not a zillion degrees below zero like most of February has been this year.  This particular snowy day, to differentiate it from the myriad other snowy and cold days inflicted upon us this winter, started around midnight last night with a light dusting of snow and was followed by heavier stuff in the wee hours.  My son works third shift and reported this morning that it was pretty steady over the dark hours of the night and that driving home was more than a bit dicey.  So the calendar now says it’s the first of March and we haven’t been anywhere near normal this winter, in temperature or in snowfall.  One’s been way higher and the other way lower.  I’d like to say it’s been a typical winter for hereabouts, but it really hasn’t.  It’s been pretty grim.  Granted we’ve had worse in past years, but not a whole lot worse.  Anyhow, the calendar is wending its slow, methodical way toward spring and in a few weeks I’ll probably look back at these words and wonder at their impatience.

Now for the latest.

As some of you may remember, we rescued a dog back in November last year, about a week before Thanksgiving, and she’s been a real humdinger for us.  She’s a smidge over 40 pounds and a mix between Shepherd, Boxer and Terrier.  That’s according to the papers we got with her from the rescue place.  I’m not sure how they derived that lineage, but its probably close.  I’d probably peg her more likely as a cross between a pit bull, a whitetail deer and a goat.  I’ll get into the goat reference in a minute. 

Just remember that goats eat ANYTHING!

Our rescue people, One of a Kind out of Akron, received her from the Mahoning Pound.  That’s all the history that’s been written down about her, so her life is a mystery to us for its first three-four years.  She’s had puppies we do know, ten pups in the last litter we’ve been told, and more than one litter, too, according to our vet.  She’s spayed now so that’s definitely in her past.  Her color is what’s called brindle, sort of a medium brown with faint, almost tiger-like, striping.  Brown and white face, white chest and white paws.  Long, deer-like ears, one of which is bent inward like she’s giving you a military salute when you see her.

Our family has always had dogs as far back as I can remember and so has my wife’s family.  This new dog is fifth in a line of canines my wife and I have owned in our married life and she may be the largest.  She was 40 pounds when we got her and we’ve added a few since then, as she started out pretty skinny. 

She’s been a good dog, I suppose.  She’s friendly toward us in the family, but that’s normal and expected, as dogs consider their owners as part of their pack.  She likes other people when properly introduced to her, but can be a little intimidating to people knocking at the door.  I’m not too upset at that.  Larger more intimidating dogs can make a house very much less ripe for break-ins or other problems from outside. 

The rescue place where we got her had named her “Trick” as they received her near Halloween.  We preserved most of their name selection by renaming her Trixi. 

She seems comfortable with it.

Readers of my blog might remember her actions not long after we got her involving her ingestion of a LOT of Baker’s Chocolate and my procedure on how to make her “offload” the dangerous treat. 

I thought that I might get lucky and that would be the worst we would see from our new buddy. 

I should have known better…

Here’s the latest chapter in Trix’s ongoing story:

I retired a week before Thanksgiving last year.  I fiddled around for a while after that momentous day, doing this and that and helping my wife with Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations.  She makes lots of cookies that we give away and mail to various relatives and my assistance was appreciated.  At least I think so.    After the holidays were over I decided to tackle some maintenance issues with the house that had been put off for way too long.  Interior painting was the first on agenda.

I started of course by moving furniture to make various walls available for preparation and painting.  During which preparation I used spackle to patch various holes and other dings and scrapes in the walls.  This is an old house, so the imperfections in the walls were numerous and all over.  I’d just spackled a number of holes one day and not long after that noticed Trix eyeballing the pink stuff lower down on the walls.  (The spackle I used went on pink and dried white.)  As dogs have been known to do, she took a lick of the stuff.  And another.  Apparently it had an odor that was pleasing to her. 

I shooed her away.  Spackle was not a food item and the label said it was poison with a capital “P”.  So I made an effort to keep her away from where I was working. 

But good intentions and real life are sometimes not always synonymous.

On Wednesday this past week I was plugging away at another project upstairs in our house – repairing a wall.  A long time ago a hole was made in that wall of our bedroom.  It’s been so long ago I’m not really sure how the hole was made, but there are some vague recollections about someone (could it have been me?) taking a punch at the wall in a fit of pique and going through.  (Shame on whoever it was!)  I was younger and dumber back then, so I just “patched” the hole with some metallic tape, then painted over the tape when I painted the room.  The damage was behind our bed’s headboard so wasn’t really an eyesore.  But now, since I was doing projects, I decided to fix that hole correctly.  I started with the “screen and spackle” technique where you attach a screen or grill patch over the hole then spackle over it.  Then sand and respackle until it is smooth and able to be painted.  I’d put the first layer of spackle on the grid and used quite a bit of it to cover the metal, then went downstairs for a sandwich while it started to dry.  After eating it and fiddling around down there for a little while, I went back upstairs to see how it was drying.  When I took a look at the repair I was confused.  The metallic grid was clean and shiny.  No spackle on it at all, pink or white!  I rubbed my eyes and looked again.  Yes, clean.  No spackle.  Wait a minute.  I KNEW I had done the work – I wasn’t THAT senile yet.  I looked on the floor – could the stuff have fallen off?  No, nothing was lying on the floor.  I shook my head, trying to rearrange the cobwebs in there and looked again.  Could the stuff have oozed into the cracks of the grid and gone inside the wall as unlikely as that scenario was?  Nope, none evident.  Then an icy chill ran down my back. 

Could it have been that stupid dog? 

When I found her she was flopped on the couch looking sleepy and real innocent.  That is until I noticed the smudge of spackle on her lower lip.  Holy cow!  She’d eaten ALL of the stuff!

I called the vet immediately and was told to use the “table salt or peroxide” trick to make her vomit it up.  I only could get a smidge of salt into her pie-hole this time before she clamped down and stubbornly refused to open her mouth.  It would have taken a scissors jack to open those jaws then, so I bundled her up and ran for the vet so she could do… whatever it was she needed to do.

They muzzled her and poured some hydrogen peroxide down her gullet, then handed her leash to me to take outside so she could vomit.  So I stood in the cold and snow watching the dog watching me.  She eliminated the OTHER way profusely, but nothing out of her mouth.  She seemed oddly normal for a poisoned animal – no convulsions, no drooling, and no wheezing.  Just a patient look as if to say, “Are we done out here, doofus?”

I returned inside the vet’s office and reported the non-upchucking.  The vet said to just take her home and watch her.  Feed her a bit more than normal to “keep things moving” internally and if she demonstrated any signs of illness to bring her in no later than Friday morning so the vet could “get it out”.

So I took the obscenely normal-acting dog home and fed her.  And watched her.  And watched some more. 

She could NOT have been more normal.

The vet called the next morning and I reported Trix’s condition.  And she called the following morning.  I repeated the report.

I read the label on the spackle during that waiting period.  Not good reading.  “Call the Poison Control Center” and “Do not induce vomiting” were mentioned.

Trix just continued doing her doggie stuff as time went by, blithely oblivious to our anxiety.

I’m sure the vet thinks I dreamed up this whole escapade, but NO, I didn’t!  Honestly!

And that’s where we stand today.  It’s been said that cats have nine lives, so let’s add another ancestor to my mutt.  There’s gotta be some cat in there somewhere! 

Along with the goat…