Still holding on, Waiting & Hoping...

I don't know what to tell you about Ms. Dog. She is steadily getting weaker, has no interest in even the most esoteric of our food offerings. We're now into the mail-order specialty sausage, cottage cheese, ice cream, bacon--what normal dog would turn her head away and get up and walk away when you held a piece of bacon under her nose?

We've offered everything we can think of--she perks up when we talk about it, she sniffs it tentatively, but then turns away with an expression like "Nope, that's not it." She's waiting for us to bring her something worth eating, I guess.

Bill's idea this morning is...wait for it...Cat Food. Whenever we visit a house with cats, Echo's first order of business is to find the feline food and eat it all up--preferably while the cat is watching of course. There's a hint of the forbidden (because we always scold her for this behavior), it's stinky, and might interest her nose enough to get some nutrition down her.

In the meantime, we worry and we sigh and we fret. There just doesn't seem to be much we can do for her.

Bill is headed to Philadelphia tomorrow for a one-week temporary assignment as First Engineer on an old friend, the USNS Pollux, an SL-7, the biggest steamship on the planet. I once visited Bill on this ship down in New Orleans, and was amazed at its size and complexity. To give you an idea of the scale of this leviathan, I took a walk one morning from the stern to the bow and back again. It took a full 15 minutes of brisk hoofing. The ship's holds of seven parking garage-type stories can carry an entire Army Division's equipment in one cross-ocean trip, including helicopters (with the props folded down), Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Strikers, tanks, etc.

Bill was aboard the Pollux, anchored near her sister ship USNS Bellatrix, immediately after Katrina's landfall. The Bellatrix could not move out of the way of the hurricane because the main shaft was torn apart, so they battened down the best they could and rode out the storm. For months post-Katrina, the ship made fresh water from its de-salinators for the city, pumped its own diesel fuel into emergency fire and police vehicles, set up a dialysis facility on-board for hospital patients to come to, and housed and fed visiting veterinarians who were caring for all the abandoned pets. I'll bet you never heard any of that on the news, did you? The captain made these executive decisions on site, and didn't consult with FEMA or even the Navy in Washington DC; he saw a need, and did what he thought was necessary.

I'm sorry to see Bill go for the week, but I am also immensely proud of the work he does. If they need him, I'm all for his going to contribute. He'll be back on Friday or Saturday, and we'll see where we are with our own domestic dog-drama then.