My two-legs decided I needed a haircut. He did not do a good job. I am displeased for multiple reasons.

On Monday night he took me back to the V-E-T. Supposedly I lost a pound in two weeks (sickness diets work!) and was running a bit of temperature. They also had to retake all my x-rays. I do not like sitting still, splayed out for any period of time (unless it is of my own accord). For your viewing pleasure are my X-rays. I have included both the ones from July 17th and from August 2nd. To the trained eye they look pretty similar, but you need to look closer (which is tough as they are not very high resolution here). I will explain after the photos.

Look at how huge my heart is!

So, look at the lungs (the dark gray), it should not have all those white spots.

This was on Monday, my lungs are more white than black... not good.

I do love how cool my insides look. I wish I could see it in action (breathing and eating and pooping).

My  lungs are what is in question in all this. Two weeks ago they had a few little white speckles. The speckles are an anomoly and have a higher density than the surrounding tissue. Two weeks later I have more little white speckles. Which essentially means something is growing in my lungs. Things should not be growing in my lungs.

We opted to try some new medication. I am on a different family of antibiotic from the one I took before. I am also on a light dose of steriods. The steroids are mainly to help open up my lungs and make breathing easier. If I take too much, it may speed the growth of the whatever it is in my lungs.

Sigh. This regiment should take another two weeks or so to finish up. At which time I will more than likely be subjected to the same horrors of the V-E-T as I have before… probing, prodding, x-rays, pills. Good times.

So wish me luck. I will post later in the week with an update.

Apparently the fungal tests that I thought they were going to do are a great deal more involved then just running my blood through some sort of fungus detecting machine. It would involve another vet visit (boo!), sedation (yay!), and ultimately having my trachea/lungs flushed. Since I am neither a) an automobile radiator nor b) do I have $700 to blow on such a procedure, my two-legs and I have decided to trust in father time and give some more of said time to the pills I ingest every day when he gets home.

Once I finish my tasty treat-flavored regimen of antibiotics we will re-evaluate and see if stronger drugs are necessary. I even heard that steroids are on the table so maybe I will finally be able to wrench a toy out of big-little-bro’s clutches. Unfortunately, the “big C” is still hovering out there; however, I do not lend much credence to that as I retain both my Hungry Hungry Hippo-esque appetite and my penchant for carrying frog around the apartment when my two-legs gets home.

There is however one disturbing development…

He is so mean to me, even when I am sick.

The two-legs in the white coat told him and the skirted-one that it would be a good idea to take me in the bathroom with them as they shower. The humid air is evidently good for my lungs (but murder on my hair). The skirted-one takes me in for her morning shower and my two-legs for his evening one. For the bulk of these steamy shenanigans I am resigned to lay on  the bathmat and contemplate what I did to deserve such treatment. The real humiliation comes at the end, when the two-legs are done showering and proceed to perch me atop the highest shelf in the bathroom (as pictured above). I overheard the skirted-one telling my two-legs that this is better than leaving me on the floor since all of the nice hot, humid air has floated to the ceiling. Since I am a fairly short four-legs who spends most of his time breathing the cool, crisp air usually found 8 inches off the floor, I do not appreciate being made to breathe the torrid, muggy air found 6 feet + 8 inches off the floor.

C’est la guerre.

This may be my last post for the month of July. My two-legs and the skirted-one are abandoning me and big-little-bro in favor of a dog-free vacation in the slightly sunnier city named by Spanish conquerors explorers after their beloved Saint Didacus (whose name they also gave to the ship they sailed in). Incidentally, Saint Didacus managed to heal not one, but two kings even after he had been laid to rest. (this information was directly pilfered from infallible wiki entries, here & here ) Maybe some of that healing power will rub off and the triumphant return of my two-legs will lead to my miraculous return to good health.

For the past 3 weeks or so I have found it difficult to breath. Not just after a good run chasing birds but even when I am just lounging (which we all know I love to do). I do not believe I am that out of shape that I should get winded walking from my food bowl to the couch but there you have it. I wheeze and whistle when I breathe. My two-legs thought it was funny at first. Chalked it up to my getting older and being out of shape. Then I started hacking when I got excited. I never coughed up anything, just clearing my throat I suppose; however, it started to get less funny for my two-legs. Then, on Saturday, it got even less funny, I began to cough little specks of blood.

I am very upset. I am going to jump.

My two-legs and the skirted-one took me over the Animal Wellness Center on Main. They recommended I go to the Pet Medical Center to get some X-Rays. Little-big-bro was left at home for all this. He missed out on the fun.

I did not like it there. First off, there was a non-dog 4-legs just hanging out in the lobby. My two-legs went over and had the nerve to pet her! I got so upset that I promptly hacked and coughed blood on their floor. They then proceeded to whisk me into a little room. I guess they do not like it when you get your fluids on the middle of their lobby floor.

In the tiny room my two-legs proceeded to perch me on top of the little metal table suspended a good 4 or so feet off the floor. I did my best to claw my way back on to my two-legs but neither he nor the skirted one would let me down.

I went through the normal exam. Weight. Thermometer (not in my mouth). And then prodding by the V-E-T. She said my breathing was not normal. (She also said I seemed a bit skinny, suck on that two-legs and feed me more dinner!) Next on the agenda was X-rays. My two-legs was not invited to join us. Frankly I blacked out once I left the room. When I awoke I was in a cage, yelling. I do not like cages. I especially do not like them when I can see my two-legs standing 6 feet away looking at pictures of my innards. I was not a good dog.

They drew some blood (again I had blacked out at this point as my two-legs and the skirted one had left me alone in a cage) and soon I was back in the arms of my master.

Tests are currently being run. Word on the street is I have largish specks in my lungs. It could either be fungus or cancer. I am rooting for fungus as I do not think I will look good bald.

I should know more this week and will keep you posted. And in case you missed it, I posted another one of my back dated posts. I can’t believe in another 3 months I will have been here a year!

It is I, Ruffles! Did you miss me?

So, where to begin. We will start with the basics. I haven’t posted since June of 2009. Can you believe it has been 7(ish) 4-legs years since I have last graced you with my wit and candor? I had some posts in drafts which I have now finally posted, you should see them back dating to October. I may back date some other posts I had been working. I may not, you never know.

I still live with my two-legs, big-little-bro, and the skirted one. So the people have not changed but the surroundings sure have. I no longer am forced to spend my days in the gray, drizzly, cold weather of the Pacific Northwest. I get to be a California boy again! Ah, sun, surf and sand.

Look at how handsome I look on the beach (OK, by the beach, 4-legs are not allowed on the beach)

It would be great if I liked any of those things. I get sun burnt and hot, I hate the water, and sand gets everywhere. The change of pace is nice though.

Life has been pretty status quo for me. Sleeping, eating, chewing. I have learned a few tricks (I can lie down!) and my new digs are much more conducive to the life of a 4-legs (I can let myself out to go poop!)

I have a few good stories that I will fill you in on in the coming days. I vow to you, my dedicated readers, I will not vanish for weeks, months or even years at a time.

I will keep you informed of my happens and hopefully continue to entertain you with my unique take on life as a four-legs in a two-legs world.

** I was going to call this post “Back in the Saddle” but then I got the damn Aerosmith song stuck in my head. It has been rattling around in there for hours now. Out of spite, I changed the title. That will teach them to make catchy songs…

Smells! We four-legs have noses that are 10, 100, possibly even a million times more powerful than even the best two-legs nose. As a schnauzer, I may not have the best nose, but it is pretty darn good (my ancestors were ratters and those critters like to burrow). Our noses were designed for smelling. We have deep folds and pockets to trap odors and particulates, huge clusters of nerve endings all around to quickly past the smells to our brain, and those little slits on the sides of our nose, those are so when we exhale, we do not blow the scent away from directly in front of us. Pretty sweet. So when I got to my new home I was overwhelmed.

A cleaned house still has plent of old smells.

My two-legs and I had just pulled up to the apartment and already I was pretty excited. I love new places and was sick of the smells in his car (dust, fast food, and funk) and was itching to run my sniffer over this place. The previous tenants had done a decent job cleaning up, but they were no match for me…

There was a chair there, a rug here, the dog slept over here, and had an accident over there. Someone dropped perfume on the rug in the bedroom. Oh, a bit a dried old food (nom nom nom). And so on and so forth until my olfactory senses were pooped.

This place was big too, probably as big as the first two places in Seattle combined. Good solid hardwood floors for playing and running, soft carpet in the bedroom for napping. And with no furniture there except 3 boxes and my dog bed, I had the run of the house!

oh, oh, oh, and there is an outside. For the first time since I lived in San Jose I finally have a way outside on my own. Of course, it only leads to a little concrete path that runs three quarters around the house but it is better than nothing. I can do my business on my own schedule now. My two-legs has no power over me.

Furniture comes in a few days, then all of these old smells will slowly be replaced by my two-legs smells. The memories of old fade and give way to new smell memories (smemories?).

Until then, I am going to keep snorting and sniffing and sucking up all the delicious aromas I can.

I feel like every time I sit down to bang out a post, I have to start off by first apologizing for not posting more. I have excuses though, and this time good ones. Last month I was stricken with an illness that is all too common for us four-legs. Kennel Cough. The hacking, the wheezing, the licking up my own phlegm. I was not pleasant to be around. I had a pretty mild case but it really stuck with me, I just could not shake it.

So then my two-legs (technically the skirted-one) took me to the V-E-T. Yeah, they spelled it out to try to trick me, but I am smart enough to form simple sounds into words. I do have a brain. Anyway, that involved some booster shots, some probing, some sitting on a cold metal table while a strange two-legs examined me. The one silver lining is that it was confirmed that I am no longer a fattie. Hooray for being average weight! The icing on the cake is that big-little-bro is actually now the fattie. He could stand to lose about 5 lbs. Ha! Fattie.

For the past couple weeks I have honestly been too stressed to do much of anything. It all started mid August when my two-legs left me with a stranger for a few days. Then, when they came back my two-legs never left the house. He was just puttering around the house. Cleaning stuff, sometimes putting things into boxes. Something was definitely happening, but I just could not put my paw on it. Suddenly, in a flurry of activity this past weekend, our beautiful home was suddenly picked up an boxed away. They even tried to but me in a box!

I do not deserve this kind of treatment.

Every time they left the apartment it felt like it would be for the last time. I cried and cried. And pooped on the carpet (they did not appreciate that).  Then, two big burly two-legs came and took everything. All my toys, all my bones, the comfy couch, the bed, everything! The apartment was empty except for the skirted-one, my two-legs, and two sad, worried puppies (and tonnes of big-little-bro’s fur. Just look at the contrast where the bed was):

That dark stuff? Dirt and fur. Puppies are messy.

And then, we all left. Separately. My two-legs and I went to his car and the skirted-one and big-little-bro to theirs. I would not see them again for days.

This is all getting too emotional and I will have to break the post here. I will finish up the exciting conclusion in Part Two: It is Not the Journey.

I used to get spoiled before I lived with my two-legs. I could anything I wanted. But now I have to scrounge. I only get his hand me downs. Take my computer for instance. You would think a hip young pup like myself would be rocking a MacBook Air or something. I do have an Apple computer, I suppose I should be happy about that. But being forced to this this jury-rigged computer is just sad:

A beatup PowerBook G4. My window to the world

My two-legs has had this since before I even existed. Both of the hinges have broken off so the screen just flops around like a dead fish. He “fixed” it by adding decorative string and gaffers tape to hold the screen up. Classy eh?

What’s more, his rigging put serious stress on the screen power cords. Now, every few minutes the screen shuts off. I then have to close the lid and reopen it, hoping it will come back on. If not, I close and reopen. Repeat ad nauseum. I think the power brick cord has a short in it… I keep burning my little paws.

Ugh! Forced to use inferior products.

So I have been pouting, and dealing. You have no idea how long it takes to get stuff done when you have to constantly open and close your laptop, are only surfing the Internet with Wireless B speeds, and have to download photos with a USB 1.1 speed port. Slooooooooow let me tell you.

I have a new system in place though. I just log on to my two-legs nice computer when he is at work. Ha! Suck on that two-legs.

Stay tuned for more of TheRufflesReport!

My two-legs is a huge nerd, and having lived around him for a few years his nerdiness has begun to rub off. I asked him to set up Google webmaster account for my domain. It has some cool referral stuff, and shows where your page is ranking in searches (there is much more cool stuff in there but I have not figured out what it is for yet). Page ranking is a tricky business. Companies spent untold amounts of money trying to get their web pages ranked number one on the various search engines. I know personally that I never go beyond the first page of Google results. If it did not come up at the top, I probably did not define my search properly. Page ranking also varies on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You may be king for a while, but someone else is always trying to knock you down. Let us see how TRR ranks with the Google:

You can try these out, none really worked for me.

These are results from the last 7 days (there are even weirder ones further back). I tried most of these links, and could not find my little corner of the web. *Sigh*
One that was very interesting (and for whatever reason not shown here) is I rank in the top 10ish for “what is ruffles” and of course, number 1 for “the ruffles report.”
But, are people honestly going to be searching for me? Like one day they think, “oh, I wonder if any dogs named ruffles are blogging about themselves” No. They are probably going to find me via referrals (or “friends”).

The two-legs’ web host has some decent tracking tools, one of which is the referral URL (how people got to my site). The top referrer is… *drumroll* … valria.wordpress.com! She has sent me a whooping 85 unique visits for the past year. I have no idea if they stayed to read anything, but I like to believe they did… I can hope.

Suck it Bing!

Here is some of the other data (because I know everyone loves to look at stats). Pretty standard stuff, except for the flux of people who found me via domaintools.com using a whois search… I guess therufflesreport.com is more valuable than previously thought. Hooray for land grabs.

And just for the fun of it, let us look at the number of unique visits to my little blog here:

Check out July, thanks for the support in my sad times!

So, why all this talk of visitors and referrers and other things you probably do not care about. Well, I was checking out the tumblarity of some two-legs I know (no, my two-legs does not tumble) and lately I have just been thinking about blogging, and internet popularity and all that jazz. I honestly do not know what to make of it all.

Hmmm, I honestly thought I would be able to come up with something more profound than all that, some sort of all all encompassing nugget of wisdom. I have thought on it a great deal (after all, I do nap and think every hour of every day) and I have not reached a definitive conclusion on anything.

“The internet is frickin’ awesome.” (I think we all can agree on that one) There is a great deal of noise though. “But we can generally filter the noise and only get what we want.” But there is just so much content out there. “True but so much of it is just rehashing of previous content and/or junk; so we rank the content.” But who does the ranking? “The crowds.” Hrmmmm. Do we trust the crowd? “Well, we can start with friends and family, see what they like, who they follow, and then build our own little internet crowd.” So, like a clique in high school? “Yes like a clique… no, no, no. It’s better. Cuz they are like, our friends, but we don’t really know them, but they post funny or interesting or insightful stuff, that we like.”  Do you happen to know what an echo chamber is (metaphorically)? “It’s not an echo chamber, it’s fun, and I like it, and shut up.”

The preceding was a conversation I had with myself the other day while looking introspectively at my own internet habits. I spend a fair amount of time surfing the intertubes. Not too much, just enough I would say. Certainly I could be on it more. There are some core sites I visit, I live by my feed reader. Some comics, some tech stuff. I do not really follow any two-legs directly, or any four-legs directly. To be quite honest, there is simply too much stuff out there. To many bloggers, too many tumblrs, two many twitterers, way too much stuff on youtube, quite frankly I just try to block it all out.

But there is a trap there, if I do not follow people, does that conversely mean people will not follow me? If I do not make my web presence known through blog rings, and referrals, and ranking, and search engine optimization, and re-tweeting, and re-tumblring, and generally being part of the Internet community, will I be left blog alone in my own little corner. Is a blog with no readers truly a blog?

Last week, he might as well have been out of town. I never saw him. He would leave the house early, the skirted one would still be sleeping, I would be nestled in my little bed. He would just get up, shower, and walk out. We were all still asleep. Sometimes he would not even pet me goodbye. How rude!

I would have to sit at home all day, napping and dealing with big-little-bro. He would stumble in with the skirted one at 2000 or 2100. Then we would take a quick jaunt around the block. Then he would go back to bed. Is that lame or what? If I was lucky he would pet me for 20 or 30 minutes before going to sleep, but those days were few and far between.

On the weekend, which is supposed to be our time, he mostly just slept. No 4-legs park. No long walks. No nothing.

Yesterday he was all grumpy because a hard drive of his failed. I do not care if lost tons of data. I want to go for a long walk dammit! (He apparently had most of it backed up somewhere, but not everything. Always backup your data, and never buy Maxtor drives.)

Today he left early again. I can only hope this trend does not continue. I am in dire need of attention.

My two-legs and the skirted-one have been acting odder than usual. I first noticed this on Monday. The skirted one was actually cleaning! She put away all of our toys and picked up stuff that had been sitting around for months. Odd, I thought, but not totally out of the norm. Then my two-legs comes home and dusts everything. Like June Cleaver or something. Ridiculous.

Tuesday was worse. I really started to get suspicious on Tuesday. He scrubbed the entire bathroom. Normally I would not have noticed as I hate going in there (except for water, which they insist on keeping next to the toilet, the other water bowl) but I started to smell some odd fumes pouring out of there. It was a completely new smell in there when he was done… smelled fresh. I think that is the first time it has smelled like that in there. Then he vacuumed. Boy did he vacuum. Everything. The floors, the beds, the couches, the chairs. There was no escape from the howling cylinder. Big-little-bro had some kind of ‘Nam flashback and started barking in nipping at it. Pretty entertaining to watch, good for a laugh (whilst I was cowering behind the skirted-one)

Then it came. Wednesday. What is traditionally an ordinary day, turned into something extraordinary. We had intruders guests. New two-legs came into our house and brought with them their new smells and willingness to pet us for hours. I am pretty sure they are big-little-bro’s grandparents. The skirted-one calls them “Ma” and “Pa”. They came late Wednesday and stayed up eating chips and drinking beers. They gave us rubs. I got to sit with “Pa.” Big-little-bro kept trying to give them kisses. It was wonderful.

This morning it was more of the same. Scratches, lounging, playing. They even took us to the puppy park this morning. And it is not even Saturday yet. Hooray! It was so nice. And then everyone left us… and it is so nice outside… And I am stuck here, not getting petted, not getting attention, not getting loved.

I am going to sit on the coffee table. That’ll show ‘em.

Yep, I am just going to sit here till they come home.