Merrylog

The expression on her face was so priceless I had to share it with you. ;) However, this photo also really nicely summed up my feelings about waking up before 6 am on a Saturday just so I could go down to Toronto’s biggest farmer’s market and beat the crowds. I love the food, love the market, but oh my gosh this is an ungodly weekend hour!

The princess received some great news yesterday – she has healed enough for us to allow her some playtime with one of her uber squishy and soft anemones. It’s not quite fetch, but it is progress! We’re all thrilled and relieved to be able to give the pug something to do other than walk, cuddle and sleep.

The princess and I actually went to the park today and, for a bare few minutes while tempting her with her favourite treats, I de-coned her so I could get a photo of that gorgeous little face. As you can see, she still has plenty of attitude. :)

The “bad part” of her eye is in the right eye (the left one, in this photo). The white halo you see at the far edge is the ulcer. All of the red you see at the top is blood and blood vessels coming in from all corners of the eye to heal the ulcer. While the white part seems to be spreading a little, the main wound itself is nearly healed – just another few weeks, the doctor thinks.

Hopefully. In pug vet world, things can change on a dime and have more than once so far!

I’m going to try to get better at posting photos and updates, folks, but the reality is she’s still on 4+ hours of eye med routine a day. That plus our normal routine doesn’t leave a lot of extra time! :) Bear with me, things will get better as the eye finishes healing and her med routine settles down.

As always, thank you to every single one of you reading, emailing, and posting comments. You’re all Support Rockstars and Merry, her daddy and I all appreciate it so much!

Nine and a half years later, the pug head tilt still slays me.  I’m going to have to make it a category in this blog so that you can find all of the other pug head tilt photos. :)

Our very own Baby New Year! As our regular readers know, the annual New Year’s Eve photo is a tradition around here. You can check out previous year’s photos: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006… and no, that is not a real diaper. That’s a white napkin that my husband (father to two) “diapered” onto the pug for me to shoot. ;)

May your new year be fabulous! (Is this image too big for your computer? See a smaller version on Flickr.)

She has been so cute on her walks – clearly, she is my pug, because we’re both pretty clear about the fact that winter has come far too early this year. Still, it does look pretty for the holidays.

This photo reminded me a great deal of this, similar, winter shot – one of what I consider to be Merry’s most “iconic” shots of all time. :)

Still more holiday-themed images to come! Stay tuned – and stay warm out there as we count down to Christmas! Two more sleeps!

Sometimes she’s just so funny I have to take the shot. The expression on her little face when I put this hat on her was priceless. I literally could NOT get a different expression from her even with offering treats – she was unimpressed by this hat (although she’s worn it other years) and wanted me to know it. :)

Even as a grump, she’s a cute little elf!

My pug is both the silliest and most adorable ever. Case in point: after her bath last week, she was in a very cuddly mood, so hubby put her in a flannel nightie (yes, the pug has a flannel nightie) and we both cuddled her on the couch. Later in the evening we both got up to check something in another room, leaving said pug on couch. When we returned, pug had somehow crawled up on TOP of the down pillows we keep on the couch, scrunched it down, arranged herself into the tiniest ball she could make in order to fit ON the squashed down pillow, resting her head uphill on the couch, and was sleeping.

Too. Funny.

As soon as I saw it, I had to run to get the camera. She did wake up, but thankfully didn’t move so I can share her outright silliness with all of you. Love the big rump hanging out in the air and the tiny chicken legs folded under her chest. Merry, you’re too funny.

She gets soooo excited when I play fetch with her, especially when I hunker down on the floor and really give her a good run for it. It’s been in short supply this week, though – between a cold that doesn’t seem to want to quit, a wedding anniversary (can you believe it’s been a year since The Hubby and I got hitched?) and a business trip to Montreal, there hasn’t been a whole lot of time for me to get on the floor and play with my best girl. It’s something I intend to remedy tonight!

It never ceases to amaze me how long the silly pug’s tongue is (and how, with such a long tongue, her face isn’t cleaner instead of needing to be cleaned out twice daily). ;)

She’s been a very good girl this week, taking care of me while I slept and sneezed and coughed my way through a wicked cold. She’s the best pillow and couch cuddle bunny you could ask for!

Important: if you’ve been trying to follow along in a feed reader (rss or atom) please update your links to our now fully functional feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Merrylog. And thank you for following.

Many of you wrote in last week to ask us: what’s up? Why did we get this email telling us that Pampered Puppy had new owners, and that Merry was retiring?

Well, folks, it’s true. Pampered Puppy did finally find a buyer – as I’d mentioned I was seeking back in May. And honestly, after months of trying to juggle both my new fabulous full time gig as Product Director of these fine sites, with my gig as owner of Pampered Puppy and the Merrylog, it was a huge relief to be able to pass on the reins to someone with more time to invest in my baby.

Modeling has also been harder on the spudling lo, these last two years. With her eyesight completely gone, it’s tough to get her to look a certain direction in order to pose – she orients herself constantly by facing me and gets panicky when posing but hearing my voice off to the side. And after 8 years of modeling (that’s 56 human modeling years, after all) I decided it was time to let her take a break from the ‘biz and simply be a dog. Don’t get me wrong – she’ll still be posing lots for the Merrylog but under much more relaxed circumstances. :)

Thank you to all of you for your patience, kind words and support during this time. It’s always tough to let your baby go – that’s never more true than with a site like Pampered Puppy. But I am happier and more challenged every day thanks to my new gig, and I hope you’ll all continue to follow this crazy pug and I along through life through this (still needing to be cleaned and prettied up) new home for the Merrylog. In case you didn’t notice the changed URL – it’s www.merrylog.com. And as Liz commented in our last post, we also have a new feed URL: feeds.feedburner.com/Merrylog (which also needs cleaning up since it currently doesn’t display much of anything – bear with me folks) so if you subscribe via a reader like Google Reader, Bloglines or similar, you’ll want to update things there.

Onward and upward folks – and thank you all for sticking with us!