There's more than one way to skin a cat

...or feed a dog.

Boscoe has been eating like a hungry bear for the last two weeks or so, ever since it finally occurred to me (duh!) to buy stinky canned food and add it to his diabetic kibble.  I think I was so fixated before on trying to get him to eat the right food--diabetic canned (which he will no longer touch), or foods for a dog with failing kidneys--that I was just making the whole thing too hard.

He seems to crave variety, and so each morning I open a different can and hold it out for him to sniff. If he turns away, I put that one in the fridge and open a different one. But usually he wants whatever I give him. I mix it up with his kibble so that he has to eat the kibble, too, and most evenings now he eats it all and licks the dish clean. (Mornings are still a bit more problematic. Maybe he needs a cup of coffee.)

I am sure that this, too, will change eventually, and I'll be stuck with cans and cans of foods he won't eat. But for now it's working well.

Riley always gets a little dollop, too, to make him happy.

I've been meaning to blog for the last week or so--nothing momentous has happened, but life keeps trucking on, and since last we chatted (because this does feel like a chat, doesn't it?) I have been to Fargo and back (at Concordia College for three days, as part of their writers festival), done a reading at an arts center in Fridley, and, yesterday, delivered a talk to about 100 people, one of whom asked me to autograph her Kindle. A first for me.

I have also been battling the Monster Cold from Hell. I blame Fargo, where everyone was extremely nice, but also seemed to be sick--the young man who introduced me at my Wednesday night reading sounded so bad I worried that he was going to collapse during the introduction.

Last fall, when my book first came out, I was very worried about getting sick and hacking my way through an appearance. Doug bought me a bottle of hand sanitizer, and I washed my hands like an obsessive-compulsive person. My hands grew red and chapped, but I breezed through the winter with no cold, no flu, no problem.

And then I grew less vigilant, and so here I am, breathing rough and shallow, going through Kleenex and DayQuil, sleeping across the hall from husband so as not to contaminate him.

On Friday night, in Fridley, I started coughing at the end of my reading--got one of those persistent tickles in the back of the throat that you know mean endless coughing. I just gritted my teeth and toughed it out and finished the page and then sat in the corner coughing hysterically.

At yesterday's talk, I made it almost to the end and then the same thing happened. I started coughing, sipping water, coughing some more. A sweet 90-year-old woman in the audience shyly handed up a Hall's cough drop and saved the day.

That bottle of hand sanitizer is going to go everywhere with me from now on.