I will get to finishing the Wallface update at some point, promise. Just been busy worrying about other things, e.g. Stella and her recurring and persistent lameness in her gimpy back leg. It COULD just be arthritis from old age; she's had that before (when she was overweight). But it could also be a relapse of her Lyme disease, especially given that I did pull a few engorged deer ticks off of her a couple of months ago (after she finished her antibiotics for the last round of Lyme disease). Damn Frontline for not working well enough, damn the Preventic collar for not working well enough, and damn my vet for not suggesting the vaccine (which doesn't work that well, anyway, and can be harmful!). Stella's up in Keene with Joe, and I don't want to ask him to take her to the vet; a trip to the vet would probably be useless anyhow since doing Lyme titers (especially on a dog who's already had it) are inconclusive at best and misleading at worst. She should probably just go on a round of antibiotics just in case - unfortunately, those are only available with a prescription, which requires a vet visit, which brings us back to the problem of Stella being 5 hours away.

However, as it turns out, you can buy most antibiotics legally and cheaply without a prescription, and they apparently work just fine on dogs: you buy them for fish! Ampicillin, tetracycline, amoxicillin, etc, are all regularly used to treat various problems in fish, and you can get, 100 250mg tabs of all of those in the range of $15. I've found that you can also buy doxycycline that's intended for birds w/out a script, but I haven't ever heard of (or read on the web) of anyone using that for dogs, so though doxycycline is the preferred ab of choice for lyme, I'll stick with the amoxicillin. There you go.

For what it's worth, if you've got cats or dogs, please stop buying your frontline, heartguard, etc. from your vet or petco. Save tons of money and order it from vetshoponline.com, an australian pet pharmacy! I've been using them for about 5 years and they're fantastic. I can get those meds for about 1/3 the price I'd pay here - with only $7.95 for shipping! Also, please stop feeding your dog junky supermarket food. I feed Stella canidae and the difference it has made in her energy, coat, and weight are amazing (we tried iams, eukanuba, nutromax and nutro natural choice before that). It actually ends up costing less because you feed sooo much less of it- at her weight, she'd be getting 3.5 or so cups a day of nutro, but she's getting 1 2/3 cups a day of canidae. I supplement that with carrots and celery as snacks; she loves it! I also really like Wellness Wellbars yogurt and apple biscuits - they smell soooooo good I always can't help but nibble them myself. But really, they're a waste of money. Stella would just as well eat a green bean as a biscuit; it's all the same to her!