She was 11 years old and was with me for a little over six of those years. We’re going to miss her rooster crows, her wagging doughnut, and the way she could never just go from point A to point B without running a bunch of circles in between.

Now we’re left with Jack, the old battleship, banged up and scarred but never sick a day. Here he is in a rare photo with Izzy, back in 2003:

Usually he sprints for cover at the sound of a camera lens motoring out.

The irony is that I adopted Izzy because I’d fallen in love with Jack—I couldn’t bare the thought of losing him. (I inherited him from my father, when he passed, so I was a bit touchy about losing loved ones.) So Izzy was the back-up dog—younger than Jack, without any of his anxieties, and a little more socialized. She turned out to be much more than a back-up dog, which was a good thing since she proved to not be so great as a back-up!

We’re all going to miss her. Even hen-pecked Jack, who’s been moping around the house ever since I took Izzy to the vet’s. He got to roll around in a used bath towel without anyone growling and grumbling at him this morning. I think he enjoyed it, but not, given the circumstances, as much as he might have.

This has been, so far, an absolutely crap year for pets. We’ve lost two. Off the top of my head I can name seven friends who’ve lost at least one. It’s crazy.

Crazy and sad.

We love you, Izzy.

So we’re back to kidney failure, or possibly an infection. The vet is treating Izzy for both, and they’re going to keep her a few more days.

Meanwhile, I went back to the Pontiac dealership and they reground my key, but it still doesn’t work.

I’ve forgotten to mention that when we had to exchange rental cars in New Jersey, I left my keys in the one we’d been driving. We called the Hertz office in Trenton as soon as we realized it, and the woman told us she’d mail the keys. However, it seems that she may have just lied to get us off the phone. Hopefully she didn’t just chuck the keys in the trash.

Yesterday I went to the Pontiac dealership to get a new key made using my VIN (because I only got one key with the car when I bought it), but the key they made doesn’t turn in either the locks or the ignition.

I am apparently never going to be able to drive my car again.

I guess I could turn it into a very expensive planter.

For weeds, because that’s the only thing I have enough ambition to grow.

Meanwhile, picked up the dogs from the boarding kennel yesterday, after the key thing. Jack was his usual self, but there was something wrong with Izzy. She just looked a little dazed at first, and I thought maybe getting home and getting some rest on a prime piece of bed real estate would sort her out, but by 3:30 in the morning, it was clear that there was something Serious going on. So I brought her to the vet, who put her on IV fluids and started bloodwork. When they called me after this, they said it looked like kidney failure. Cue tears (mine, not the vet’s). I okayed x-rays, and after a while they called back to tell me that her kidneys looked pretty normal on the x-ray, neither enlarged (as you’d expect with acute kidney failure) or undersized (as you’d expect with chronic kidney failure), and putting that together with the bloodwork (particularly the elevated potassium) and the fact that this all happened in conjunction with a stay at the kennel, and the fact that she’s trembling and walking funny, they’ve decided it’s maybe Addison’s instead, so I okayed the test for that and we’ll have the results in a day or two. Cue hand-wringing. I hope it is Addison’s, because while not curable it is treatable. Meanwhile they got her stabilized enough to be able to stay at the vet’s overnight (as opposed to having to be transported to the emergency vet hospital). I’ll call in the morning to see how she’s doing—hopefully even better yet! (Please don’t let it turn out that I made the wrong call on staying at the vet vs. going to the emergency hospital for the night. I just didn’t want to move her if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.)

I haven’t had a chance to get back to bike riding yet. I have to bring Mark to work tomorrow so I can go back to the dealership to try to get a working key, and so I’ll have the car if the vet says Izzy can come home, so probably no bike riding tomorrow either. I did look at my bike fondly…as I was bringing down a load of Izzy-puke-covered laundry.

I was planning to start in on the Mercy rewrites today, but no luck. I’m typing this while I make dinner, and I have a crapload of things to do after dinner. But tomorrow, I’m digging into it. (I did get it all set up in Scrivener last night, though, and rearranged the first draft so that the scenes were in order. And I made notes. Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow. I shouldn’t have any puke to clean up off the carpets and stuff tomorrow….)

We let one of our dogs go today. The vet and her husband came this evening, we all said our goodbyes, and then she went peacefully and quietly. She was a fantastically good-natured dog, always a joy to be around. She’d just turned fourteen and had been in good health until last November, when her first tumor appeared. She endured two surgeries and a lot of Neoplasene, but the cancer was more aggressive than the treatments.

She’ll be missed, every day, especially by Neil and Dres, who barely remember a life without Ruby in it.

We should be so lucky to have a dog of her caliber pass through our lives again.