Tomorrow will be 4 weeks since Winston's surgery. He's doing great and his leg looks good. He's actually gaining some leg muscle back on both hind legs. Since he was only using his left hind leg for so long, I would have thought that leg should have gained some size to make up for not using the right hind leg, but I guess it makes sense that he would have overall atrophy since he wasn't getting any regular exercise at all. The only time he got to walk around was to go potty, and the rest of the time he was laying down. He even ate laying down. I haven't paid much attention to his front legs, but I suppose he lost muscle there too. Swimming will be good for him once he's healed up enough to be able to do that.
Today we moved him out of his room in the "lobby" of our split-level house and into the main part of the house. I moved both of his beds upstairs and removed the baby gate from the lower stairway. We have a baby gate up at the top of the upper stairs so that once he's upstairs, he can't go back down unattended. Hopefully at his 8 week check we'll be able to take the baby gate down and let him have stair privileges again -- depends on whether they say the bone is fully healed or not. He's managing the stairs really well. He walks up them with each leg, even the TPLO leg, and I have to have him on a leash to go down since he would go too fast on his own, but he's also placing each foot on the stairs as he goes down -- HOORAY!!!
We just re-painted the exterior of our house this weekend. We're not quite done, but most of the body color is done. We have the east side of the garage left and some brush-work to do where we had to put tape on the siding itself (it doesn't stick to the bricks very well), and all the trim color is still waiting for us, but wow -- what a difference a new color makes! We're on a corner so the house is more noticeable... it used to be this ugly light green color on top with reddish multi-tone (some darker, some lighter) bricks on the bottom -- not a good combo if you ask me. Anyway, the house used to just jump out at you and I wanted to find a color that would recede into the background. I picked out a pretty rust color that complimented the bricks. It was pretty on the paint chip anyway. Then I bought a quart of it to try out in different areas. I painted a couple of pieces of wood that I could put in different places to catch different lighting. It still looked pretty good, but was a little brighter than I expected.
We have these two huge doghouses (that have never been used by either of these dogs...) that used to be on our back patio, and we decided to move them underneath our deck, since they wouldn't take up useable space, and they'd be in a location where if the dogs got stuck out in unexpected weather while we were out and about, they MIGHT use them. Probably not, since we've got a covered porch that they'd probably hang out under instead, but hey, the dog houses are well insulated and heated, so we don't want to get rid of them just yet since future dogs might use them. So... before we moved the dog houses under the deck, we painted them the "new house color" -- uh oh. They looked ORANGE and not a color orange that most people would want on their house. We live in Denver Broncos country, so neighbors might have thought we were the biggest Broncos fans on earth. I sure didn't want to be known as living in that orange house on the corner. Time to find another color!
I tried a bunch of other "rust" tones and ended up buying 6 quarts of different rust tones, and none of them looked good on all sides of the house. Some looked ok under the coverd porch but got shockingly bright in the sun, and some looked ok in a small area, but when we re-painted the dog houses with the "ok" color, it was still not something I wanted on my house. That was always the ultimate test -- if it looked ok on the dog houses, we could paint the house. I finally had to give up on the rust color. I went for 2 more quarts -- one that was more red toned and one that was more brown toned. Don finally gave me the OK to actually put some paint on the house, so I went around all sides and put some of each color onto the siding. Both looked good. I painted one doghouse red and one doghouse brown. hmmmm.... I like them both. I finally decided to go with the more brown tone because I think the red would have been too much with the brick. Well, now the house is pretty brown looking, but I think it will be fine once we get the cream trim color up. And... the best part is that the house really does recede into the background. I always heard that, but never actually saw a house change so dramatically right before my eyes.
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