Lovely Morning

Yesterday, as a measure of atonement for our absolutely decadent meal on Saturday (lobster l’americaine, garlic/cheese French bread, Caesar salad, and chocolate Grand Marnier cheesecake, all homemade and washed down with generous quantities of good wine), Debbie made a lovely Mexican chicken soup (tlapeno). Slightly more down-to-earth than Saturday’s meal, but awfully good. Anyone who knows Debbie is aware of her inability to make less than enormous quantities of soup — so now we have (yum!) gallons of leftover tlapeno. You all should envy me!

Now, making tlapeno involves large quantities of chicken processing — you have to roast the chicken, then strip the meat, and boil things down to get the broth. For our three field spaniels, life doesn’t get much better than a kitchen with unwanted chicken parts flying around. We had the full and undivided attention of all three dogs while we were processing the chicken — and we didn’t have to dispose of anything other than the totally stripped skeletons. Happy, happy dogs, they were.

Until 1:30 this morning, that is. Because at that moment, Lea decided (rather abruptly) that vomiting was the appropriate thing to do. On the bed. On Debbie. In large quantities. Full of delightfully greasy, fragrant chicken parts. Lovely.

Not.

So… Up we got. First, Debbie (in her vomit-dripping pajamas) took Lea outside, hoping that any further spewing would occur in the great outdoors. But Lea was terrified by the howling of bazillions of coyotes, some pretty close, so Debbie brought her back in — and got my sorry butt up, so I could take the poor girl out for a walk (on a leash), hoping to encourage whatever foul humors remained to disgorge. But nothing more was forthcoming. Debbie, meanwhile, took a shower and did something to her pajamas. We gave up on sleep; stripped the bed, applied various chemicals, and parked Lea in the office (which has an easily cleaned linoleum floor) in her favorite doggie bed. We had coffee. Then, a couple of hours later, Lea casually stands up in her doggie bed and vomits again, in the same style as previously. Right into her doggie bed, not the easily cleaned floor, naturally. The disaster response team swung into action again, with practiced moves. Large quantities of paper towels were consumed. The doggie bed, washable, fortunately, went into the washer with appropriate chemicals. Now Lea is lying beside me in the office, on naught but an old towel — which is also easily cleaned.

So far she has vomited approximately 30 gallons of partially digested chicken. We’re pretty sure that’s more than went into her. We’re hoping there’s nothing more to come out.

Pray for us.

Update: It gets better. We have one of those Tempurpedic foam matresses, and after stripping all the bedding earlier, it is exposed to the air (awaiting appropriate chemical treatment, once we find out what that is). I just went into the bedroom a moment ago, and discovered a trio of our cats all looking at one part of the mattress (not where the dog vomited, but rather down by where our feet would be). I looked to see what they were all interested in — and discovered that they had eaten a few cubic inches of the foam!

Oh, my. One wonders what memory foam will do to a cat’s innards…