Mom and Dad are very frustrated with me right now… not me personally because they love me so much, but they’re terribly tired of dealing with my boo-boo and very worried that it’s never going to heal right.

We were very pleased that Diane — she’s our vet — tried to fix my cyst without surgery, but the drains didn’t work. So she cut me open and removed the cyst. It was two inches wide! I was in good shape for a few days, but then my noggin started swelling up like a balloon. Diane’s only in the office every other Saturday, so Mom and Dad had to take me to CAVES.

The doctor at CAVES (I don’t like him one bit…) took something like a gallon of fluid out of the top of my head and said I had a something-or-another-oma. He said they had to use hot compresses on my head and keep me quiet until it healed. Well… they’re doing pretty good on the first part.

We’ve been to see Diane a couple of times so she could clean me up and open my drains, but they’re just weren’t working — so yesterday she removed them. Now Mom and Dad are having to work on me every few hours to clean me up and Dad’s a little ticked off because all I want to do is play and they’re having one heck of a time with that “keeping me quiet” bit.

Oops… gotta run. Here comes Mom with the towel and hot water.

Laundry tags — those little paper thingies that are stapled to your shirttails when you pick them up from the cleaners.

Every day for the last week or so, Ginger has foraged the trash can and closet and every night, we find them on the bed — sometimes under the covers. We assume she’s playing with them, but have no idea what the fascination is.

Actually, the ones I just made were completely free.

Cut three strips from an old bath towel. The kind with nubs works best. I cut the strips about 3-inches wide across the width of the towel.

Take one strip and tie a loose overhand knot in the center. Slip the second strip through the knot and tie another overhand knot. Slip the third one through the first two and tie a third knot. Pull the ends of the strips to tighten all the knots and form a small ball in the center.

It took Dakota about 24 hours to learn he could use his paws to steady the collar while grabbing the inner seam in his teeth. Once he had a good grip on it, he was able to pretty much shred half of it in 30 minutes. Since the vet said we needed to keep the collar on for 5 days, we had to find a solution.

First we tried replacing the E-Collar with an inflatable Pro-Collar. That worked great for several hours, but he eventually found a position in which he could scratch the injury on the top of his head.

Necessity really is the mother of invention. I took what was left of the E-Collar and trimmed it to a width equal to the distance from where his regular collar sits at his throat to the end of his snout. I then threaded his regular collar through both the Pro-Collar and E-Collar with the E-Collar inside the other one, loosened his regular collar a notch and slapped it on.

That got us through another two days and then he figured out he could crack the collar by ramming it into the furniture. Three or four strips of duct tape got us through another day.

Then his sister Kisa decided to play tug of war with it and it was all over. Fortunately, this was shortly before our vet visit so we didn’t worry about it too much.

Take two small squares of bread, coat them with peanut butter and slap them together with the pill inside.

Not recommended for pets with allergies.