Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, except without any pictures of Sheba or Nina

Well, Sheba's run of twenty vomit-free days came to an end this week, on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. On the one hand, this is a new record, but on the other, we were really kind of hoping for longer. Maybe the baby mice she found and ate on Tuesday morning's walk didn't agree with her, or maybe it was the sponge she tore apart on Monday (she didn't get all of it, or even very much of it, but I doubt the pieces we recovered afterward would have been enough to reconstruct the entire original sponge), or maybe we just went a little overboard with the treats Tuesday night. The treats thing seems most likely, but I have to explain that one by way of a story.

Parodia microsperma. Was tagged P. herzogii, but cactiguide.com says that's a synonym for P. microsperma.
The husband and I were going to go to Cedar Rapids on Tuesday, because I hadn't been to Frontier in a while, and I needed clay pots. Once we got to Iowa City, though, the "CHECK ENGINE" light came on, and it suddenly seemed like a bad idea to go all the way to Cedar Rapids, so we decided not to. I bought pots at Lowe's and my ex-work, as well as *coughcoughcough* some plants (Agave, Mammillaria, Parodia; photos throughout the post). Then we stopped at the grocery store so I could buy some cactus-repotting tongs -- 'cause you gotta have cactus-repotting tongs -- and when I got back in the car, I suggested that we stop by the animal shelter.

It wasn't that I wanted to get another dog; the shelter is on the way home, and I wanted to check up on Fervor. I can't exactly explain why. I just did. So we went.

Any guesses as to the ID on this Agave? I'm inclined to say it's a variegated A. attenuata, but that's mostly because it's the main Agave I know without marginal spines -- the leaves don't seem wide enough to be attenuata.
He was still there. Got very excited when we paid attention to him, talking to him through the cage and stuff. I stuck my hand through and rubbed his stomach (neither I nor the husband could remember him rolling over for stomach rubs when he was living with us), and he jumped around and wanted to play and all that. I'd been fairly certain, the last time I'd seen him, that he remembered us, but I was less sure about that this time -- I mean, maybe he did, but it's also possible that after five months in the shelter, he'd have been just as thrilled with attention from a total stranger. I don't know.

I hadn't really planned on staying a long time, and I didn't want to have them go to the trouble of getting him out, especially since I knew there was no chance we could adopt him, but the temptation was there. (The husband and I found out after we left that we'd both been thinking well maybe we could take him and he could just live outside some of the time, or maybe the allergy thing wouldn't be such a big deal now that he's not shedding anymore, or endless variations on surely there's some way we could make it work. . . .)

Anyway. So I went in and asked the shelter people whether anybody had even applied to adopt him since we'd brought him back, whether there had been any interest.

Mammillaria elongata 'Pink Nymph,' according to the tag.
And no. It turns out that there has not. In six weeks. So then I felt kind of awful again.

The point of relating this story -- or at least the first reason, because I think there are two -- is that then when we got home, finally, we may have over-doted on Sheba a little, which makes very little rational sense but seemed like the thing to do, emotionally. The emotional logic, I think, was that if we couldn't take care of Fervor, then we'd take extra-super-good care of Sheba. You know, like, love-her-'til-she-pukes kind of good care.

Which in this case turned out to be literal.

Plus I'd given her a couple treats when we left, as an apology for leaving, so it seems likely that the treats are, and maybe always have been, a lot of the problem.

And the second point is, if you're in or near Johnson County, Iowa, and you're looking for a really big but basically well-behaved and sweet dog, I can recommend one. And if you're not looking for a dog, perhaps you ought to be? Maybe? Think about it? I'm really not going to rest easy until someone adopts him.

Fervor, who the shelter people insist on calling "Jebediah." Picture from 16 Mar 2010.