Tolkien

You know, cleaning out your old files on your computer is very like cleaning out a closet or a "junk drawer" in your house...you find all kinds of stuff that you have stashed away at one time or another and then completely forgot about. I have a very, very bad habit of copying and pasting crap to my desktop. On the one hand, I make whatever I've stuck there very accessible (at the time) to use. On the other hand, I never get around to tidying up my desktop and then I can't find ANYTHING. Today while moving and/or deleting various and sundry things, I ran across this:

And this:

And I realized that there was a real great story to be told about these X-rays.  However, the story was not technically mine to tell.  These X-rays belong to my friend Nancy's dog/wolf-beast, Tolkien.  I got in touch with Nance and she gave me permission to tell Tolkien's tale.

 

Before I go much further, here's a picture of Tolkien's outsides, since we started out looking at his insides:

Isn't he a handsome fellow? 

Tolkien is a Canadian pooch...but he loves anything from Alabama...like this hat (and me!)

 

Tolkien belongs to my very favorite Canadian family of all time, the Kozaks.  This picture is approximately 8 years old...Tolkien is not even half his final size here...but it's the only pic with the whole clan in it.
I sometimes visit the Kozaks in Canada...since they are my very favorite Canadian family and all.  Tolkien always seems to think that I have travelled all nine hundred and twenty eight miles just to see him.

He is part collie, part (I think) German Shepard (or timber wolf...Lord, that dog is big) and part Joey from Friends.  He believes (feverently) that no female is immune to his charm.   He's quite the ladies' man.

Besides trying the "bad touch" with anything female that crosses his threshold, Tolkien has another unfortunate characteristic.  He will attempt to eat anything that he even suspects is edible.  During his earlier years, he was particularly fond of the kids' underwear.

Nance has told many tales of the things that he has counter and/or table-surfed and eaten (then sometimes barfed back up)...like a 5lb bag of potatoes, and entire bunch of bananas, potpourri, etc.

Two Christmases ago, one of the Kozak children brought their handmade ornament home from school and proudly hung it on the Kozak Christmas tree.  It was a very attractive ornament.  It was a very attractive ornament that smelled like marshmallows...because it essentially was a giant ball of marshmallow held together with approximately 98 straight pins.  The ornament was made by taking a Styrofoam ball, then sticking marshmallows on it using corsage pins:

 

It was if it were perfectly designed by Martha Stewart to assassinate 200 lb collie/wolf/Joey creatures.  To this day, no one really knows how Tolkien got this ball off of the tree where it had been hung (they assumed) out of his reach.

Luckily, they were able to get him to an emergency vet and after surgery and hospital stay that cost many, many Canadian dollars he was fine.  For which we are all profoundly grateful.  Canada just wouldn't be the same for me if I wasn't greeted with his canine version of, "Heeyyy, how you doin'?"