I am alive.

But just barely. Okay, the really bad days were Thursday and Friday, and I've been mostly convalesced since then. Over the weekend, we played host to an old greyhound named Frank. Now, Frank is a little shy, and the sweetest thing in the whole world besides maybe Maggie, but he is stinky. Until they come out with, like, Web 10.0 I will be unable to accurately convey exactly how stinky this dog is. His coat, while oily and a little dandruffy (he's an old man, I will cut him some slack here), isn't really even the source of the problem.

It's his mouth.

Now, greyhounds tend to have bad teeth as a rule. They're the Brits of the dog world. Frank's teeth are a total mess -- he's had to have some of them pulled, and the resulting dental lineup causes his tongue to loll amusingly to the side when he's excited. But his breath... dear god. Were it not for his panting and jingly tags, I would still be able to tell when he came up behind me. His breath is like a spectre of stank, both heralding his arrival and marking his passage through a room long after he's passed through.

Frank and his breath are not unlike one of the more disgusting recurring characters in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, Foul Ol' Ron, whose stench is so strong that it has become an entity unto itself and sometimes behaves as such.*

I will see if I can update this shortly with a picture of Frank -- my camera is currently broken and Chris has his in the car. I may draw cartoon smelly lines coming up from his mouth to indicate the stink. So overall, we had a good weekend, but it's been impossible to get Maggie to understand that Frank doesn't want to play all the time, and that just because he gets tastier food, that doesn't mean she can have it.

Anyway, I'm all better and even starting to *gasp* get a handle on work. Frank goes home tomorrow morning. Funundrum shall continue anon.

Gaze into the very maw of horror itself!

*Craig -- a thousand times, thank you for Discworld. It's so good.