Yes, that’s really my Lab Boxer pup’s name, and he has several aliases: Bud Bud, Peanut Face, Goober Head, Baby Boy, etc.
Copper is a 60-pound package of bouncy boy dog sweetness. And he has my heart. So you can imagine how I felt when I HAD to dose him with Ace Promazine yesterday in order to get his nails trimmed. First time I’ve done that, but weather here hasn’t permitted our usual walks on the pavement to keep his nails filed.
Well, at 2 pm he gets the pill. At 2:30 pm I bring him stumbling upstairs and out to the car. He hates to ride so he was on high alert and even more so when we got to the vetspital (no spellcheck needed, that’s “hospital” for pets). The good news is they did trim his nails, and his feet were not moving targets this time. The bad news is when I got him home, the adrenaline wore off and he was utterly and completely drunk.
Yes, Copper Doodle was now a noodle. Not even al dente…an "all day long forgot I put noodles in the pot to boil" noodle!
He was shaking and he walked crooked, head down, and tail between his legs. I haven’t seen him like that since he got bitten by a poisonous snake when he was just a yittle puppy (no spellcheck this time either -- my 6-year-old neighbor is wearing off on me with substituting Ys for Ls).
Anyway, I checked on him the last time around midnight, and he was a little better. This morning he was back to his normal happy, bouncy self. Whew!!!
So why am I telling you about this? Well, it brought back memories of college for me. What in Sam Hill would the only thing college students think to do in our dorm when it snowed??!! Drink. Alcohol. We gathered up every drop we had and quickly determined that we didn’t have enough on hand to get drunk. We had five beers and a half pint of Southern Comfort. Ugh.
Drinking games!! That’s it. Damn, we were smart. So we commenced to playing spoons, and it seemed my spoon playing drinking friends had decided I would be the one to get drunk! So every round I lost I had to shotgun a beer, and then it advanced to shots of (oh, just kill me now!) Southern Comfort.
You see, I was the one who could “hold” her alcohol. I was the one who helped my friends out of the nightclubs and into the car at closing time or after happy hour. I had my $#!** together. NOT.
Well, you guessed it. With all that concentrated effort, I did get intoxicated … still not sick though. Boy did I wish I had gotten sick and purged that $#!** out of my system when I woke up the next morning!! And crawled to the bathroom. Brushed my teeth around ten times but still had fuzzy mittens on them.
Ladies, that taught me a valuable lesson about drinking. I never shotgunned a beer or drank Southern Comfort again!! Now, why oh why did I blame it on those two things and not the alcohol in general? I do not know. I was of reasonable intelligence or I wouldn’t have made it into college! Duh.
One day I’ll tell you the story about flipping the Rib Eye … that was my senior year living in an apartment near campus. And we pooled our money because we were poor college students back then and bought steaks to grill. But that’s another day. Was I older and wiser? Maybe.
I only wish I had known then what I know now. How Happy Appy (Appalachian State University a/k/a party central) got the nickname. I wonder how my college memories would stack up now? I didn’t drink all the time in school, but the Friday afternoon happy hours were a real thing. And even then, I remember that I didn’t seem to have an “off” button.
Today I express gratitude to my body. For putting up with all of that and more. Human bodies are simply amazing.
I am reminded of the fact that I have never regretted NOT drinking. Not. One. Time.
You won’t regret it either!
