One thing we didn’t consider when we adopted Hazel was the fact that, as a black dog, her nails are also black. I don’t think I had ever considered a dog’s nails in my life, even after having grown up with three of them, but Hazel, as always, is an outlier in everything she does. Her nails grow at the speed of an F1 car, so she so she sounds like someone typing on a mechanical keyboard when walking on a hardwood floor. Her nails can get so long that when she stands up normally, they twist her toes in weird directions. In normal circumstances, the length of her nails are kept in check by daily walks and her guiding instinct to pull on the leash like a sled dog, but with the frigid snow conditions of the last two weeks, she has only gone outside to do her business and come back inside as quickly as possible, retiring to the couch to wait until warmer weather appears. So they’ve gotten very long.

She’s been to the vet to have them clipped before, and they’ve given us drugs to administer two hours before the appointment. The last time we did this, it didn’t go well, and the vet tech seemed to be pissed at us. We followed your directions, dude. I made an appointment yesterday to bring her in to get them trimmed again, and they upped her dose at our request. She seemed a little spacey on the way there, and was a bit out of sorts in the waiting room. Thankfully, it only took them ten minutes to actually do the work, and she came back out to the waiting room, anxious to leave. When she got home, she was even more gloopy and passed out under Jen’s desk as we worked, her pupils as big as dinnerplates. Overnight, she splayed out in the middle of the bed like a pile of wet towels and lay in the same position all night, forcing me to teeter at the edge of the bed. This morning, she went outside for her customary walk, came back inside and immediately laid on the couch, completely uninterested in driving to school with the girls—an integral part of her normal routine. As a creature of habit, it’s very strange for her not to want to take a ride. But when it came time to meet our neighbor for the first dog walk in two weeks, she was happy to get outside, back to her normal self.