Things My Dog Has Eaten: a guest post by Susan McCormick

  https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ahkFJlGiL.jpg

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The almost-seven months of coronavirus quarantining has taught us a lot of lessons. If you can't travel in real life, you can always get there in a book. (Oh, to walk the foggy streets of San Francisco!) As Dorothy famously said, there's no place like home, and the people and pets living there. Thrillers can be fun, but when real life gets a little too thrilling, we want to spend time inside a cozy mystery: sweet, funny characters, real community, and an intriguing puzzle to solve.

And finally, as all the folks who owned dogs before March, and all the many who have adopted one since then know, there's nothing to get you thorough the hard times like a pooch. Here's Susan McCormick to tell you about her beloved Albert - and to whet your whistle for her just-released "atmospheric, entertaining whodunnit" THE FOG LADIES: FAMILY MATTERS.

 

Things My Dog Has Eaten

by Susan McCormick

 

A Newfoundland dog is a joy in oh, so many ways. Newfoundlands are calm, patient, and phlegmatic. A Newf will happily sit around all day doing nothing, which is perfect for COVID quarantines. These dogs are gigantic, and you don’t need to lean down to pet them. You will never trip over them, and their bark is a deep, dignified woof and not a tiny, high-pitched yip. They are also slobbery and furry, and any hope of a clean house is abandoned when you bring home a Newfoundland. One thing you may not know, however, and was likely a characteristic of our specific Newfoundland rather than all Newfoundlands, is the number and variety of household objects chewed up and eaten.

 

 

All puppies go through a chewing phase, and we were not fazed by this. However, Albert the Newfoundland never grew out of chewing, and through all of his years chewed everything in sight, attached or unattached to something or someone. We witnessed the gobbling of some of these belongings, and some we discovered in Albert’s poo. Luckily, a Newfoundland has an enormous esophagus and intestinal tract, and Albert never had a blockage, which was sometimes a worry, seeing the size of the swallowed item.

 

 

 

 

Here is just a partial list.

-        Any paper product, including piano and guitar sheet music, homework, files tucked away in a briefcase brought home from work, mail, toilet paper, paperback books

-        Legos, any and all small plastic toys, bouncy balls, stuffies

-        Pinecones

-        The carpet on the stairs

-        The stairs

-        Socks (on or off our feet)

-        An entire loaf of pumpkin bread

-        A ten pound bag of flour and a five pound bag of oat bran when he accidentally locked himself in the pantry

-        An ink cartridge

-        A Yankee’s baseball carried home by our sons from a trip to NYC (did you know baseballs were made of cork?)

-        Two pizzas at the doggy beauty parlor (he slipped the leash, climbed the stairs into the break room and devoured their lunch off the table)

-        One pound of lard

-        Nonslip bathmat from inside the bathtub

-   
    My elderly mother’s red cashmere sweater and only pair of shoes that fit (luckily, my mother had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember he’d eaten her favorite shoes and only knew that she loved Albert)

-        75 pieces from a Mastermind game

-        Strainer full of pasta

-        Costco-sized bag of fancy chocolate Easter eggs covered in colorful pastel tinfoil (we sweated this one because chocolate is deadly for dogs, but he is huge so the lethal dose is huge, and he must have swallowed them whole because the eggs came out the other end undigested and still covered in their foil)

-        A fully decorated gingerbread house

-        Baby Jesus from the nativity set

 

COVID was good for Albert. He was approaching nine years old, very old for a Newfoundland, and he was sick. In his last months he had his entire family around him every single day, sheer bliss for a dog.

 

Many dogs inhabit the elegant apartment building in my cozy murder mystery series, The Fog Ladies, and Albert was my muse when writing. In Book One, a tiny dog saves the day. Albert could not believe a tiny, yippy dog got this role. In Book Two, there are a few lines about a Newfoundland. Albert was pleased. But in Book Three, expected out in fall 2021, a Newfoundland is front and center.

 

 

How has your dog fared during COVID?

What is the strangest thing your dog has eaten?

 

 

THE FOG LADIES: FAMILY MATTERS    Till death do us part, with kitchen shears. What drives a family man to kill his wife? This question haunts Sarah James, a medical resident who meets the unhappy family at a resort near Big Sur. She witnesses how ugly a marriage can be. But murder?

Sarah and the spunky Fog Ladies—elderly neighbors from her San Francisco apartment building—set out to discover the truth. Their probing finds the threat is perilously close to home, endangering another troubled family struggling to survive.

 

Susan McCormick is a writer and doctor who lives in Seattle. She graduated from Smith College and George Washington University School of Medicine, with additional medical training in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Susan served as a doctor in the U.S. Army for nine years before moving to the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the Fog Ladies series, she also wrote Granny Can’t Remember Me, a lighthearted picture book about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two sons, and, until recently, her giant Newfoundland dog, Albert.

You can find out more about Susan and the Fog Ladies at her website. You can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @smccormickbooks and enjoy many more dog pics on her Instagram feed, @susanmccormickbooks.

You can purchase both books in the Fog Ladies series at

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Apple Books

Goodreads

Book Bub