My mother called this morning to tell me that the Christmas presents I’d mailed had arrived. Included in this package were presents for my younger sister, a nephew and niece, and a half-dozen dog toys. I told Mom she could go ahead and open the box as all the presents were wrapped, and she said she would put them under the tree.

Twenty minutes later my mother called again to tell me that Megabyte had fished two of the wrapped dog toys out from under the tree and opened them when my parents were out of the room, and they were chasing her around the house trying to get them back but she wasn’t giving them up. I could hear my dad in the background hollering “Meg! Come back here!”

I don’t know how she knows which ones are for her, but she does. Last year, I caught her a couple of times pulling one of her presents out from under the tree, but I stopped her from opening it and she left it alone until we gave it to her Christmas morning (video).

I miss Meg. I miss the little things that became great events from her perspective – her excitement when I came home from work, her kisses and thumping tail when I woke up in the morning, her pleasure at licking the cutting board after we’d grilled chicken for dinner. I miss her crusty whiskers after she’d licked the yogurt container. I know she’s well taken care of in Calgary; my parents adore her and spoil her rotten and she has people around her all the time and a yard to play in. But my life is emptier without her.

Megabyte and I are about to come to the end of a long journey. Over the last two days we’ve been driving for hours, from San Francisco to Salem, Oregon, where we spent the night, to a small city in south-eastern Washington. Here we’ve stopped for a couple of days with some old friends. Tomorrow my parents will arrive, and on Tuesday morning they’ll return to Calgary. Meg will be going with them, and I’ll be returning home alone.

I’ve been trying to accept this for the last month, but it hasn’t gotten easier. But over the months that Meg has been with us in San Francisco, it’s become clear that she’s unhappy there. After considering all the options, we’ve all agreed that the best solution is for Meg to go back to Calgary to live with my parents, who adore her and miss her and whom she loves. She can’t change the things that make her unhappy, so it has to be up to me, as her guardian, to take care of it for her.

I’ve heard that dogs adapt to new surroundings in a few weeks, and I know that Meg will be happy once she’s settled back in to the house where she’s spent almost as much time as she has in our old condo. I’ve been hoping that once she’s gone it will become easier for me, when I no longer have to be reminded daily of her unbearable cuteness and devotion. But right now my heart is broken, and knowing I’m doing the right thing for her is small consolation.

We have this large, shallow cardboard box that brought our TiVO and is sitting on the floor of my studio, along with a number of other things we mean to take to our storage unit on the weekend. As I sat on the floor going through these things, Megabyte came by to see what I was doing, and, holding one flap of the box down, I said, “Here, Meg – get in the box!” C’mon…

And she jumped in, because I’m her mom and when it suits her she does what I tell her to, even if it’s something that she thinks I’m completely crazy to ask her to do. Like asking her to lie down in a stupid cardboard box. She just rested her head on the edge of the box and looked up at me a little woefully as if to ask why she must submit to such embarrassments. Kind of the same way she looks at me when I pin her ears back with a plastic ChipClip before letting her lick plates after dinner. Or like that one Christmas when I put those fake reindeer antlers on her head.

But she always puts up with me.

She is a sweet, sweet dog.

Megabyte loves her toys. (Quicktime video, 482 kb)

Megabyte and I went to Fort Funston today. She’s been there before, with her dogsitter, but I think it was her first visit to the ocean.

Now, Meg is not shy when it comes to water. In Calgary, she spent many summers swimming in the Elbow River. But this ocean thing is a whole other matter. For one thing, the waves sneak up on you when you’re not looking. You pick a nice cool spot for a little lie-down, and the next thing you know you’re up to your tummy in cold water! So not fair!

Initially I wasn’t going to let her off-leash for fear the tides would be too strong for her. But after a while I let her go, as it was clear she wasn’t planning on swimming. She spent a good hour dodging the waves and rolling around in sand and other things that I think may have been little bits of dead crabs—nice—and then spent about a half-hour in the bathtub while I tried to get all the sand out of her fur. We’ll go again, but not until she’s had a haircut.

(We put a few more pictures up from today’s fun in my Megabyte Flickr set: all Megabyte, all the time.)

Edmond and I had a quiet Christmas together, just the two of us, as my visa stuff didn’t work out to allow us to go to Canada as we’d planned. So we stayed home, and I tried to make Christmas dinner—with varying levels of success—the way my mom always does (it was the first Christmas in my life that I didn’t spend with my parents, and I overcompensated – just a little). You can view my efforts on Flickr.

One good thing about spending Christmas here is that we didn’t have to board Megabyte. Over US Thanksgiving we boarded her with a great couple in the Castro and according to all accounts she had a great time (every time I called—which was often—I heard how fabulous she was, and how she’d slept on their bed, and how she was lying on her back on the sofa getting a belly rub). Before, she always stayed at my parents when I was away, and I was completely freaked initially about leaving her with strangers, but she seemed to survive Thanksgiving so I was ready to let her go for Christmas. But I was sad that Meg was going to miss out on Christmas with us.

Meg is a total Christmas dog. Whenever we got to my parents’ house Christmas morning she tore around the house, jumped on the bed to wake up my dad, and she wanted to help everyone open all the presents. It’s like she knew that it was a special day, and I don’t think it was because my mom always had the turkey on by the time we got there. On her first Christmas, when she was only a few months old, she was so tired by the time dinner was over that she was sitting in the middle of the living room and her head was sinking, sinking to the floor as her eyes closed, over and over, and then she would shake herself and lift her head up and try to stay awake to see what was going on. Even here in the weeks leading up to Christmas, she seemed to know what it meant that the Christmas tree was up, and several times I caught her pulling presents out from under the tree—she knew which ones were for her, I guess she could smell the rubber in the tennis ball, or something about the stuffed toys that indicated they were dog toys.

I’d purchased the presents with the intent of sending them to the boarder’s with her, but as things worked out we ended up staying home, and she got to spend Christmas morning with us after all. But since you weren’t here to see her being adorable, I’ve got a goofy little home movie clip to share (1.7M).