Lesson learned: don't wish for an exciting life.

Fruit salad. At 3:00 this afternoon, this was the most exciting thing to happen all day. At 4:00, we all went our separate ways  - Brad and Michelle off to Spring Break in Santa Barbara stuff, me to babysit, and Rachel to job search. At approximately 7:20, I returned home, completely unaware of the impending disaster.

Half-jokingly I told Rachel that we needed to do something exciting this evening, because I'm on spring break and we were the only two at home. Little did we know...

So, this is Zazie:

This is a 12 oz bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips:

Tonight we found out that, not unlike some people, dogs cannot always contain their desire for sweets, particularly chocolate sweets.

Rachel discovered the bag, torn to shreds, sitting on the coach, with an energetic (although not unusually so) Zazie nearby. Naturally, we attempted to not panic as I frantically searched online to see how much chocolate a dog could eat and survive. Not finding a suitable answer (granted, I did only look for about 30 seconds), we ran to call the vet, which was closed. We then called the pet emergency center (didn't even know those existed) and relayed the information that our approximately 10 lbs (actually 15) dog had eaten potentially 10-12 oz of semi-sweet chocolate. His response? Bring your dog in.

So we did. And the moment we got there, they took her to the back and started working - quick sidenote here: if you're ever in Santa Barbara area with a dog that needs some kind of emergency treatment, take them to Care, because they are fabulous (no, unfortunately, I'm not getting paid to say that) - while Rachel and I waited rather anxiously in the front. To put things in perspective, we were sitting with two groups of people, one whose dog may have cancer and had just had massive surgery, and the other whose dog was dying of kidney failure and may have to go on dialysis; however, at this point all we knew was that we had potentially poisoned our professor's dog (toxicity for her size is just under 3 oz of chocolate, just fyi), so it wasn't super comforting.

After what felt like forever, they brought us to the back and started explaining. They had given her morphine to make her throw up, which she did, thankfully nearly all if not all of it - and trust me, it was a lot of chocolate, because they let us see it. Then they gave her a water treatment under her skin and a charcoal oral treatment to absorb anything else in there out. And then they just had to wait for her heart-rate to get down to normal so we could take her home. After about two hours, it finally was low enough for us to take her home, and so, we took our (at that point) rather drugged-up, sick, swaying little doggie home.

Now, just so you don't get the wrong impression, we really do like these animals and we don't try to feed them things to kill them. We have lived here for nearly 2.5 months and in that time Zazie has eaten many things, but never out of the pantry. Today, Zazie managed to get into the closed pantry, in the middle of the bottom shelf and pull out the chocolate. Our theory? Jake, the cat, can open the pantry, so we think it was a team effort.

Way to go guys. Love that animal intelligence.