Cooking and a dog day

My house smells so wonderful tonight. I put the carcass from last night's chicken in a pot of water with celery, onion, dried parsley, a bit of oregano, salt and pepper. Put it on just before I went out to supper and will leave it all night, put it in the fridge in the morning and strain it into broth to freeze sometime tomorrow. When I came in from supper I was overwhelmed by the good smell.
Scooby and I have had a hard day today--well it was harder on him physically (and maybe emotionally) but it was hard on me emotionally. I had to take him to have his teeth cleaned and was told they might possibly have to extract as many as five teeth (he's nine years old). Because I once lost a dog to the infection from rotten teeth and another to a cardiac reaction to anaesthesia from having his teeth cleaned, this is a scary thing for me. I finally got up my nerve to call about 2 p.m., figuring he really was fine or I'd have heard. He was indeed fine, some bad gingivitis but no teeth pulled. I was told not to feed him until 7:30 tonight and then only a third of what he normally gets (poor thing--I'm sure he's hungry). And he's on antibiotics. I brought him in a few minutes ago intending to take the bandage off his front leg, but he just saved me the trouble by chewing it off. It's amazing to me how wrapped up we get in our animals and how relieved I am to have him home at my feet in my office, even if he is noisily licking himselfl which usually drives me wild. My neighbors tell me that their dog gets into bed between them and begins that noisy licking until they've had to put an Elizabethan collar on him every night. I just wake up every so often and say, "Stop licking!" But tonight I'll probably be glad to hear the noise.
I had lunch with Fred, my mentor, today and told him the plot of my novel. He was much intrigued by plot twists and thought it was all working out well. He's going to read the portion I have written, which I much appreciate. And then I had dinner with Carol Roark tonight--she brought me a wonderful late Christmas gift--a coffee cup decorated with one of her photos of polar bears that she took when she and her husband went to Hudson's Bay or even farther north to see the bears. What a neat thing! It does not go in the dishwasher.
It's been sort of hectic today--including a run out to Jordan's to take her something she needed--so I'm turning in early.-