6-18-2008 Lauren broke her left Femur on 6-16-08 while at daycare. It was a spiral fracture and they put on a hip spica cast, otherwise known as a full body cast. She is completely immobilized with the cast and can not move around at all. She will have to remain in the cast for 6 weeks, at which point it will come off and she will be back to normal. More pictures of her will be available on her Gallery page located here.

5-8-2008 I have added a new piece of software to the website called Gallery. What it does is organize and display all my photos in an easier way. I have really neglected updating the site with new photos because it take forever to resize them, upload them, and create the html to display them. With Gallery installed it should make updates a breeze. All pictures on the site will be hosted on Gallery which you can access by clicking the link above called "Picture Gallery". One thing I love about it, is the date the picture was taken is displayed on any picture taken with a digital camera. However many pictures from this site are pictures I scanned from film with my scanner, so those pictures contain no such date. In cases that there is no date then by default the date will display 1-1-1970. So if you see a photo that says 1970 that just means there is no valid date to show. Sandy and I are also slowly over the coming months going to go through and add captions to many of the pictures, but again this is going to take a long time, as I have almost 2,000 pictures in the gallery.

5-5-2008 Stewart started panting on Sunday (4-27-08). Sandy took him to the vet the next day (4-28-08) and we found out he had congestive heart failure. The reason he was panting was because of fluid on his lungs, and he couldn't catch his breath. The vet prescribed two medicines to help make him more comfortable, but there was nothing they could do to fix his heart. Over the next several days Stewart appeared to get better and panted less. He was still just as active as always running around the yard, and barking at birds. He didn't appeared to be that sick. That Friday (5-2-08) his panting progressively got worse throughout the evening. He would just stand on all four legs and pant, he refused to sit down or lay down. I think it was easier for him to breathe standing up. It was cool out so he wanted to stay outside. I periodically checked on him throughout the night, and every time he was standing up in a different place around they yard just panting. I checked on him last at 5:00am Saturday Morning (5-3-08), he was standing just off the deck and panting heavily. I went to bed and woke Sandy up to tell her he was not doing well at all, and I didn't think he was going to make it much longer. Sandy got up with Lauren at 7:30am and she went outside to check on him. He had gone to the bathroom all over himself, and was still just standing up and panting. I told Sandy then, I thought we were going to have to put him down. We called the vet at 8:00am and scheduled an appointment for 11:10am. I thought we were going to have to put him down, but I also thought in the back of my mind that maybe he would still get better. He was still active and walking around, he was just panting very heavily. He continued for the next several hours to stand and pant heavily. He moved around various spots in the yard, but he was obviously in distress, and unable to catch his breath. At 10:45am we went outside to put his collar and leash on him to go to the vet. He really didn't want to move and tried to just stand still. Sandy coaxed him over to the gate and we went into the front yard and over to the car. I opened the back door and moved around to get in the front seat. He walked up and tried jumping into the back seat. He made it about half way but couldn't get his back legs up and in. Sandy grabbed his back legs and helped pick him up and into the car. He immediately laid down on the seat as Sandy still had a hold of him, he let out one last big breathe and passed away. I really didn't think he was that close to death, and we were both shocked that he died right then. I think after spending the last 12 hours standing up and panting he was just exhausted and didn't want to go on.  He was somewhere between 11 and 13 years old, which is pretty good for a big dog. I am thankful that we had notice from the vet he was dying. We were able to spend one last week with him and say our goodbyes. He got preferential treatment the whole week by getting fed table scraps, and we bought him wet dog food which he loves. He got lots of affection and attention that last week. I think we gave him as good of a life as anybody could have, and I'm glad he passed away without suffering for a long time. More pictures and videos are all going to be on the new Stewart page.


These two pics were taken on Tuesday (4-29-08) just 4 days before he died.


3-17-2008 I have decided instead of cluttering up KenMerritt.com with all my gaming stuff, I'm going to move it all over to a new website I am creating just for gaming. My new site is KensGaming.com. It's going to be dedicated to just xbox gaming news and reviews all written by me.


1-14-2008 Added the Lauren5 page (15-18 months), with 113 new pictures.


9-17-2007 Finally added the Lauren4 page (12-14 months), with lots of new pictures.






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