Solución

If I ever expect any brave soul to venture into my indoor farmland, I really need to figure out a way to nix the smells. They aren't entirely bad smells, except for the cat litter. Ugh, I hate the cat litter smell. Like I've said before, I don't want to use harsh chemicals or even fake shit to cover up the smells.

Now that I'm five months away from moving, this place is finally starting to look a little better (but as the previous paragraph mentions, still working on the smell improvements). For awhile, I was so overwhelmed with all the animals and their messes (NOT bodily messes) that I didn't do much about cleaning. Not only that, but for the first six months of living here, we didn't have a vacuum. I was working 55 hours a week and could never make it to the place that sells used vacuums. I like buying used whenever possible and sanitary. Somehow, thankfully, one day I realized that I needed to tackle the tornado. I got the vacuum fixed, as it had broken by that point, and became a cleaning tornado. How great it would be to train my dogs how to clean! If you can train a dog to see for a blind person or to trip an autistic kid when he runs away then you surely could train a dog to do basic cleaning. Although, they don't have prehensile digits so perhaps that's why no one's done it yet. But I'm more referring to picking up after their messes, where they chew a toy and just leave it--or them, the pieces of it--in the middle of the floor.

The lump on my littlest dog's neck turned out to be an infected salivary gland. Thus, Annie will be on antibiotics for the next ten days. She has a liver shunt, so she is on a special dog food, but she doesn't like it all that much so I mix it with my other dogs' food. Antibiotics are good for liver shunt dogs, according to the vet. He knows a Rottweiler with a liver shunt who crashes without antibiotics. It makes sense, because the job of the liver is to clean the fluids in the body. And when there is a shunt, the fluids bypass parts of the liver and don't get cleaned properly. So the antibiotics make up for that and do the cleaning for the liver. (Disclaimer: If I have any of this info incorrect, feel free to correct it. I like being corrected as long as it is done in an appropriate way.) So I will monitor Annie's eating and general well being this next week to see if the antibiotics positively affect her. With humans, I am opposed to them whenever avoidable because of the whole building an immunity thing. But dogs don't live nearly as long, and if it greatly increases the quality of her life, then why not?