March 31, 2013
-
Sunday Morning
It is a damp, gray day.
Not a good outdoor dog day.
Wet fur. Wet dirt. Testy moms complaining about ‘mud’ and ‘tracks’.
There is a depressed dog on either couch. Life is just not hardly worth waking up for, today.
When good dogs go bad:
Okay: I stole the eraser from the corpse because I collect them. I am convinced that someday Nancy will have a mechanical pencil that will survive long enough to need a replacement eraser, and I have at least 6 of them waiting for that moment.
So far it’s not looking good.
It would appear that mechanical pencils sit on Nancy’s deck, or her couch-side table, and sing siren songs of chewability to Annie. Come little dog, and chew me up, I’ll taste so good… You haven’t nibbled on a pencil as good as me in days…
I can leave my shoes on the floor and Annie will trot up to them and beak them, but only one of my pairs is so tempting as the cause her to grab it and run away with it… Come on, Cheryl, RUN! I’ve got your shoe! We can play chase!
The life expectancy of an unattended mechanical pencil is roughly 12 hours.
This is the problem. Snorty McFee:
All of my animals have multiple names. Her name on her license is ‘Annie’. Her name when she is outside barking and I have enough enough is ‘Annabel Lee!’ AKA ‘Snorty McFee’. (This allows me to look at Nancy and bark, “Get Snorty!”)
Riley is Wiley Riley Booberry Boo (or any combination thereof.)
‘Wiley Riley’ is…an exaggeration. Nice dog. Not a rocket scientist.
Yesterday I took them to the Downtown Dog to have their toes shortened. This is a horrible betrayal. Annie weighs 40 pounds and it takes two people to trim her nails, one to hold her, one to snip. With Riley they use a sander that looks remarkably like my Dremel, but Annie will have nothing to do with that, thank you very much. Yesterday the unthinkable happened: a foreign dog came into the dog grooming store and Annie and I spent some time assuring each other that no one really needed to bite that dog, that it was a public store–for dogs, even–and that awful, no good, horrible dog had as much right to be there was we did. Although we had an appointment. And we’re a better dog. And we don’t like that dog at all. We are, I think, actually making a little progress on that whole other dog aggression thing. Not dog park progress, but ‘we can walk past other dogs maybe sometimes if everything is fine’ progress. Tuesday we have another appointment with our trainer to continue our work,and we have arrange Ilahcare for our next class, whenever that may be. We WILL be a well-behaved, walkable dog. We’ll get Cheryl and Nancy trained if it kills us. We will.
Riley does not like having his toes shortened either, but I think his major objection is to the table. We don’t like that table. He is quite proud of his feet when it’s all done. Riley doesn’t care if other dogs come into the grooming salon while he’s there. Well, he does: some he would like to greet, some he would like to send packing, but a simple ‘no’ will allow Riley to calm down and get down to the serious business of getting all the way across the hardwood floored storefront with shortened toes.
He has gone outside again. Birds are chirping. Grass is growing. He has an estate to survey.
