It was pointed out by my friend Dave the surgeon that I neglected to mention suturing the alien’s leg back on. That’s because he–Dave, not the alien–is a famous human surgeon and that’s what he would obviously do for a human in similar conditions. However, he (hopefully) doesn’t have to worry about other humans in the household trying to rip the leg off his patient and consuming the sutures in the process. Thread, string, yarn, Mylar tinsel and packaging, and ribbon all can create serious problems for dogs and cats if the animals swallow them, far worse than rubber
Read more →After disappearing months ago, the yellow alien made a surprise appearance during my New Dog Dawning Seminar here last weekend. I had taken the big puffy dog bed from upstairs down to the living room and placed it on the floor beside the chair where I would be sitting. Rather than get into the gory details here, Ollie and Bee were NOT on their good behavior which we know can be marginally good at best. And benign neglect periodically lost out to the cute factor or, when it wore thin, the pain-in-the-butt one. Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we
Read more →Once again I’m behind as spring clean-up and creating a new garden out of an area that consists mainly of sand and rocks takes up what little free time I have. Still, there have been some changes and BeeBee has been involved in most of them. Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a
Read more →Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until
Read more →Spring officially came last week and with it a lot of changes. Let me pause here to note that “spring” is a relative term. Last week that meant only one snow storm and one night with record-breaking low temperatures. However, in spite of the fact that the snow was very heavy and very wet, there was only about 3″ of it and I decided to let it melt rather than shovel it or have it plowed. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to take the puppies out every day to get them used to the outdoors, to get some sun, and
Read more →Although I always hope I’ll be able to take those professional-looking pet portraits, the reality is that little puppies are remarkably fast. Add that the battery in my camera crapped out and I was reduced to plugging my camera into a wall socket which greatly limited my puppy-chasing mobility, and I had no choice but to resort to what my son did under similar circumstances to keep Cori still long enough to photograph her: I popped them into a decorator wastebasket. The only disadvantage of this is that, as you can see, they did not see this as a
Read more →Last night just as I was dozing off, something set BeeBee off and she started moving restlessly around the bed and acting like she wanted to jump off. I automatically tried to determine if anything had changed but that was useless. It was dark so we were both probably equally visually so I doubt anything I couldn’t see set her off. And because she’s deaf, that ruled out any unusual sounds triggering her display. Although it’s always possible that she could have smelled something I couldn’t given her enhanced sense of small, there’s no way I’d know that. Under
Read more →Sunday: Once again I got behind because of the weather, so I’m going to take this opportunity while I’m waiting for the plow guy to come, and all the snow to fall off the roof in front of the house so I can a) go out the front door without getting clobbered and b) and clean it up. The alien has pretty much been demoted to the status of toy, albeit a special one. There was one incident this week in which Fric went on a playing jag downstairs and then started to race upstairs with it. Unfortunately, she
Read more →Since the last time I wrote, a lot has happened which is why I haven’t had time to write, including that biggest time-consumer of all, more snow. I fear I destroyed the scientific validity of this study when I picked up the yellow alien and moved him. In my defense, I did this in self-defense. Fric went through a spell when the alien went out and came in almost every time she did. But when it started snowing in earnest on Friday, she left it on one of the little landings up to the front steps. Seeing it there
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