The Great Houdini Redux

Some time ago I talked about how my dog, Shasta, was apparently the reincarnation of Houdini (hey, he said if there was a way to come back, he would… I guess he didn’t reason it’d be as a dog).  Somehow, she manages to find escape routes that we can’t even imagine or conceive.

I had mentioned that we had bought a large metal gate that screws into the wall in order to keep Shasta penned into the kitchen when we’re out for the day.  We chained up the cat door to keep her from waltzing through that.  Well, now she’s one-upped herself yet again.

She’s learned to open the gate.

I mean… she’s somehow figured out how to unlatch the gate and open it.  Which, of course, is impossible.  Except, somehow, for her, it’s not.  Dear Wife has come home three times this week to find the gate open and our happy little dog enjoying herself in rooms other than the kitchen.

So, this weekend we’ll be heading out to get some more chain and a small padlock.  We’ll be chaining and locking the gate closed from here out.  If she can figureout how to open that, then, frankly, she deserves to spend the day sleeping on the living room couch.

Why I Love Dogs

There’s just something about dogs.  I’m a dog person.  It’s not that I don’t like cats.  Cats are great pets.  But give me a choice between a cat and a dog, and tell me I can have one and only one, and I will pick the dog.  Chances are the dog would pick me, too.

And that’s why I love dogs.  It’s a cliché, I know, but I love dogs especially because they love me back.  I mean, each dog has his or her own temperament – and each breed as well.  But dogs are pack animals.  Dogs are, as a whole, a very social species.  And that’s the key to what makes dogs so great.

Having a pet is a big responsibility.  You have to feed them.  You have to make sure they get plenty of exercise.  You have to provide them shelter.  You’ve got to keep them groomed, and provide for their health.  But dogs have a need beyond all of these.  Dogs need to be loved and to love.  They need social interaction with their “pack” – and the pack of the dog is their human family.

Last week, I was struck by this as my dog, Shasta, begged to cuddle with me periodically.  I realized that she hadn’t been getting as much attention, perhaps, as she was used to before B.T. came along.  And she was feeling lonesome.  She just wanted to cuddle, to sit with me and for me to pet her.  And something in her big brown eyes just melted me.

Other times, she brings over one of her favorite toys – her “pink rope” or her “dead squirrel” (a stuffless stuffed animal in the shape of a squirrel pelt, no actual squirrels involved) or one of her others – and lay it in your lap knowing for all the world that what you really want to do is play a game of tug or fetch with her.

What struck me about all this, and what I wanted to write about, is just how much of a real need this is for dogs.  It’s as important for their health and well-being to be played with and loved as food and exercise and regular visits to the vet.  And they’ll gladly give the same, in kind.  It’s just so fundamental to their nature.

One of my favorite bumper stickers that I’ve been seeing on the road occasionally, recently, reads “DOG IS LOVE”.  The transposition from the original phrase isn’t just hilarious (regardless of whether you believe the original phrase; I just happen to) – it’s also true.  And that’s why I just can’t help but love them back.  Especially Shasta, the big cute lovable ball of fur that she is (or, as we sometimes call her, “Silly Bear”).

Review of “How I Punched a Hole in my Foot”

Yesterday, I doubled-up on blogs, with both a review of my current outlook on writing projects, and a review of the movie “How to Train Your Dragon” that Dear Wife and I saw over the weekend.  But the movie wasn’t the only out-of-the-ordinary thing that happened this weekend past, so I’m hitting you with double-blogs today, too.

As I’ve alluded to, in the past, Dear Wife and I often take our bundle of furry joy, Shasta, to the nearby Dog Park to run and play.  Shasta loves romping in the dog park even more than she loves romping in the backyard.  There are as many, if not more, squirrels and the whole thing is much bigger than our yard.  Plus, usually there are other dogs to play with.  Shasta loves the game of “chase me around the park bench, while I dart under it and hide and sometimes dart out again and chase you”.  The rules of that game seem a little flexible, if you ask me.  Kind of like the game of “Fluxx“.

The dog park in our neighborhood is only a few blocks from our house, so most days either I or Dear Wife (or both of us) will walk Shasta there.  But in the last couple months, with Dear Wife walking for two, whenever she goes we’ll take a car down instead.  We did that this weekend, and because I was in a hurry to catch up and drive Dear Wife, I slipped into some flip-flops instead of putting on shoes as I’d normally do for a dog park excursion.  It turned out to be a mistake.

For one, there was little protection for my feet while Shasta and whatever doggie-friend she found played that game Shasta loves so much (you know, the “chase me around the park bench” game).  But that wasn’t so bad.  Later, when it was time to go, I started walking around the park to give Shasta one last chance to run around the park before heading home.  I’m not sure what happened, but I’m walking along, and suddenly there’s the pointy-end of a stick sliding up over the bottom of my flip-flop and ramming into the bottom of my right heel.  You know, it hurt a little.

I hobbled with Shasta back to the gate of the dog park.  I told my wife “I’m not coming here in flip-flops again.”  She looked at me quizzically.  I showed her the hole in my foot.  We hightailed it back to the car, me trying not to get too much blood on my flip-flop (that would be a pain to clean, I reasoned).

As near as I can tell, what happened was that as I was trying to catch Shasta’s attention, I wasn’t paying attention to all the sticks and twigs on the ground.  I must have accidentally kicked a stick with my left foot as I was taking a normal step into my right foot.

Anyway, I was hobbling around all day yesterday, but today my foot is feeling alright, and I’m walking mostly normal again.

Doggy Addendum

B.T.’s Mama (aka Dear Wife), in a comment on “Dogs Are Not Like Us” points out that there is more to the story of Shasta’s odorific discovery.  So I thought I’d now share the conclusion to that sordid tale, in which we solve the mystery of the unpleasant odor.  But be warned, dear reader: this is not a journey for the faint-of-heart.

Dear Wife ended up having to bathe Shasta – our hose down was insufficient to really clean her, and Dear Wife was working from home that day (in part to wait on the Electrician and in part because she’s significantly pregnant and has a special dispensation to do so), and could not abide with the lingering stench.  I feel for her.  My encounter with the smell was bad enough; I can only imagine what it must have been like for a pregnant woman, whose sense of smell is magically enhanced by baby-having hormones.

Now, on days when Dear Wife gets to stay at home to work, one of Shasta’s fondest activities is prancing and laying around in the backyard, enjoying the outdoorsiness of it all.  And Dear Wife, needing to do some actual work, couldn’t be a day-long doggy-playmate.  So, eventually, out and into the yard dear Shasta had to go.

Which was apparently fine, for most of the day.  Until she found it again: that wonderfully repugnant stinky spot she’d so joyfully smeared herself in before.  My poor Dear Wife had to dump buckets of water onto our poor dear puppy, to try to clean her off a bit.  Then she had to rush off to another “getting ready for baby” type class at the hospital that evening.  (I eventually made it to class, after a painfully long day at the day job.)  When we got home, it was my turn to give Shasta a bath (the stench still lingered faintly in her coat).

By then it was too late to do a decent search of the backyard – the sun had long since nestled down for the night in its cradle.  So, just before bed,  I took Shasta out for her traditional “last-chance” to do her outdoor business.  Normally we let her just go and do whatever she needs to do in the backyard.  But last night I followed her out and watched her from the deck.  After she’d had enough time prowling in the shadows where I couldn’t see her very well, I called her back for bed.

She brought a present.

I couldn’t tell what it was.  It was a black, lump of a thing, grotesquely shaped, with some unidentified bits hanging off of it.  Something told me it was related to the smell Shasta was so in love with.  Probably it was the smell of the thing.  I made Shasta drop it.  Then I got a closer look at it.

Was that a jaw bone sticking out of one side of it?

It was dark, and I didn’t have time to investigate further.  It was time for bed.  So I brought Shasta in with me, leaving the thing out on the deck for the time being.

This morning, after taking Shasta for a morning walk (we missed our customary morning jog because I overslept a little due to the late night previous, so it was a shorter walk for her today), I returned to the deck, and had a closer look in the light of day.

It was indeed a jaw bone coming out the side, for the thing was the not-fully decomposed head of a very dead squirrel.  Using plastic bags, I cleaned up the skull, tracked Shasta’s movements from the prior night, and found the headless body of the squirrel.  The thought of it still gives me shudders.  Was the filth that streaked through Shasta’s fur yesterday morning in fact bits of dead squirrel? 

The body of the squirrel met the same fate as the skull.  But Dear Wife, watching from the deck, noticed a concerning problem: Shasta was still delighted with the scent of the ground that had recently been the final resting place of said squirrel.  The solution, we hoped, was a little bit of Lysol spray on the spot to mask the odor.  Imagine the absurdity of that: spraying Lysol on the grass!

So, that mystery was solved, and dealt with.  But we were left with another mystery, one which may never be solved: where did the squirrel come from?  Did Shasta catch and kill it, as she always threatens to do?  Or was it only random circumstance that had it meet the end of its days in our backyard?

Dogs Are Not Like Us

Don’t get me wrong: I love dogs.  As a general rule I sing their praises, even when they chew on the furniture or pee on the carpet.  Their positive qualities are numerous and well-documented: the absolute love and devotion they feel for their two-legged companions, their sublime snugglability, their silly, guffaw-inducing antics.  Dogs want desperately to be a part of our lives, and there’s just something about them that makes us (for values of “us” meaning “dog-lovers”) want to care for them.  For instance, whenever I remember that I need to spend a few minutes of my day working out (which for now consists mostly of a few sets of push-ups from time to time), Shasta thinks it’s a game, and wants to play along – which makes actually doing any push-ups more difficult than they otherwise would be.

But every once in a while, your dog just has to go and do something that indelibly reminds you that they are not like us.

Take their sense of smell, for instance.  Dogs have a phenomenal sense of smell, far superior to that of a human being.  This is a pretty well-known fact.  But have  you ever considered that a dog reacts to smell very differently from a human?  Humans are attracted to certain smells, like the smell of fresh-baked bread or the perfume of newly-bloomed flowers in spring or the smokey scent of a barbecue or the cleansing freshness of an afternoon rain.  But we’re also repulsed by certain smells, like the decay of trash and refuse and, well, dung.  (Sorry to burst those happy thoughts you had reading about the good smells.  Today’s entry is, after all, a study in contrast.)

Dogs don’t seem to think that way about smells.  They don’t seem to judge smells.  Smells are just different from one another, not always better or worse.  And some smells they seem to think are attractive are… well… not.  Case in point: my dog Shasta.

Shasta loves to find spots of ground, in the grass or dirt, that seem to have that particular eau de terre that she finds irresistable.  Then she loves to roll in it.  This is usually fine by me, because to my undiscerning human nose, she still smells like dog when she’s done and I’ve grown mostly used to that smell.

Yesterday morning, as I was letting her in from her morning backyard romp before I left for work, I immediately noticed that she must have rolled in something unusual: Clumps of brownish dirt streaked through her fur like a bad hair color job.  I took her towel to rub her down, and as I bent to over her to clean her off, I detected something else.  An odor.  An odor that was several orders of magnitude in the wrong direction.  It didn’t smell so much like her own excrement (I’ve picked up enough of her doggie doodoos to have a pretty good idea what that smells like), but it definitely had that spikey, pungent eau de toilette stench (by which I mean she smelled like crap, not perfume).

In the immortal words of Han Solo:

What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!

So Dear Wife and I put her on her leash, marched her out into the backyard, and proceeded to hose her down.  With a hose.

The poor girl was utterly humiliated.  I felt awful doing it, but what choice did we have?  I didn’t have time to give her a proper bath (I was already dressed and ready for work, remember) and she’s humiliated when she has to get those, too.  But I couldn’t simply let her have run of the house while she smelled like a septic leak.

Speaking of which, as I write this, of course, it is still the day of the incident.  Which means that when I get home yesterday from work (yesterday being the day I am writing this) my first mission will be to see if I can rediscover whatever smell it was Shasta discovered, and deal with it promptly so she cannot roll in it again.

And that, my friends, is your weekly dose of TMI.

The Great Houdini

No, not that one.  I mean my dog, Shasta, whom we shall henceforward refer to as Houdini, because she exhibits such skill.

Dear Wife spent some time working from home on Thursday.  Shasta (i.e. Houdini) loves days like this, because she can spend time outside, or come inside, and sometimes – sometimes – she can even weasel which ever of us stayed home with her into play a game of tug or fetch.  She enjoys spending time out doors, laying in the grass soaking up sun, or chasing squirrels, or sitting on the deck overlooking the yard like a queen. 

Midway through the day, Dear Wife noticed our incorrigible pup was barking at the UPS man… from the front yard!

Discovering that our canine companion had once again escaped the back yard is a bit disconcerting, and stressful to boot.  Yes, this is not the first time she’s exhibited her powers of prestidigitation and escapology.  It was probably about a month after she first joined our family that we discovered her first escape.  It was a Saturday morning, and I’d let her out into the back yard so she could take care of business while Dear Wife and I went back to sleep in just a little longer.  It wasn’t long later before a neighbor stopped by, knocking on our door.  She’d been walking her own dogs, and saw ours happily on her own way to the dog park.

We responded (first by thanking our neighbor) by looking through the back yard to figure out how she’d done it.  We came to the conclusion that at a point where our fenced met with a retaining wall that the wall was too low there.  So we bought (and Dear Wife assembled) an extra five-foot extension to the fence, so it would cover until the wall was another foot higher.  We reasoned that Shasta had trouble trying to get up on our bed, so anything taller than our bed would be tall enough to keep her in.

Months later, on a similar Saturday morning, we had a similar experience.  Except, rather than our neighbor bringing her back to us, she was just hanging out in the front yard and on the porch.  Another time she was running around in the neighbor’s back yard.  So, we added a bit of decorative fencing to the top of the retaining wall that separates the front yard from the back (which are at two different ground levels).  Now, it’s back to the drawing board again.

Inside the house, when she’s been left home alone during the work day, it’s been much the same.  Both Dear Wife and I would rather leave Shasta in Doggy Day Care of some kind, but we can’t really afford the extra expense.  So she spends her days in the kitchen, with her bed and a half dozen toys, a chewey stick, and a handful of doggie cookies.  The first few times we tried this with a wooden baby gate were… unsuccessful.  She chewed up the baby gate into kindling, and left scraps of some magazines and assorted other things all over the livingroom floor.  Later, we got a heavy, thick metal gate that screws into the door frame and bars like a jail cell.  It had a small cat door at the bottom.

Eventually, Shasta ate the latch off the cat door.  I came home to that one.  I don’t recall what, specifically, she tore up that day, I was just surprised by the cat door incident.  I saw it hanging open, with the rest of the gate still securely latched.  But she’s a 50-pound dog – something of a few sizes larger than your average house cat.  The cat door was half her size.  But there was the evidence, incontrovertible, that she had somehow gotten through it.  The mess she made ignored, I called her into the kitchen, closed and latched the gate, and left the cat door open.  I went into the living room, and called her out to me.  My jaw must have dropped as she slipped through the cat door with feline ease.   I watched it with my own eyes, and I still can’t quite explain how she did it.  So, we bought some chain to permanently seal the cat door.

Given the ability she exhibited in that particular incident… finding out how she’s escaping from the back yard this time is not going to be easy.  Any small gap between fence and ground that we don’t think she can fit through could be, in reality, just big enough.

So far we’ve been lucky, and she’s been pretty much unhurt every time she’s gotten out.  We don’t assume we’ll stay lucky like that forever.

Knowing how much Shasta breaking out puts gray in our hair, I can imagine what it’s going to be like when its our child on the line.

My Dog is Sensitive

Yeah, I’m posting this out of the regular schedule of daily 8:00 a.m.  That’s because I already have Thursday’s and Friday’s posts planned out.

A little background, first.  Our dog, Shasta, has grown increasingly needy and anxious as my wife’s pregnancy has progressed.  We’re certain she knows that something is changing, but doesn’t quite understand what.  We try to make sure we give her a lot of loving and hugging her and giving her affection so she knows she’s still loved, even if we spend a little extra time doting on Dear Wife’s belly, too.

Also, Shasta has always had a bit of a gas problem.  From the first day we brought her home from the animal shelter, we were driving along when we smelled something rather foul.  We looked at each other, and looked back at our new dog, and said to each other “What have we got ourselves into?”  Shasta’s always taken our gentle teasing about her problem pretty well.  I mean… she is a dog, and even though we learned she probably has a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words that she understands, we were pretty sure she couldn’t understand complex sentences in which we gently jibed her about the smells she shares with us.

So, last night, as is often the case, Shasta farted.  Not the first time, and not the first time we’ve groaned aloud at the smell.  But this time, Shasta’s ears drooped, and she started skulking away like we’d just scolded her.  We were pretty surprised, so I called her over to come sit on the couch in my lap.  Now, she’s a 50-pound dog who can easily jump straight onto the couch, but she’s always acted like climbing onto the couch is terribly difficult for her (we know it’s simply not true, because we’ve seen her jump onto it in a single bound to pursue a flying tennis ball).  This time was no different, except she farted again as she “struggled” onto the couch!  I groaned again, and made a typically snide remark about her farts.

I’d never offended her before, but this time, she jumped back down, skulked away, and hid behind the easy chair like I’d yelled at her!  I was so sad for her.  It took some coaxing to call her back, but we got her up on the couch (this time without her farting) and cuddled her and told her we loved her and we were sorry.  She seemed pretty satisfied with that, and her usual grin promptly returned.  All was forgiven.

And that’s that.  Other than to celebrate the posting of my 100th post on this blog (yeah me, and yeah consistency!), and my 1,000th hit!