Pets

Ohhhh…so cute!

(Click on the image for the full dose of cuteness.)

We’ve found the newspaper recycling basket, and we think it’s an extremely cool place to hang out. Adorable, eh?

Right now she’s harassing Her Stratospheric Majesty, who in spite of an occasional testy moment is amazingly patient with the little pest. They’re having a horrible fake “fight” just this minute, very funny.

Since we switched to the new feed recommended by the holistic vet we tracked down, Pup has begun to put on substance. She was pretty frail, being the runt of the litter, much tinier than her little brothers and sisters and really very delicate. She’s now developing some vigor and spunk, and she’s utterly unafraid of the Queen of the Universe and Empress of All Time, Space, and Eternity. She’ll call the Royal Bluff at the drop of a growl.

After she damn near drowned in the pool…omg! Did I report that here? I’ve got another site on a Corgi board where most of the puppy antic stories are going.

Well, the other day we’re sitting out there and pup is roaming around the yard. I look up and see she’s managed to weasel her way through the barricade I put up to keep Charley the Golden Retriever away from the shrubbery-clogged deep end of the pool. Uh oh…there’s a reason I don’t want the dogs down there.

I slip off my shoes and start to walk around the shallow end toward her, hoping to call her to me before she can fall in — she’s now toddling along the very, very narrow strip of Kool-Dek on the far side of the pool. Too goddamn late. Before I can reach her, she topples into the drink!

She’s now as far from me as she can get and floundering in the very deepest part of the pool — which is 8 or 10 feet deep, farther down than I can swim.

I run around the shallow end to reach the deep end and throw myself in, fully clothed. My foot slips as I jump and I land in the water with a belly-flop, creating a tsunami that swamps the puppy. She starts to go down. I manage to get to her just as she’s getting one helluva snootful, grab her by the leg, and lift her head above the water.

We make it out of the drink. I’m shivering. She’s shivering. Bluejeans are very heavy when they’re wet.

I wrap her in a kitchen towel long enough to pull off the soggy clothes. Then run her to the bathroom, wrap her in a bath towel, pull a space heater out of a closet and plug it in, and wipe her dry in front of the thing.

This, as it develops, is not very difficult: puppy coats are not what you’d call very substantial.

Luckily, the water is not very cold — weather has been in the high 80s and really, a person could go swimming right now, if a person were brave enough or stupid enough.

Now on an endless QV, I realized another Animal Barricade Contraption was needed. Hence, the following:

This contraption is built from three-foot lengths of (relatively) inexpensive garden border fencelets, made of wood. They’re flipped upside-down and strapped together with UV-resistant plastic zip-ties, and then roped to the patio upright, a chair, and the metal bordering around the poolside flowerbed. Cost is nominal, especially compared to the metal equivalent. They’re low enough that I can step over them without risking disaster, but high enough that neither dog is willing to try jumping over them.

Heh. My house: Home of the Eccentric Innovation.

Anyway, Pup is OK. She’s going strong, except for having been set back a bit in her house-training project. She’s reverted to Stealth Peeing, a strategy at which she is very, very effective. I didn’t know it was possible to pee by mental telepathy. This dog can be on one end of a room and cause a puddle to materialize all the way over on the other end of the room. It’s weird.

She’s in love with her new Rope Toy: carries it everyplace she goes. Problem is, it’s almost as big as she is!

Cassie and the new sidekick:

Loses!

heh heh heh heh heh… I believe I recall reciting this ancient bit of wisdom myself, not so long ago.

Kitty-cat

Cougar-cat

By the way, you might ask, how did the fortification of the Funny Farm’s ramparts work?

Not well. The cat won. Again.

{sigh}

Cassie and I are out there trundling around the yard the other day, an extremely lovely day, and what should we see but Other Daughter’s big, fat orange tabby strolling up the far side of the pool. She is not fazed by the presence of the savage corgi. She is not fazed by the presence of the hostile human. The Enemy, in other words, makes her no never-mind. She ambles down to the far end, takes up a position under the Texas sage, lays herself down, stretches out luxuriously, and relaxes.

Cassie ignores her. I give up.

It is not possible to win against a cat.

Actually, it could be “Corgi game and set.” If there was ever any question that corgi puppies outsmart Ger-shep pups, that one’s now answered. We already knew Ger-sheps are smarter than humans, so no such question has never arisen regarding the ape IQ.

Oh, you should have been there for this morning’s trip to the vet! Make that “attempted trip…”

Three of the four captains’ chairs designed for use as passenger seats in the Dog Chariot reside in a garage cabinet. I took them out and stored them years ago, when the vehicle was hauling two 90-pound dogs around. Then came the run-up in fuel prices that accompanied the crash of You-Know-Who’s economy; at that point I decided not to put the seats back in, since I never carry more than two guests anyway and since the absence of three heavy seats would lighten the load by about 150 to 180 pounds. This means the back of the Chariot resembles a bowling alley.

Cassie habitually sits all the way in the back, up against the back gate. The space between the two front seats is jammed tightly with a plastic Kleenex box and a small basket holding bits and pieces of stuff I like to have while on the road — hand cream, sunblock, lip balm, pen and paper, business cards, and the like.

This morning, when Pup is supposed to show up at the vet for her first check and her current set of puppy shots, in she goes, into the back of the car.

It’s a 20- or 30-minute drive to the preferred veterinary (i.e., the veterinarian who meets our desiderata: a) cheap; b) not inclined to overtreat; c) commonsensical). To get there, I have to exit the neighborhood from a feeder street onto an east-west main drag; navigate through heavy traffic to a freeway; dodge my fellow homicidal drivers to reach Thunderbird Road; and cruise east about halfway to Scottsdale.

Fine.

I turn onto East-West Drag and just get settled in my traveling lane when

At my back I do hear
Pup’s squeaky voice whining near…

At my elbow, actually. She has climbed into the junk basket and is stuck.

Grab her by the scruff of the neck, place her back behind the seats, and pull an old cardboard box over to block ingress to the basket.

Twenty seconds later, she’s inside the box, out of the box, and caught between the outside of the junk basket and the front passenger seat.

Holy sh!t.

Hit the emergency blinkers, cut off one of my fellow homicidal drivers, and veer into the neighborhood to the south.

Free the dog from her pickle. Fortify the barricade. Make a U-ie and pull back into the morning traffic.

Now the whine is coming from the region of the other elbow. Dodging a murderous fellow driver, I glance down and…uhm…

Well, you know those plastic door pockets that used to be called map holders? This car has one of those. It holds a mini-umbrella, a hair brush, and…a puppy.

For godsake, she’s inside the map pocket!

HOW???????

Nevvermind. There she is.

Emergency blinkers again. At least this time I’m not in the center lane, so I don’t have to threaten mayhem to get over.

With some difficulty, free pup from automobile interior. Throw jumper cables out of the Rubbermaid crate in back of vehicle. Line crate with emergency bath towel (don’t ask). Place pup inside crate.

Back on the road. Running late. Outa my way, ya crazy fools! This would be why we own a six-banger.

Pup squalls. She doesn’t like being confined, especially not in a plastic box. Squalling stops forthwith. Whining restarts. Pup is out of the box and back in the junk basket!

Realize I yam not going to make it to the vet’s by 10 a.m. In fact, realize I’m not gonna make it anywhere with this beast unless I have a carrying crate, something that I’ve never needed before.

German shepherd and golden retriever pups are too large to squeeze through mouse-size openings.

Holding wriggly Pup on my lap, I wend my way suicidally back to the house. Call the vet: tell them there’s no way I can get the pup to their place until I can run over to PetSmart or Petco and pick up a dog crate. Their front office staff, having heard it all (no doubt), is equanimous: no problem…let’s make it tomorrow morning, same time.

Wring pup out in the back yard again; place her in her bedroom crate and flee the house, avoiding the “I told you so” look on the Queen’s haughty face.

I had already decided to buy a thing called an “X-pen,” which I’d heard about at the corgi forum. Turns out this is short for “exercise pen”: a sort of portable playpen for dogs. Someone there had remarked about what a great tool this thing is for house-training.

Well…let me put it this way: it’s 1:59 p.m. as I scribble. The washer and dryer have been going since 5:30 a.m. Pup has peed on towels inside her crate, on throw rugs, on more towels, on more throw rugs, and on and on. Plus of course the lifetime supply of blue-jeans needed to be laundered, so I can’t blame it all on the dog. At any rate, this little gal is all over the place.

Though she’s doing pretty well at training the human to take her out and let her empty herself out, she’s still too little to last longer than an hour or two. And she had a little doggy-wobbles earlier in the day, causing her to make a colorful mess in her crate and then to have to be washed in the bathtub, which then had to be cleaned. And of course this meant she needed another towel for drying. And when she’s awake, she is a very active little lady.

This morning the Big Kahuna Client sent another project, with “I hope this can be done at the earliest.” (Well. No, boss. I’ve spent the entire damn day running from pillar to post and cleaning up pee and poop.) At any rate, no matter what I’m working on, it requires blocks of uninterrupted time, and I tend to become so absorbed in the work that I don’t notice the quiet padding of little puppy feet. When she’s sleeping nearby, she tends to come so close to the rocking chair I’m afraid of pinching a foot. When she’s up, she’s really up…and like any electronics-infested dwelling, this place is festooned with electric cords. Many other hazards, not the least of which is the Queen of the Universe herself, abound.

Soon as I saw a photo of an X-pen at Amazon, I realized this was what was needed to keep pup safe whenever I can’t give her my complete, undivided attention. Didn’t want to wait for one to be shipped, so figured to go to one of the chain pet stores on the way home from the vet.

So it was up to the Petco across the road from the Ghost Mall, where I picked up the desired hardware for an almost reasonable price, plus a rope pull-toy and a kind of geodesic dome of a ball that Pup may be able to grab and carry around (Cassie’s tennis balls are too big for her little jaws). From there, up the freeway to Costco, there to get a package of bully sticks…with any luck, she’ll find these preferable to human flesh for chewing purposes. Also picked up an inexpensive bathroom mat for the pen, upon which the little dog is conked out as we scribble.

The puppy playpen is SO handy and dandy, I’m thinking of getting a second one. Though it’s easy to fold up and carry around, I suspect it could be convenient to have one on the back patio, where just now I would like to be working (it’s a preternaturally gorgeous day out there). She loves to toddle around the backyard…and she makes a beeline for every hazard in sight: the potentially poisonous plants (yum!), the frantically busy honeybees presently swarming the citrus blossoms, the delicious rocks on which one can break one’s teeth and block one’s intestine. She hasn’t even noticed the pool yet. But she’s so little that if she fell in while my back was turned, I might not hear the splash. Another X-pen would keep her safe when I’m working in the yard or absorbed in the laptop.

Speaking of absorbed in laptops, I suppose the client expects that I’m going to return his 255 single-spaced pages sometime in the next few hours. And so, to work…

(Click on the images for bigger & better views.)

Pup has about worn herself out inspecting Her Majesty’s realm. Cassie’s endless barking (the cause, after all, of her relegation to the dog pound) is a bit of a distraction — Pup doesn’t know what to make of it. Sometimes, neither do I.

She’s baptized the floor four times, but managed to pee outside once(!). She did poop outside…probably because the human has an undue interest in standing around outdoors after puppies have eaten.

🙂 I do love all-tile flooring.

She and Cassie managed to eat in the same room with no competition (Cassie has to be fed in another room when Charley is here; otherwise he’ll grab her food). The only bad blood that’s arisen has been over a couple of Greenies I put down (for the uninitiated, a “greenie” is a chew toy that allegedly cleans dogs’ teeth). Dogs can’t really grasp the concept of “hers” and “mine.” In the dog mind, apparently, it’s all “MINE!”

Had to take those away. Cassie’s is still grumpy and growling, though I think she’s getting over it.

She’s such a LITTLE pup that it wouldn’t take much grumpiness on Cassie’s part to inflict some damage. And I’m not sure how much exercise an eight-week-old corgi needs. She’s pretty darned energetic. Races and races and races and races and snoozes briefly and springs up and races and races…. Cassie’s not inclined to play much — she prefers to save her energy for barking — and so it falls to the human to keep this small beastie amused.

And right now with the puppy quiescent, I think I should stick her in her crate and take Cassie for a doggie walk, by way of soothing The Royal Nerves.