Ruby-Doo Ascendant

So Ruby the Corgi Pup seems finally to have thrown off whatever was afflicting her with chronic doggy diarrhea. She’s  no longer squirting brown puddles all over every flat surface she encounters, and she’s gaining weight apace. The floors have been soaked with enzyme odor remover — I hope not to smell that lingering schmell the next time I walk in the front door — and all is quiet at the Funny Farm.

Uh, well…no. “Quiet” is probably not le mot  juste. Now that Ruby is feeling much, much better, she’s rising to full puppyhood. Where before she was a mild, well-behaved, and mostly silent little dog, now she has learned to pester and to BARK. Just now she’s driving Cassie nuts, which is good because it means she’s not driving me nuts. They’re chasing around the yard like rockets. Cassie knows, by instinct, that the way to control a kid is to run ’em!

With her newly discovered Voice, Ruby is also coming into her own as a watch-puppy. Holy mackerel, is that dog turning into a watch-puppy!

Last night my neighbor María called. I didn’t pick up the phone until the voicemail had started to record her, which meant (for those of you who have forgotten how land-lines speak to humans) the base phone and all six little walk-around phones flashed a reminder light. I forgot to delete that message, so the base phone in the room across the hall was still flashing when we all went to bed.

Four o’clock in the morning:  FRENZY FROM THE FOOT OF THE BED! The pup is growling — as in really growling, deep and fierce — and she’s on full alert, every muscle in her little body tense. Cassie is trying to sleep, leading me to think this is not very serious. But the pup will not be calmed.

Finally I realize she can see the light flashing in the other room. Dunno what she thinks it is, but apparently she’s never noticed it before. To quiet her down, I had to pick her up off the bed, carry her across the hall, let her inspect the flashing phone, and erase the damn message to make it quit nagging.

Within the next day or two, I need to wean her off the “bland diet” of hamburger and rice with the daily vitamin pill supplement. I’m thinking it would be good to start by adding a teaspoonful or so of yogurt to her food, by way of jacking up the calcium content — beef and rice are devoid of calcium, and a growing pup needs that for bone health. The vitamins have a dose of the stuff, of course, but I’d rather rely on real food than on pills by way of nourishment.

Cassie needs some more fiber in her diet just now, and so whenever I get out of class, come back and check on the cleaning lady (yes…today is CL Day), and check the e-mail, it’ll be off to Sprouts to pick up some butternut squash and yams.  So those can be the first additions, too, to Ruby’s expanding diet. Want to try one item at a time, to ascertain whether any one ingredient makes her sick.

In my experience, when a dog eats real food (meat, starch, and dog-friendly veggies) it does not experience the intestinal upset that happens when you switch commercial foods. Cassie can eat virtually anything and switches between chicken, beef, pork, and turkey without a problem. The same was true of the German shepherd and the greyhound, both of which, before I discovered real food, would get violent diarrhea anytime I had to change commercial brands.

I suspect this was the case with Ruby, too. She got switched among a  half-dozen dog foods as she came off the prescription diet and I tried to find a similar canned food that would sustain her without bankrupting me. I should’ve been a little more confident — or, shall we say, a great deal more resistant to Big Pet Industry’s propaganda — and simply have gone directly to meals of real food.

Also I would like to get rid of the space-eating X-pen in the family room. Ruby no longer needs to be penned up when I’m gone — she’s fully housebroken, and she’s not inclined to eat the furniture, ô mirabilis! But just now it serves the purpose of keeping her from raiding Cassie’s food dish during the dinner hour. All she has to do is look crooked at Cassie, and Cassie will back away from her food. So I’ve been feeding Ruby inside her X-pen and Cassie in the kitchen.

Dawned on me that I could set Ruby’s food outside the back door and close the security door while they eat, at least in the mornings. On a 110-degree day, of course, it’s too hot to banish her to the porch for noon and evening meals, but the mornings are plenty cool enough.

The crafts room and the storage room are both barricaded off with step-over baby gates, thereby reducing the number of square feet for Ruby to pee and poop on. Those gates could go away, I think, now that she’s house-trained. But just now Petsmart has a hinged gate on sale. I’m thinking to replace one of those inconvenient stationery gates with a gate that opens and closes, and then Ruby could go in a back room to eat, until such time as she learns not to bully Cassie. That, of course, may be never…but kulawahed. With a gate that the pup doesn’t have to be lifted over and that won’t trip me and land me face-first on the floor, I can feed them separately for as long as both dogs are living.

How exactly these animals are going to be dealt with when I’m convalescing from surgery remains to be seen. The appointed date is a Thursday, and my son is going to take off a day or two to watch out over me. So if he’s here on Friday, he can feed the dogs and pick up and refill the heavy water dishes. Maybe he can help on the weekend, too. But after that: ?????

Oh well. More pressing matters await: to wit, it’s time to get ready to go to class.

Only two more days of class left! Thank goodness.