Easter 2022

 

Happy Easter to All My Friends!

Watch out for those candy bearing, egg hiding, carrot munching, stupid fluffy tailed bunnies gallivanting willy-nilly like all over town.

Happy National Pet Day!

This year I, along with the rest of my fellow Administrative Assistants (yes, even the cats), were recognized as valued members of the library team on National Pet Day.  That’s me in the fourth image, by the way, along with Harry the Horrified Hammy (Sister’s Junior Administrative Assistant).  Given the amount of deals I’ve helped Sister land over the last two years (she thinks she’s responsible, but let’s face it, her vendors are always asking about me, not her), it’s about time I received some recognition.

The Great Banana Caper

Sister is mean.  Sure, she was instrumental in me being allowed to lounge on the couch and she’s very generous when it comes to buying me new toys and fixing my old ones, but when it comes to food and sharing, she can be downright cruel.

Waiting for Ice Cream

We have a very simple rule in my house: if you are snacking on something that I like (and what don’t I like?), you are obliged to share it with me.  If you’re eating popcorn, I expect some popcorn to rain down on me.  If you sneak a piece of cheese, I expect to get a sampling of it.  Same goes with apples, peanuts, crackers, oranges, bananas, and ice cream.  It’s simple--if you eat the dog eats.

Sister has been known to try to bypass this rule in the past, usually unsuccessfully.  She’s particularly fond of the head fake where she pretends to walk a snack from the kitchen to the living room by way of the dining room while I, predicting her destination, scurry from the kitchen into the living room via the hallway only to find myself totally alone.  Eventually I circle back to Sister still in the kitchen and force her to share, but it’s a lot of unnecessary work.

Well last week, Sister did something horrible--something unforgivable.  Sister succeeded in cheating me out of a piece of banana.

It started innocently enough. Pa offered to take me outside to do some business and I graciously obliged.  There was no reason for me to suspect that something nefarious was about to happen and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bark at invisible entities just beyond my front gate.  Getting up, I headed for the door, leaving Sister sitting in her chair in the living room.

As soon as I walked back into the house, I could smell it; someone was eating a banana.  Quickly, I scurried into the living room and came to a screeching halt in front of Sister, still sitting in her chair, ready to assume my begging position.  But despite the fact that the aroma was strongest by her, Sister wasn’t eating anything.  I turned toward Pa’s chair thinking maybe the banana was there.  It wasn’t.  Frantically, I turned back to Sister and started snuffling along the top of the side table to her right.  No banana.  Beside myself with panic, I checked my pillow to see if maybe the banana smell was coming from a Kong waiting for me there (sometimes Ma does that, she sets up a Kong for me when my back is turned).  But there was nothing.  By this time, I was completely and totally frantic--my head whipping back and forth with my nose up in the air trying to find the source of the smell.

There was something else I noticed, though.  Sister was laughing hysterically which I’ve learned over the years is not a good thing.

Turns out, as soon as I stepped outside, Sister jumped up, grabbed a banana, and quickly ate it with the intention of consuming it entirely in my absence so that she wouldn’t have to share it with me.  To my great satisfaction, Sister was yelled at for being so mean to me and apparently felt so bad in the end that she even broke down and retrieved a second banana which she shared a majority of with me.

Did that banana make up for the trauma I underwent?  No, but it was tasty.

A Good Walk Gone Bad

Some days it’s just not worth putting on one’s collar and leash.

But first, a fashion update.  Because of my sensitive back and neck (I recently had a flare-up which left me limping piteously until a visit to Doc. Petermanm resulted in a week of pain meds), Pa bought me a harness to use rather than a collar on our walks.  I rather like my new harness despite the fact that I was wearing it upside down for my first outing (the part that rests on my back was on my chest and vice versa…it was a tad awkward but luckily I didn’t run into any other dogs to make fun of me) and my family frequently suggests that I be carried around like a suitcase using the handle running along the part on my upper back.

But despite being dressed to the nines, my second walk using my new harness was less than ideal.

When we’re out east, Pa and I enjoy taking frequent quick jaunts up and down the street.  We immediately hang a right out of the driveway and scoot across the street to do some business.  We then walk one house north then switch sides of the street again to leave a message at Flo’s house (Flo is the Golden Retriever who lives two houses down the street).   After that, I pull unsuccessfully toward a wooded area that I’m not allowed to explore due to the threat of ticks, then cut across the street again to sniff the plastic yellow figure holding a flag that reads “children at play” (this was my arch nemesis for the longest time, but now we’re cool).   Once the yellow figure is deemed not dangerous, we turn around and repeat the aforementioned route in reverse before returning home to take a much-deserved nap.   It’s a nice route--short but filled with lots of interesting places to sniff and sometimes I even get Flo in trouble when she starts barking at me from within her house.

But last Saturday, this nice little route became painful.  As I sniffed along Flo’s property line, I suddenly jumped back as if I had come across something nasty like a bug or something that smelled so bad even I didn’t want to roll in it.  After lurching backward, I started limping forward.   This is when Pa got involved.   He knelt down next to me and found, in my front right paw, a giant thorn sticking out from between the pads.

Launching into doctor mode, Pa quickly pulled the thorn out of my paw at which point I found that I could comfortably walk on it again.  And walk I did--straight home.  There was no sniffing around or leaving additional messages.   I wanted to go home and I was not wasting any time getting there.

A cookie, some sympathetic attention from Ma and Sister, and one nap later, I felt much better and hardly traumatized.   In fact, I was feeling so much better about the whole situation that I was even willing to go with Pa on another walk (though I steered clear of Flo’s house just in case).

St. Patrick’s Day 2022

 

 

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Sister and me!

(I'm on the right)

Proof of Life Squeak

Plush toys are my toy of choice.  I’m not a huge fan of bones (you don’t get anywhere with hard bones), rubbery squeaky toys are no match for my large gnashing teeth (they pop like balloons and are not repairable), and I’m not allowed to have rope toys.  Plush toys, however, are soft, and squeaky, and perhaps best of all, satisfyingly destructible.  And oh boy am I tough on them.  Here’s just how tough:

• Every night, at least one toy is taken away from me because I’ve started ripping the stuffing out of it.  On a good night, four toys are taken away.
• I know the terms “no plucking” (ripping with my front teeth) and “no back teeth” (sawing through toy fabric using my back teeth), but choose to ignore both. 
• Not a single one of my toys has all the limbs it started with. 
• There’s an entire closet floor in my house dedicated to the storage of toys in need of an operation in the doll hospital and the area outside that closet is a holding zone for toys that are in imminent danger of needing a trip to the hospital (toys that were taken away from me not because they had a hole but because I was fixated on making one).
  

But despite the destructive nature of my play, I’ve learned ways of prolonging the inevitable moment when my family realizes what I’m up to and takes away my victim before I’ve shredded it to the point of no return. It’s called the “Proof of Life Squeak.” 

As I furiously pick and rip my way through a weak spot in the toy, I keep my ears tuned to any sound of my family showing interest in what I’m doing (usual warnings include the issuing of the dreaded “is he being good?” question and the creak of a chair as the occupant bends over to check on me).  As soon as this warning is issued, I stop my ripping, grab the entire toy in my mouth, and give it a good squeeze so that the squeaker (I’m always careful not to kill the squeaker) cries out.

It works every time.  Because the squeaker is usually in the middle of the toy, my family naively assumes that if they hear squeaking I can’t possibly be ripping or gnawing on a seam.  Once the heat is off and my family resumes whatever they were doing prior to checking on me, I go back to my destructive ways.

Eventually, my family catches on and all the “Proof of Life Squeaks” in the world won’t prevent them from noticing either the loud ripping sound or the pile of stuffing littering the ground.  They toy is immediately transported to the doll hospital and I move on to a new one.  The process begins again.

Released from the Doll Hospital

This weekend, Sister took the time to operate on all the toys in the doll hospital.  Holes were stitched closed, limbs were amputated, squeakers removed, and stuffing was either pulled out or stuffed back in depending on the situation.

Look at all those grateful terrified button eyes, staring back blankly from the recovery couch.  It's like they all secretly know that their time outside the hospital will be short.  I wonder how they know?

PS:  I have personally seen to it that three patients have already been readmitted to the hospital.