Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

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  • Finally Friday

    It’s been a tough week in the dog world. Not my own dogs, they are fine.

    In the rescue world, things have been a bit rough. It is difficult. It is worth it, but difficult. I try to focus on the worth it part, but some days are harder than others.

    What else is up? It has been warm, and almost all the snow is gone. The backyard is a complete and total swamp. I don’t want Indy and Watson to run around back there, because that is a disaster.

    Indy got her bloodwork results back. She is in really good shape for her age. Good enough that she was cleared for dental surgery. So, that is where she is today. I am nervous about it, not so much because I fear something will happen during surgery (although, of course I will be anxiously awaiting the call that says all is well). I am mostly nervous about starting some kind of chain reaction.

    I give Watson things that are meant to be chews that last a while, and he quickly consumes them. Back to the chew shopping. Apparently, I have another power chewer. I’m not surprised in the overall scheme of things, but I am a bit surprised to have this issue at 12 weeks with the items I’ve been offering him.

    This weeks puppy class was again good, but Watson got less play time in because the other pups there were so small, and he was a bit of a bull in a china shop. Still a great learning experience for him, but it burned less physical energy. Luckily, I have a play date scheduled for Saturday with some big dogs.

    My mother is back for another visit, to help me with some things and mostly to help me with Watson while I get stuff checked off my To Do list. The timing for adopting a puppy was less than excellent, so part of how we came to the conclusion we could manage it anyway, came from her willingness to come back to help. Watson clearly recognized her when she walked it the door. It was so adorable. He likes people in general and is always excited to see new people, but he was just beside himself with sheer wiggly waggy puppy happiness to see the woman who bottle fed him so many meals. We didn’t know whether he would recognize her, but he did.

    I might have created a twitter account for Watson. Great. I’m becoming one of THOSE people.

  • Elementary

    I am feeling supremely unmotivated to blog, for a wide variety of reasons. It seems this would lead to not blogging, and yet there is a part of me nagging me to blog anyway. As if I need internal arguments to help make life more aggravating.

    Puppy class went well. I chose the class based on location, schedule, and the fact I hadn’t heard anything bad about the place. I am very pleased that happenstance led us there. I think they have a good program.

    The biggest challenge I am currently facing with Watson is housebreaking. This is no surprise, since at this age, that is the biggest challenge for most families raising puppies. What is slightly different, for me, is the nature of the challenge I am facing. Overall, he is doing pretty well. Now, mind you, I believe that training the average dog is 60% training the humans, and 40% training the dog. We are all doing okay. The problem I am encountering is one I’ve never had before. It isn’t a full blown problem yet, just one I see looming. Developing a substrate preference is a big part of successful or difficult housebreaking, and Watson has definitely formed a substrate preference. Unfortunately, his preferred substrate is vanishing a bit more with each passing day.

    Yep. He is strongly inclined to potty on snow. This makes sense. His early “go potty” “good dog” training has all been on snow, since the whole yard was snow. As the snow is shrinking away, he is clearly moving away from the areas where he used to go to the bathroom, and going where there is still snow. Yes, I know how to work on this, but any further challenge during this particular time in house training is annoying, even when you know how to address it, and that it must be addressed.

    He remains adorable.

    Introducing Watson
    Handsome Boy

  • Blah Blah Blah Weather, Blah Blah Blah Dogs

    I’m afraid winter is over. I really dislike spring here, at least early spring. I am expecting this one to be particularly unpleasant, since we had record breaking snowfall this winter. Things turn into such a gross, shoe sucking, muddy mess. Flooding closes some bridges and fucks up traffic. I have to clean muddy paw prints off of the floor daily, and there are still muddy paw prints on the floor. Yes, little pretty hints of greens start to appear, but all surrounded by dirty. The streets are gross from the salt and gravel dumped on them all winter. Basically I find it all very esthetically unpleasant and generally tiresome. If I didn’t have dogs, it wouldn’t probably bother me less.

    The "creek" in our backyard.

    This photo is taken from my living room window. That “creek” is from the sump pump working overtime to keep our basement from flooding. The non-snow area down at the base of the trees is the low spot in the yard. It is a complete swamp. It is gross and dirty, but hey, at least it doesn’t have mosquitoes growing in it… yet. That comes later.

    Our snow last week was so amazing. Not just a few dumb flakes, but a real full on snowfall, that accumulated a good six inches, more in some areas. I was so happy to see it falling, as I had already begun to fear that there would be no more snow. The day was pretty warm, and I spent a lot of time playing out in the snow with Indy and Watson. It was a very good day for Indy. I do my best to take the time to really enjoy and appreciate her good days. Overall, she is in amazing shape considering her age, but most of her days are just… days. Hey, I am glad they are not bad days. Still, the good days are very special, and she clearly loves winter, the cold appears to ease some of the inflammations that slow her down.

    There are a couple upcoming predicted snow falls, but I don’t expect them to be significant. The days are warm enough it will probably only happen at night, although if enough is falling, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to take Indy out.

    Indy went to see the vet this week, which was a bit of a fail, so I have no real news to report. Just before I arrived, some yahoo ran their car into a transformer box thing and took out all the power in the area. Indy couldn’t even be weighed, much less have blood tested. The vet looked at her in the lobby, because the exam rooms didn’t have any light. Clearly, we’ll need to follow up to get a better picture of her health. Her eyes are still in pretty good shape, no sign of glaucoma or cataracts. She does have nuclear sclerosis, which she has had for a while. The vet mentioned that her night vision probably wasn’t as good, which I agreed with immediately. We’ve actually been leaving a light on for her at night for the past 10 months or so after noticing that her confidence walking around in the dark seemed to be fading.

    To continue the fail of vet visit day, my planned trip to take her in for grooming and a “you wash” kind of place was derailed because the place had to close early for some repairs. We’ll try again on Monday.

    Tonight Watson goes to his first puppy kindergarten class. I’m very comfortable with puppy raising and dog training, but group classes are a really good way to make sure they learn to behave with distractions. It is cheaper to go do self training sessions at a dog park, but have you seen the way some people (and therefor their dogs) behave at dog parks? Ugh. At least at a group class there is a minimum of one human per dog, plus an instructor, and there is some vague sense that everyone there is hoping for a well behaved dog. I’ll be letting the kid take the class with Watson, as she was very young the last time we raised a puppy. It will be good for her (and Watson) if she is much more involved with his training.

  • Happy Tails

    Our Fosters from Ms Tori on Vimeo.

  • Eleven

    Apparently I could only make it to number 11 before having a failed foster.

    Welcome to the family, baby boy.

    I think we’ll be calling him Watson.

  • Sitting and Thinking

    So, yesterday I teased that I had other news that was too big to just tack on the bottom of that post.

    It wasn’t really a sweeps week “to be continued” type of tease. I just have all this shit on my mind, but my mind hasn’t finished chewing on it yet. I know some of what it means, but I don’t know all of what it means.

    So, here you get a little glimpse into my life, mid thought process.

    I am typing this while sitting at the dining room table. At my feet, Indy is asleep. This is usual. She is asleep at my feet a large portion of the time that I am on my computer.

    Far less usual, and quite unexpectedly, there is a puppy asleep at my feet too.

    Webster.

    Webster is back. For reasons which are totally understandable, and I agree with and support, but are not my reasons to tell. The family who had hoped to adopt Webster, has decided it isn’t what is best for him. He was with them for a week and they all had a wonderful time, but they came to a very difficult decision. They are doing what they think is best for the dog, which I totally respect.

    He left on a Sunday, and came back on the following Sunday. They were willing to foster him, but I wanted him back. I put this much in. I’d like to see it through to all three orphans finding their forever homes.

    It is time to figure out what “I might have wanted to keep him” means, now that it is an option.

    I am certain there are other families out there who would love him just as much as we do. I am certain there are no other families out there who would love him more. I knew both of those things about Bear too. There is more to it than that, as I so difficultly had to stand by when letting Bear leave. I must ask myself, “Is there somebody that is better for him due to practical life circumstances?” and “How exactly does he impact the lives of the pets we are already committed to?” Most of all, I need to make sure that I don’t let the pangs of regret I feel for “having” to let Bear go, allow me to lie to myself about these answers. It would be easy to trick myself, just so that I can avoid a difficult goodbye.

    That is where I am at today, with a puppy curled up at my feet, right next to Indy.

  • I’m A Winner!

    Now that I feel a bit like Stuart Smalley, made all the more creepy by the fact he is my senator now…

    A cool email arrived in my inbox today, letting me know that I won a 3 month subscription to an earrings of the month club.  The earrings are handcrafted by the lovely and talented woman who blogs at Honey & Ollie, and the prize was courtesy of a contest held by Simply Rebecca.

    I’m really excited about the prize because I would have LOVED to have bought a subscription for myself, but am in $ saving mode right now, and could not justify treating myself to that at this time.

    In other news, check out Zoie’s post featuring pictures that she took of Mindy.  In a way, it isn’t “other news” because, while the contest was decided by a random number generator, my comment which randomly won was about my newest friend, whom I met because of the fostering.

    In other, other, news…

    No, that really deserves its own post.

    Apparently, along with being a winner, I am also a tease today.

  • In the Middle Was Webster

    One of the rescue founders took an immediate liking to Webster, so when he arrived at my house, he already had a hold placed on him, and he never went up on petfinder.

    In the first couple of days I was more focused on Mindy, and then Darby when she got back from the vet. Webster was the easy one, not that anything about it was actually easy, but in comparison, the one that ate easily was definitely a bit less stressful.

    A few more days in, and their personalities started to peek out, and he was the first one to wag just because he saw me. My heart melted. He got bigger and odder looking, with a head shape that spoke of a touch of something else thrown into the mix besides the screaming signs of GSD and Husky. He was adventurous like Darby, but less independent. He was very snuggly like Mindy, but more independent.

    I’m kind of crazy about him.

    I might have wanted to keep him. I don’t really know. I can’t really know, because I didn’t have the option. Wanting something when you can’t have it, is a different thing. I know I didn’t want him because somebody else wanted him, that just isn’t one of my triggers. I might have accidentally gotten too attached though because he was already spoken for. He was safe. Since I didn’t have to worry about accidentally keeping him, I might not have put up the proper “not my dog” barriers that I’ve always worked to maintain with the others. When they have nobody the urge to keep them all is definitely there. A dog without a family makes me feel so sad for the dog.

    However it happened, it happened. I felt like, if I could keep him, maybe I would. Indy liked him. She was tolerant of all of them, but he was the only one she ever tried to engage with. I was pretty sure that he could be raised to continue being great with the cats, since he was so young (Bear and Xander had a problem with each other). Also, really, this was just unique. I had bottle fed these little guys and gotten up every 20 minutes to deal with all the poo. Somewhere in all that, apparently too much oxytocin was releasing, because I felt intensely maternal about this set of fosters.

    So, Webster left on Sunday, a day later than planned because of a vaccine side effect.  Several days after Darby left the orphanage, and one day before we sent Mindy off on a plane.

    I cried.

    I cried for London

    and Bear

    and I just cried.

  • Mindy’s New Friend

    Mindy finds out that her family got another puppy for her to play with.

  • And Then There Were None

    Do you hear that?

    The house is so quiet.

    It makes me feel anxious, because I haven’t done anything for the puppies lately, so they should be noisily complaining, and the silence leaves me with a repetitive flutter in my gut that something is wrong.

    Yesterday, I dropped my daughter off at a class and came home for an hour and a half of couch potato-ing before needing to pick her up again.  It was the first time I’ve been alone in the house without any other people since January 10th. Holy crap, that is a lot of people time for somebody like me. I couldn’t swim in the silence because of the feelings of puppy anxiety.

    Time for life to return to some value of normal. Whatever that means.

    Darby went home on Wednesday. On Thursday Mindy got sick. I called the vet and described the symptoms and she told me she was having a reaction to one of the vaccines. The vet came during her lunch hour to bring me some medicine for Mindy and an hour after she left Webster had symptoms too. On Saturday the call came from Darby’s family that she’d been sick for two days.

    The vet was not pleased, and called the manufacturer and is returning this particular batch. They were not violently ill, and are going to be fine, but it was frustrating and inconvenient, at the very least. Nothing like taking three totally healthy happy little puppies and making them all sick while trying to prevent them from getting sick to raise my stress level a bit.

    Webster was supposed to go home Saturday, but he ended up staying until Sunday so the vet could take a last look at him. I thought Mindy was going home on Sunday, but that was due to a typo (not mine) so she actually left yesterday.

    I guess the big happy news is that Mindy went to live in California. This is a long story.

    On July 13th, 1997, I met a family of three, and they rapidly became a very important part of my life. The female portion (D) of that trio has been mentioned in the past, for example, here and here. Their family of three turned into a family of 5 over the years. The three children have been asking for a dog, because that is what children do. D is not a dog person. She didn’t dislike dogs. She has taken care of my dogs for me when I needed it, and taken care of other people’s dogs, but she didn’t have any desire for her own dog.

    The kids swore that if they got a dog they would take care of EVERYTHING and D wouldn’t have to do anything. Right. Sure.

    Back in December my friend who took Ellie was going on vacation. She arranged for a petsitter to come and stay at her house to take care of her three dogs, but as the vacation approached, we realized that Ellie still wasn’t getting along well enough with one of her other dogs to make that a good idea. Trusting a pet sitter to deal with that kind of dynamic just wasn’t reasonable. However, the boarding situations available really were not ideal for Ellie. So, I asked D if she’d be willing to take Ellie in for a couple of weeks (paid, of course).

    D agreed. For one thing, Ellie needed it, and for another, we had a plan. She would assign the kids to take care of Ellie, with the promise of all that money at the end. The kids would not take care of Ellie, D would do it all and keep the money, then the next time the kids said “we’ll take care of EVERYTHING, you won’t have to do anything” she would feel less guilty for laughing in their little dog wanting faces.

    Ellie, no surprise, was a PITA. She got into the trash, because that is what Ellie does. Then her digestive system completely revolted, explosively, all over D’s carpet, because that is what digestive systems do when fed too much trash. Ellie was also absolutely sweet and adorable, because that is what Ellie is.

    Three weeks later when Ellie went home, instead of a long sigh of relief, D found herself missing her.

    Which is what led to her telling me she was thinking about getting a dog. I assigned her and the kids a bunch of reading. I went over the pros and cons of dog ownership. I asked her to make a list of what she was looking for in a dog. I warned her not to go out shopping for a dog, but instead to just be open to getting a dog when the right one came along. You don’t want to go out with the plan to pick a dog, because then you’ll simply pick the one there that comes the closest to being what you want. Instead, it is best to wait until the one that is actually right presents itself.

    So, she started reading her assigned homework. She made a list of things she wanted in a dog. The list included items like:

    • around 25 lbs
    • short hair that doesn’t shed much
    • an adult, about 2 or 3 years old

    Time passed. The right dog hadn’t presented itself yet, but she was taking my advice and not being in a rush.

    By the time Mindy was about 4 weeks old, her developing personality started speaking to me, and it kept telling me she’d fit in to that family really well. This was a silly notion, because she was:

    • expected to be about 50lbs
    • is a husky mix and will do so much more than just shed
    • is not going to be an adult for a couple of long destructive years

    I thought about it a couple more days, and then sent D an email, acknowledging all the bad, but explaining I had a feeling. She wrote back and said she’d been having the feeling too, from the first photos of the three of them.

    They talked it over and decided to fill out an application. Other local people applied for her too. We waited anxiously to find out what the rescue would decide.

    Mindy is an adorable and very adoptable little puppy. Ellie had been available for ages without any interest, and she had health conditions which made her less adoptable and made California a much more suitable climate for her. It is frightening to send a dog so far away. What if the new family changes their mind? It is especially iffy seeming when it comes to sending a dog to somebody who has never had a dog before.

    The rescue decided to trust my recommendation, for which I am very glad. Nobody wanted Mindy to be flying in cargo, so that means she needed to head out to California after she was old enough to fly, but before she got too big to qualify to go as carry-on. This left a very narrow window. D and her daughter came out for a long weekend, to get some how to care for a puppy training and to fly Mindy home with them.

    I was very anxious all afternoon yesterday while Mindy was in flight, but it turns out she did very well on the flight. The wait for the shuttle to the parking lot was a bit rougher (so noisy outside at LAX) and she cried and peed in her carrier. However, by last night she was safely at her new home and is getting settled. I know she’ll be very happy with them, they are really good family for this little people focused pup.

    Best of all, I will get to be in touch with Mindy for her whole life.

    There is stuff to say about Webster too, but that will wait for another post.