I know that people often worry about old folks in the bath....

I am probably the most carefully watched old person in the shower.  ......

Three out of four watch me for my entire shower.  They go off once I get out, but I am rarely out of their sight...

This is what feeding time at the zoo must look like

We have a visiting dog for a few days (that's her in the middle the tiny black one) and there is Sienna, the white dog, and Tinta (the TinyTerrorist) on the right.  At 5 months she is nearly as big as Sienna.

On the left, we have Romeo, the big boy and Clementine, the tiny puffball.  This is what feeding time at the zoo must look like to the staff. 

 

There is a special birthday today

Sienna is 7!

Can anyone help me

Figure out how to explain to Sienna that Daylight Savings Time is over? She still wants the old time back and wants me to participate in the rebellion against Eastern Standard Time. She especially wants me to get out at 7 AM, or even a little earlier in the morning if possible. Reasoning with her has no effect. It is those sad ears and eyes.......

Cesar Millan, we have a problem

OK, so yesterday we discovered that after 6 years of going into the crate whenever I left the house without any problems, Sienna decided that she was a big girl and deserved to be released.  Since she didn't seem to have success in communicating this to me, she decided to release herself.

I have class on Thursday also, so I removed all the loose pieces that she had been working on, turned the crate around so the hole she had made was flat against the wall, let her into the crate and shoved a piece of furniture over slightly so it was against the other door.  The part of the crate that faced the room was the back, solid wire, no door.

I came home to this:

This is a NEW hole and shows what a 4 hour crate attack can look like. She couldn't get all the way out, because the crosspiece is still in place, but she had removed enough verticals to get her head out the hole. 

Now, just so the SPCA doesn't get me, she was in NO distress and could remove her head from the hole without a problem, so I grabbed my camera because I couldn't describe this.

I am now going to go search the web for bulletproof crates.

I have a lunatic dog.....

As my regular reader(s) know(s) I have a much beloved Spanish Water Dog named Sienna.  Looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, doesn't she? 

She has many good traits and a basically good disposition. She is also a lunatic escape artist. She tried to get out of my friend's apartment when she was staying there, she has twice gotten out of her crate but I attributed that to fireworks on the 4th of July and she hasn't done it since.

Until tonight, that is. First of all, she is 6 years old. NOT a baby. It must have taken her the full 6 years to figure out how to try to do this. I was gone from 6pm to 10 pm. FOUR HOURS.

In that time, she broke 2 pieces of the crate off completely. When I came in they were on the crate floor. She bent up the main bar, that includes the piece that you slide the door latch into, and reversed it 180 degrees. It is a BIG structural piece of the crate. I do not know HOW she completely chewed off the other two pieces , but she did. They were on the crate floor.

The bar that is bent upward in the last picture is the one that held the door latch part and it went all the way to the bottom of the crate once upon a time. 

She is only crated when I leave, and gets cookies to eat as I walk out the door and the TV is on to give her a human voice.  It's not like she was dying of boredom.  I'm not sure what I am doing with her tomorrow when I have to go to class. She might chew her way out of the apartment totally!

we're gonna play ball...right?

For the past 6 months this ball (or its predecessor) has joined us on every walk we have taken. Sienna always carries it on the same side of her mouth and has learned to bark around it when she wants to. It originally functioned as a mute. Now, not so much.

In case you didn't know....

it is snowing in New York City..... some of us are happier about it than others.

• The booties are for the salt, since it burns her feet,
• The sweater makes ME feel better, though I doubt she really needs it...
• The leash is required so I can pull her up from a snowdrift when she gets in over her head.
• The expression on her face? Priceless ... 
• She is giving me the "Whose IDEA was THIS getup?" Look.
• Frosty.

I made my bed this morning

I make it every morning.  Later, around noon,  I wandered into the bedroom.  Do you think Sienna is trying to tell me something?

The lifeguard

When I take a shower and I look out of the tub, this is what I see. The Lifeguard. She is always there making sure I don't drown.

It is a well supervised job, this painting

Romeo is checking for missed spots.  There are NOT any missed spots.

Nick did the painting.  He laughed when I slapped a little paint up there.  He is a perfectionist.  That is a good thing to be when you are painting.

Sienna and Romeo volunteered to help

see this face?

Do you notice that it looks a little ...... different than its usual happy go lucky self? Well, it ought to look different. This is the face of a critter who just devoured almost an entire bag of CAT TREATS! Not only did she eat cat treats, SHE ATE THEM IN MY BED!!!

I am hoping that the only further result is a very small amount of stomach discomfort. There are other possibilities that are just too dire to contemplate.

Besides. When Romeo gets through with her she is going to look much worse than this, I would suspect. Romeo loves his treats.

Merry Christmas to all

and to all a good chewey.

I'll be back.

Do you see the guilt in her eyes?

I love Sienna, you all know that, but can you see the guilt in her eyes here? I ask you, would you believe anything she said wth that look on her face? I have seen less guilt on a 3 year old standing in a puddle of spilled cake batter. I KNOW what I am talking about.

Sienna has been sleeping on my bed lately. That is fine, but she likes to get up about an hour ahead of me, and I keep reminding her where she is supposed to be, but she seems to spend some time wandering around the house doing inventory.

People, she is FIVE years old this December. She is not some innocent puppy. Today, when I walked into the living room, I discovered the look you see above and the item you see below.

This was once the remote control for my Air Conditioner. Needless to say, it doesn't work any more and since the internet has failed to reveal a replacement, I guess I am going to be getting up to change the temp. Meanwhile, I am considering making her do it with her nose.

Someone got another haircut

Don't her eyes look HUGE?? Who says a haircut can't change your outlook on life?

If you have an attachment to clamps

consider the above picture and weep. Sienna, a character well known to my faithful reader(s?), is crated when I leave the house for longer than 30 minutes or so. Mostly this is to keep her from eating cat food and otherwise annoying the other fur critters in the house. However, during the 4th of July fireworks there were some "local exhuberance" fireworks set off right behind the apartment and they scared her. She managed to open one side of her crate and squeeze out. I figured it was a terror reaction and refastened the side of the crate but yesterday when she greeted me at the door again I knew a stronger intervention was required.

So, today when I left for brunch, I clamped the side she has managed to open together with 2 clamps, opening inward with handles on the outside.

When I came home, the items in the picture above were on the floor of the crate, and Sienna was lounging on the couch.

Maybe she will learn to drive next and come find me whenever I go out?

theft by sneakiness

The scene of the crime. 

I need to tell you all that I am doing Weight Watchers.  I need to tell you that so that you have a picture in your minds of the impact of the rest of this post.  I also need to tell you that I am nearly 5 pounds down and that I fell off the wagon with a big huge splat last night at Malecon. Also,  that my "friend" blogless Nicki is the grandmother of a Girl Scout and feels it is necessary to buy more Girl Scout cookies than can possibly be eaten by one person and to share them.  

Nicki went with me to Malecon, but earlier in the day she gifted me with 2 boxes of the aforementioned Girl Scout cookies.  

After Malecon, since I had fallen off the wagon so badly I figured that I was so far down the path to insanity that I might as well eat a couple of dulce de leche Girl Scout cookies since I had never tasted them.  We had previously determined that a serving was 3 cookies and 5 points.  Might as well blow everything at once and get back on the horse clean on Monday AM. 

Of course the only problem with that theory is that there would be an OPEN box of Girl Scout cookies to contend with on Monday, but that was a problem for another day, so I ate 3 cookies, closed up the box, put it on the counter behind the sofa and went to bed. 

This morning, I rounded the corner into the living room and noticed something odd:

I am usually pretty neat ....upon closer inspection I found:

Neat little pile of junk is it not?

It is an EMPTY box of Dulce de Leche Girl Scout Cookies.  I know I only ate 3, I have never walked in my sleep and even if I had, I probably would have put the empty package in the trash.  I really am neat. 

That leaves us with only one suspect, and the embarassed eyes and slinky behavior have confirmed it.  I figure she ate 15 cookies.  I am sure that the next result of gluttony will not be pretty, and I will spare you pictures, though I may summarize the results ...............

I have lost my blogging mojo...

I am reduced to pointing you all at other people's blogs, but I do want you to look at these. I am neither here nor there on the subject of celuclay, but they would be interesting made out of torn pieces of great paper and paper mache or wallpaper paste mix... messy, I am sure, but light and pretty. I think I might try these out. I once saw something like this made over the shape of a big huge balloon, so that it was big enough to sit on the floor and hold yarn for a whole sweater or whatever.

It is turning cold here, I need a sweater when I walk the big old girl in the AM. She loves it, however, she hops and skips and barks and at some point runs in mad circles around me making me dizzy. Then she comes in and makes interesting piles of dog on the sofa. I love me a relaxed puppy.

















Isn't this a comforting view? I have never had a real over the stove microwave before and it took me 6 months to find the light under it!

It changes the look of the kitchen.








I think it is going to warm up a little, but summer is over for sure. No leaf change colors to report here yet, but lots of morning fog.. Looks like winter is on its way here...

bless me, I have sinned...

I have been over a week without a post and that is not a forgivable sin. All I can say, by way of 'splanation is that I was doing this.












and some of this.







and a little of this.





then of course, there was time spent doing this..

There is an old southern saw about how when I stand, I lean,
when I sit, I sit loose
and when I think I fall asleep... well, I have been thinking.


Trying to get to the bottom of why I am not doing but instead am ......
thinking loose