adventures in puppy-owning

Adventures in Puppy-Owning

At a quarter to three last night, Chantico came hard-charging, as Ted puts it, up the stairs, having escaped from the kitchen. This was the first time she’d done it in the middle of the night, although she’d made it quite clear that all our contraptions and piles of stuff to keep her locked in were merely a nuisance, not actually an obstacle. She is a Puppy Houdini.

So Ted got up and put her back in the kitchen and added Yet Another Layer of Preventative Measures, which we then listened to her thump, wriggle and whine her way through. It became obvious the only way to prevent her from charging up the stairs was going to be to put her behind a closed door. Ted, who has a heart of oatmeal unless he’s pissed off, objected to this, and spent a good forty minutes trying to come up with a way to lock her into first the kitchen and then the downstairs bathroom without actually closing the door (it’s very, very warm in the downstairs bathroom, and the door being closed only aggravates that). Eventually Chantico did something (sniffed in the litterbox, I think) which caused Ted to have a temper tantrum and sulk off to bed.

Being hard-hearted, and it being three forty in the morning now, I closed Chanti into the bathroom without angst and went to bed, where I didn’t go back to sleep until somewhere after 4:15am. Chantico was not dead of heat exhaustion or dehydration this morning (she shouldn’t have been; she has a giant bowl of water for downstairs), although she was (and is) rather subdued. She insisted on having breakfast *before* she went outside, which is, I gather, how Ted has been doing it, but went running desperately for the door when I said it was time to go outside. Unfortunately, I’d left the leash upstairs and while I went to fetch it she peed on the entry mat. I figure this is my fault, not hers, and she did go outside and do the rest of her business very promptly. Good puppy.

And now she is writhing around with some chew toys under my feet, and all is pretty well with the world.

Non-Puppy Adventures

We, which is to say, Ted, accidentally broke the bike pump last night, so we went to buy a new one, and had a very entertaining discussion with the guy at The Bicycle Shop (yes, that’s what it’s called) who was, well, very silly. It was fun. :)

The Anchorage Peoplemover (bus) system sucks.

However, I did get Outlook Express to admit that it will support more than one mailbox, and now I can check my email for mizkit with that instead of webmail. It’s a sad thing when OE is an upgrade.

Oh! And last night I was working on business cards for On Your Left, and had of course posted my phone number on them, and had people take a look at them to give me design opinions, and Henry was forced to call me! He *does* have a lovely voice. Yum!