For my “long standing readers… this post is a mash up from two different posts, one from almost ten years ago when we first brought home the new pups… https://kathygaillaughingatlife.com/2013/11/21/the-great-elk-hound-escape/
And an incident that involved the batteries in the impossible to reach smoke detectors- which required the Little Giant extension ladder to enable one to reach the unit and swap out batteries. https://kathygaillaughingatlife.com/2014/09/11/little-giant-big-brain/
Hubby’s still outsmarted by dogs, ten plus years of chasing after the furry escape artists and they still get the best of him!
Hubby or “Tool Man” as we fondly describe him to folks when sharing tales of his various projects…has been spending many hours renovating the area which exists beneath the deck which travels the entire length of the house. It faces the descending wetlands that encompass the lower end of our ½ acre lot.
He announced last year, after almost ten years of constant vacuuming and hours of testing out carpet stain removal products- that he intended to renovate the “dog area”.
His plan was to eliminate the majority of dirt tracked into the home on the paws of our pets. This involved the delivery of a mountainous pile of gravel delivered to our driveway just as the fall rains kicked in, by the way.
Pea sized gravel and about $800 worth of shade tolerant plants called Japanese Spurge, were eventually installed and through a series of stages that involved sectioning off major areas of the “doggie area”. This part wasn’t a total problem as it concentrated the area where the pooches could poop, and necessitated a frequent clearing of said substances to avoid tracking this unpleasant residue onto the carpet when they bound through the clear vinyl door of the entry and trod on the carpet of the recreation room.
As with many of the projects Hubby has executed over the almost 40 years of our marriage, this one morphed to include an additions:
* Expansion of the wooden deck outside the doorway of the dog’s area.
* Creation of a “shade garden” at the end that abutted our new neighbor’s back yard.
*Renovation (tear down the existing) Hog Wire fence, originally installed during the summer of 2016 when Hubby was in between employers. He’d noticed the fence line had migrated toward the wetlands, and decided an additional improvement would be to reinforce the fence by anchoring it to a large block of cement to prevent further movement.
Many steps of the project left gaps in the fence lines, which provided opportunities for our dogs to escape… visit the neighbors and chase after the rabbits that have populated our community in increasing numbers over the years.
Today’s escape was a replay or rather a mash-up of two of my older posts involving previous incidents recovering canine escapees and the trials of our fire alarm systems.
We were awakened by the shrill shrieks of the unit needing a new battery at 7:00AM.
Nervous Elkhounds expressed their discomfort by pouncing on and off our beds, racing up and down the stairs, announcing the obvious. If they could talk they’d scream “Change those Batteries… NOW!”
Shaking with anxiety our canines were soon joined by our son Nick. His autism makes the tweets unbearable. He voiced what the dogs were unable to express
“Ray! Get the ladder and fix that battery.”
The ladder to which he referred was the “Little Giant” folding step ladder that daunts all who attempt to extend the device to its full 17 foot length to reach the alarm mounted on the ceiling, 20 feet in the air.
This one smoke alarm is the ONLY reason we still have this ladder, a necessary evil.
Hubby hated it the moment he set eyes on it.
Our fearless Tool Man prefers to balance on a chair, a small kitchen stool, or use our ancient aluminum step ladder. A reject, left behind when a neighbor moved, one that would totally flunk any OSHA tests.
Today was the second time he’d needed to mount this multi-stepped behemoth to exchange the tired 7-volt for a new one. He swore it was “Just a few years ago” that he’d had to scale up to this height. He cursed the “rip-off” on the life of these alkaline bombs… Shocked upon examination of the exhausted battery- “It expired in 2020!”
Meanwhile the dogs powered through the flimsy plastic barriers erected to protect that shade garden that Hubby had yet to complete.
Déjà vu: I’d spotted the dogs in our neighbor’s yard darting back and forth between the sand box and plastic tricycles. They ignored my please to come back and bolted out the other end , unfenced due to the neighbor’s yard project… and ran up the street.
We’d managed to corral the pups, and Hubby uttered aloud “How the heck did they get through that fence?”
Anxious to demonstrate, their paws flew down the stairs and they dashed through the now gaping hole in the erected structure Hubby was so sure would be impregnable… the chase was on a second time.
Finally secured by a closed doggie door, Hubby was hard at work reclosing his now trampled Shade Garden.
Hard not to laugh as I remind Hubby of the incident where our newly homed pooches jumped over the fencing that had kept our old arthritic Elkhound, Jaeger , secure in the dog area for the remainder of his years at this new home.
Some things just never change…
by 