Category Archives: Puppy Posts

Tabasco is the new orange

Puppy Posts, , ,

Tabasco: the new accent color at our house.

Readers if you do not have dogs… just stop reading now. Prospective dog owners please do the visual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your easy and shouting “nah, nah, nah” to keep from reading a story that will make you question why you would ever think of owning a dog. 

Only the dedicated dog owners will truly understand and appreciate this post. Dedicated, Unconditional Love type owners like the couple we met at a local dog park when our puppies were very young.  They own two German Sheppard dogs that were about a year old. My husband mentioned that our puppies were beginning to chew a bit and we were troubled about this aspect since we’d not had that experience with previous pets. The husband laughed and stated that their dogs had a project going in the basement of their home that was keeping them very busy. Basically they had sacrificed the carpet on that floor to the dogs. They figured it would take a year or two before the floor was down to the cement, but seemed like a bargain if they’d stay away from other parts of the home.

Our puppies chew… everything! We purchased a rather expensive, “guaranteed to work”, bottle of Fooey™. This is a bitter apple mixture that our puppy trainer swore was the best. “Be careful to not get this stuff on your hands” she cautioned.  And she was right, because of course we had to taste it ourselves. Made my hubby pucker up like I hadn’t seen since our first date! Great! This was the answer to saving the woodwork. Our dogs licked the surfaces we’d sprayed and smacked their lips for more!

  We’d already tried vinegar. Our house smelled like the salad bar at Sweet Tomatoes. We had tons of chew toys and read the articles on how to get training going by redirecting the pups away from the undesirable item and over to their toy box to find a fun new item that is good to chew. This was accompanied by chirpy enthusiastic reinforcement type statements that made us sound like the 9th grade cheer squad.

A friend said she’d tried many recommended methods too.  She found that Tabasco sauce, straight out of the bottle was the only thing that stopped her Golden Doodle in his tracks.  She painted it on every surface that her pup was attacking. “Great! We’ll try that too”. What did we have to lose? I didn’t take into account that we have all white trim and carpet in our home but stopping them from chewing the trim, right down to the wall board, it was worth a shot.  Orange is a great color for fall, right?

We have bright orange trim now throughout our home. I have developed a slight cough, due to inhaling the fumes of Tabasco as I slathered the walls and trim. It is a good thing that COSTCO sells industrial sized bottles because purchasing such a large quantity of the grocery store 5oz. size would have been even more costly than the Fooey™ .

How is this working you ask? Well I had not found any new shreds of carpet at the bottom of the stairs yet.  I checked other spots in the house for new damage and gouges. We were looking good.

Just as I was feeling like we’d won this battle, our little girl pup seems to have developed a slight cough. 

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Men’s Briefs

PMS (and it's not the medical one), Puppy Posts, ,

Men’s Briefs:

An oxymoron if I ever saw one! There is nothing brief about the length of time many men wear their underwear. What is the “formula”?  How many days before BVDs are considered unbearable?  I do not want to know how that schedule is calculated nor what criteria are used that determines: “Time to hurl them toward the hamper.” I’m a mother of three boys, this is still an unsolved mystery.

I recall a scene from a movie that depicted a guy, probably a single one, taking stock of his work apparel.  He walks about his flat and grabs a shirt draped over a chair.  It passes the “sniff” test so he buttons up and tucks it into his pants, zipping his fly as he dashes out the door.

One of my friends told a story; her mate was packing for a 2 week trip overseas. He had two pair of underwear in the bag. “Why two?” she asked. He said; “I’ll wear them a week, turn inside out and they’ll be good for another week.  The extra pair is just a back up.”

Jerry Seinfeld’s stand up routine on “Men’s underwear” is very enlightening.  He let us know that some men’s briefs are worn to the point of simply disappearing into thin air. “Poof… they are just gone.”

Today I saw a new twist on this phenomenon.

This morning my husband was searching high and low for some briefs he’d still deemed worthy of wear. Upset, he could not locate said pair. “Where are the dogs? Do they have them?”

Our puppies love to abscond with items of our clothing. No harm is done; they just crawl under the bed and cuddle with us vicariously through our undies, socks and night gowns.  Husband has a whole drawer full of freshly laundered underwear but continued to carry on about a possible hiding place for his Hanes.

The clock was ticking. My husband rides the commuter bus. The last one that goes as an “express” to downtown was scheduled to leave in about ten minutes, so the tension was mounting! He was now fully dressed, coat was on, briefcase and car keys in hand… still searching for those cotton knit boxers!

I went back to the bedroom to straighten sheets and fluff the duvet.  There were his missing briefs…under the pillows I’d thrown onto the bed a few moments earlier.  Each night extra bed pillows get tossed onto the leather easy chair next to our bed. This same piece of furniture is a staging area for my husband’s clothing category called “undecided.” Jeans, shorts, even underwear are in limbo, not yet ready to be deposited into the clothes hamper.  Ditto those boxers that still had a few days wear left on them.

“I found them!”  My message intended to relieve his worries and solve his quest, had the opposite effect. I watched in disbelief as my husband dashed into our master bedroom and completely disrobed from the waist down.  He removed the new knit briefs I’d fished out of his dresser, which he’d donned in desperation and replaced them with the “slightly used” boxers I’d discovered.  He recreated the movie scene described earlier as he dashed out to the garage and zoomed off in pursuit of his bus.

I did not have the nerve to call later and ask if he made it to the stop on time.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Puppy Paw Print Arts Project

PMS (and it's not the medical one), Puppy Posts, Uncategorized, ,

I truly believe my dogs are in cahoots with one of more of the following: The guys who cleans our carpets, the folks who sell us the “très cher” (too expensive) bags for our equally “spendy”  Miele™ vacuum cleaner or maybe it is my trainer at the health club, who always wants me to do extra workouts in my spare time at home.

All I know is that I go to the club for an hour of working so hard I am dripping in sweat and arrive home to see a “puppy project” that is going to make me delay taking the much needed shower. The latest involved a very deep hole dug in the back yard. So deep that all I could see was the white butt and curly tail of Gordon,  my male Elk hound puppy a midst the flying dirt. But he only supplied the medium. The “art” was charcoal black paw prints well distributed on the 3000 square feet of our light beige carpet, by both he and his sister, Elki.

Elki barks at me with outrage as I vacuum up all her paw print art work. She must feel righteous indignation similar to the chalk artists whose work is hosed away by the street cleaners. In her eyes a thing of beauty and hard work but her inky black paw prints on the light beige carpet incite me to drag out the vacuum. The result is additional expenditure of energy and muscles already exhausted by the prior hour get additional workout as I push through the task.

Pacific Northwest folks are unique in how and what we view as troublesome. Take Blackberries for example.  A delight to eat, they grow wild up here in the Northwest, on very strong spinney canes that rip through the picker’s skin and clothing.  When we first moved to Seattle many years ago we delighted at seeing a host of signs along the road with bold large letters saying FREE and BLACKBERRY but puzzled by the smaller print that up close read “ FREE removal of BLACKBERRY from your property, guaranteed to eradicate these plants forever!”  A cottage industry has sprung up involving owners of goat herds who camp out on one’s blackberry infested property. Goats will eat just about anything and the brambles do not seem to bother them at all.

I’ve been thinking that I should rent out my dirt digging dogs! They are fast and very efficient. They work for dog treats.  Not sure how to entice them to dig on command, but once that detail is solved, we could be in business!

kathy gail@2013

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather