Posts Tagged ‘burrs’
She’s Home!
My fellow blog readers, the week-long nightmare of my whining about Cyndie being gone is over. May life return to the usual chaos that masquerades as normal around here. May Delilah go back to having two people from whom she can constantly demand attention.
There were a couple of moments last week when I began to question whether I truly have what it takes to be a responsible dog owner and caretaker. Delilah pushes me to my limits, and I haven’t put in the effort required to command the obedience from her that would allow me to relax and enjoy her company.
I am really happy to have Cyndie back to resume her role as primary dog handler. I’m a little sheepish about all the burrs that were waiting to greet Momma on her return, but in my defense, I had them all brushed out earlier in the day, yesterday.
There is a confused racoon that I have to thank for the burrs. At least now I know what Delilah was so obsessed with when I took her outside Sunday night for a failed attempt at one last pee before confining her to her Crate-bed-den for the evening.
She went nuts the second we got out the door and pulled like her life depended on it to go after something that was completely invisible to me, given the short distance my head lamp projected.
Delilah was so freaky about this that it scared me a little bit. I didn’t know what was going on. In the morning on Monday, we headed out for the sunrise walk around the property and had only taken a few steps when Delilah cornered a surprised racoon behind our backup generator.
At the sound of all the snarling and growling, I gave her leash a yank and that was all the racoon needed to sprint for the nearest tree. The weeds at the base of that tree are where Delilah picked up her first batch of burrs before I could convince her she was at a stalemate with the critter and resume a walk with me.
Fast forward to late afternoon, after I finished a battery of property management tasks during which I had let Delilah nap in her kennel outside, I headed over with tennis balls to fling so she could get a little exercise before going inside for dinner. During exercise time, I usually get away with letting her run off-leash, because she is so fixated on the toys we throw that she stays engaged.
Not this time. She completely ignored the second ball I threw and ran past it in a sprint with a mission. In a blink, she was gone. It made no sense. I circled the house, calling and whistling, wondering where on earth she went with such intense purpose. Then I heard her bark. That is not usual behavior when she runs away on us. Next, I spotted the horses running away in the pasture.
Was she chasing our horses? What’s gotten into her, I wondered. I arrived to find the answer. It was that dang racoon, again. Twice in one day, during daylight hours? I’m concerned that something might not be right with that critter. Especially that it would hang around when it is obvious there is a threatening dog that lives here.
They ended up with another stalemate when the racoon made it up a tree again.
Cyndie kept Delilah on a short leash for her evening walk last night, and experienced no further excitement, so maybe the racoon got the message that it should seek refuge somewhere else.
Today, I return to my routine at the day-job, and get to do so without fretting about how Delilah is doing at home all alone while I’m gone. It’s so nice to have Cyndie back.
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Pesky Procrastination
Yesterday we finally got a break from the bitter cold. For two nights in a row now, we have been able to leave the horses outside all night. That means, I didn’t need to clean out their stalls during the day. Yahoo! They seemed to accept the return to their previous routine without concern, and I gained some flexibility in choosing what to do with the middle of my day.
I opted for splitting wood. I have been negligent in keeping after that chore. My goal was to have the wood shed filled to the brim this winter, but I’ve yet to make that happen. It’s just too easy to let it slide. Between the December and New Year holiday events, and the extreme cold, there have been plenty of reasons to delay working on it. Particularly, because the wood being stacked now is for burning next year and beyond. I probably already have more than enough for next winter, so some of what is stacked won’t get burned until a year after that.
It isn’t going to make a big difference whether I finish soon, or in another month or two. That is challenging for a person who is more than happy to procrastinate when opportunity allows.
I clipped Delilah’s leash to one of our glider swings while I worked and after thoroughly scouting her perimeter, she settled down to keep an eye on the horses barely visible through the trees. If your eyesight is good, you just might be able to make out the silhouette of one of the blanketed chestnuts in that image. Delilah certainly had a bead on them.
I wonder if she was pondering why they get to free-graze out there while she is stuck tethered by a leash. She is still a flight risk. She recently failed two brief tests when given freedom to meander.
On Tuesday, while I was clearing the drifted snow off our deck, she got out of sight around the house and set me to whistling and hollering for her. Happily, she returned after not too long, but she had taken advantage of her brief freedom to go find the nastiest velcro-like burrs possible and made sure they got well tangled into her thickest fur beneath the outer hairs of her coat.
I spent much of the rest of that day in damage control, pushing the limits of her tolerance while trying to get them all out. Makes me wish I hadn’t procrastinated pulling up all the weeds that grow burrs last summer.
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Twice Fooled
It’s the dog, again. She fooled me twice yesterday, and will now be back on a leash or in her kennel for a while when in my care. Each time Delilah runs off I feel like such a sucker to her shenanigans. She had been doing well lately, so I had become less concerned with her getting out of sight on occasion.
Yesterday morning, she was behaving like her usual self and checking out the crew and equipment of the fencing company. With all the activity happening, it surprised me that she would run off and leave it. She was gone so long that the fencers finished and left, and I went in the house for lunch without having seen a hint of her for hours.
I kept my eyes out for her during my lunch, and eventually spotted her movement down by the barn. I hollered at her and got her to come running for the house. She was a mess of burrs. Delilah was confined to quarters while I tended to a few indoor projects after my lunch, but then something in me decided to give her a second chance.
To start, I gave her 100% of my attention, and we spent a long time together on the front lawn where I worked diligently to detangle the burrs from her thick coat. It was another beautiful day, as sunshine had returned with such strength that Delilah needed to get up and move over to some shade in the middle of my de-burring effort. The beautiful wispy clouds in the deep blue sky were dreamy.
As I lay in the grass beside her, I closed my eyes and realized I could easily fall asleep. It was probably less than a minute, but the sound of her rustling in the leaves nearby woke me from the brief slumber and told me I needed to get back to an activity that would keep her around. Delilah did great, keeping me close company while I worked in the shop to repair a broken bird feeder.
It’s the one that has been laying on my shop floor to dry out for, oh… probably 6-months, after an incident when Cyndie was on crutches and took Delilah out on a leash in a thunderstorm. A boom of thunder had caused Delilah to bolt for who knows where, wrapping her leash around the post of the bird feeder, tipping over both it and Cyndie, as well as the bush growing there, all in one frenetic moment of panic.
I kept Delilah in close contact while I fed the horses and as a load of gravel was dumped in front of the barn. She smartly gave the huge truck due respect and stayed by my side. As I spread some of the gravel around, she laid down in the shady grass on the other side of the pile. In a blink of time, I came around the pile and she wasn’t there anymore. No sight of her in any direction. No answer to my whistle and calls.
She’d done it to me again, twice in the same day. I was really irked by that. After giving her a reasonable amount of time to return on her own, I set out on an unhappy hunt to find her. With my suspicions about her visiting the neighbor’s place across the street, that’s the direction I headed. I popped out of some brush at the edge of our property onto 650th Street, just in time to see her sprightly stepping off one neighbor’s property about to cross the road (without looking) to visit another neighbor’s property.
My angry shout for her obviously caught her by surprise. She approached with trepidation, clearly reading the message in my tone. I did not put any effort toward removing the fresh batch of burrs she had acquired. It had to wait until I could work myself “back to grazing.” Hopefully, that will be today. I just couldn’t get myself there last night after getting fooled twice in the same day.
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Relative Something 