Posts Tagged ‘dog’
Looking Close
I woke early yesterday and snuck out the door in the dark while Asher was still in his overnight crate. My destination was the Subaru Dealership in the Cities where I bought my 2019 Crosstrek. It’s headed for the 80K mile mark soon and still had the original tires, or what was left of ‘em, anyway.
Today it has fresh tires, brakes, oil, and an air filter. It’s almost like a brand-new car.
Cyndie called in one of our pet sitters to take care of the dog and horses in my absence. It was like having a day off for me. Well, half a day. Upon my arrival home, Asher instantly wanted to rough-house and battle for his squeaky ball. Eventually, we headed out to feed the horses.
The barn was in perfect order. The only difference between the way I do things in the morning and the way our helper left it was a closed door where we usually leave the top half open during the day.
I found myself taking close-up photos while waiting for the horses to eat everything in their feed pans.
The wind was whipping up some ripples on the surface of the waterer.
Close inspection of some of the hay that was delivered to us last season reveals a lot of woody stems and a very bleached coloring. We’ve been mixing it with partial flakes from 30 bales we received from a different supplier. I’m guessing the difference is first-cut versus second or third-cut.
The horses are very skilled at not eating any hay they don’t like.
It’s a lot more like straw than hay. The horses just let it drop to the ground.
This morning, Asher gets a car ride to Hudson for a day of play with other canines. It’ll almost be like another day off for me, except I’ll be picking up Cyndie’s grocery order and hauling it into the house.
The latest update on Cyndie’s convalescence is all good one week after surgery. Maybe even ahead of schedule for what she was originally expecting. The swelling is under control and she is already moving around using only one crutch while controlling pain with nothing but over-the-counter acetaminophen.
She is doing well to keep herself at rest and icing and elevating her ankle regularly.
I’m hoping she will be able to get back in the action by the playoffs. Whoops. I mixed her surgery up with all the injuries happening in the NFL. Between concussions and ruptured Achilles, it seems like there is a risk of teams not being able to field enough backup players.
Here’s hoping Asher doesn’t pull a muscle racing around with other dogs on his play date today.
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Getting Outside
It’s only been three days since Cyndie’s ankle surgery. She is spending most of her time reclining with her foot elevated and I am outside many hours every day, walking around with Asher and tending to the horses. This morning it was particularly frosty because the overnight temperature bottomed out well below freezing.
I cleaned up some leaves yesterday that had become matted on the driveway and in the early light today it looks pretty respectable.
It’s a shame Cyndie doesn’t see it. She missed out on the neighbor’s wood furnace smoke stretching along the valley and the horses lining up in the early rays of sunlight.
As much as I wanted to stay beneath the covers with my head snuggled into a soft pillow this morning, getting outside to experience the glory of the day offers rewards that Cyndie doesn’t get to enjoy during her convalescence.
It becomes my responsibility to appreciate being outside twice as much to cover for her. It’s a tough job, but a challenge I am willing to meet.
I know my warm bed will be waiting for me again at the end of each day.
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Easy Patient
It was almost “just another Thursday” except for the fact Cyndie was only one day away from surgery on her ankle. Her extensive experience with the routine of recovering from surgeries makes her a pretty easy patient to watch over. She has been in good spirits throughout the whole process, surviving the first night with only minimally interrupted sleep from pain.
You may think she is doing so well because of the care I’ve been providing, but I can’t take credit. It’s the healed ankle bones that are all the difference. More specifically, it’s that she doesn’t have pain from the shattered bones and she is not forced to avoid putting any weight on her right foot.
Cyndie’s brother, Steve stopped by for a visit and provided good energy. He and Asher got along really well, especially when Steve accepted Asher’s challenges to wrestle by dishing out plenty of roughhouse competition.
In the afternoon, Cyndie occupied herself in the recliner by making a “snuffle mat” for Asher. My sister, Judy provided inspiration with photos of mats that she makes. The project fit well with the homemade dog chews Cyndie had just sewn for our pup.
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Asher took to it like a natural, individually sniffing out and chomping each little morsel Cyndie had scattered. It occupied him for about a minute or two.
I allowed him some off-leash time around the outside of the house while I moved all the deck furniture to storage behind the house for the winter. He was a good sport and stayed close but went nuts doing Zoomies to burn pent-up energy.
I think he senses something weird with Cyndie’s behavior and is rising to respect her space while looking toward other avenues to get his needs met. At the same time, I think he really misses the “old” version of his momma.
It won’t be long before she is back to her old ways.
Last year, I was more concerned with how soon she could return to tossing around hay bales. This year, I’m looking toward how soon she can get back to entertaining Asher when he gets overly whiny.
I really wish I could convince him to simply “use [his] words!” whenever I can’t figure out what he wants.
He is not what I’d call an easy patient.
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Misjudged Amount
I thought it was going to be a small amount of slushy snow coating the grass but I guessed wrong. Our first snow of the season covered everything with around three inches of windblown snow.
As ready as we thought we were for winter to arrive, this snow landed on plenty of things I intended to move. Cyndie’s door table in the woods. The furniture on the deck. Potted plants all around the house. Chairs out in the yard.
It’s all stuff that can still be moved without too much trouble. Temperatures are expected to warm up well above freezing in the next few days, but there’s no guarantee how much of the snow will disappear. I’m gonna make another guess and combine it with some hope that almost all of it will vanish.
By the weekend, it looks like a chance of some rain, which would go a long way to finish off any patches of snow that might last that long.
Cyndie landed the first appointment for surgery today, so we are heading out the door before dawn and hoping to have her back home in the recliner by mid-afternoon. Just depends on how quickly she comes to her senses, breathes on her own, and eats a little something.
We are well familiar with the routine.
While she convalesces the next few days, Asher and I can be outside putting away deck furniture. I’m sure he’d love to help me.
When we first met Asher, his foster mom told us he loves snow, so we’ve been looking forward to witnessing it firsthand. His reaction didn’t disappoint. His aura radiated “FUN!” the whole time he was romping around in the white stuff.
Thank you to all who have offered encouraging messages to Cyndie for her metal removal today. We appreciate your support! I’ll provide a full report tomorrow about how smoothly everything went.
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Homemade Chews
Our dog, Asher is a chew toy destroyer. He loves to rip things to pieces. Since he also shows a passion for tug-of-war, rope toys give him a chance to do both tugging and destroying. Cyndie bought him a “ball” made of rope which was a genius idea for a toy.
He showed moderate interest in it until one section finally came loose so he could begin to shred it. Since then, his interest soared and he thrills in bringing it to us for some tugging that leads to holding it for him to chomp the unraveling rope.
Asher also takes great pleasure in tearing the stuffing out of fabric toys and then shredding the fabric. Watching him do this to something Cyndie just bought causes us mixed feeling$.
Well, it causes me mixed feelings. I love seeing him have fun but the idea of destroying something we just spent a lot of money on bothers my miserly mindset.
That led to an idea. I asked Cyndie if she would consider sewing together some “toys” out of found materials we have at home. I brought her a short length of natural rope and Cyndie produced a collection of heavy fabric pieces. We also dreamed up the idea of putting a hard chew he’s shown meager interest in, inside one of the toys Cyndie was sewing together.
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Cyndie then put one of his squeaky balls inside a little pillow she made.
He loved it! Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately rip the new toys to shreds. He mostly seemed to be trying to shake the pillow to death. The long, skinny thing had scrap pieces from a store-bought stuffed squirrel he chewed to pieces sewn onto each end. That seemed to fascinate him.
He spent a little more time trying to rip into that one, but it was still mostly intact as of last night.
With days of rain (plus predictions for slushy snow tomorrow) keeping us indoors for long spans of time lately, there haven’t been a lot of opportunities to get him running around outside. We keep trying to find other ways to expend some of Asher’s high-octane energy.
Methodically destroying sanctioned homemade chew toys gives him a good combination of mental stimulation with the tactile reward of chomping on something interesting.
I just hope we aren’t conditioning him to seek out any old thing lying around the house whenever that urge to gnaw on something shows up.
Meanwhile, I just finished putting together a small wooden puzzle to start my season.
Let it rain and snow. We’re good to go indoors.
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Cyndie’s Views
Rarely a day passes when I don’t receive a photo in a text from Cyndie. Many times, it ends up being the only image available to complement the tales I post. Occasionally, it is the main point of my post. Today, the backlog of images she recently sent me are featured in this post.
Like, “A Man and His Wife’s Dog.”
Okay, he’s our dog. Until he runs away. Then he’s her dog. Or when he chews up something valuable like my glasses. Or plows into me from behind. Or… well, you get the picture.
Cyndie gets the pictures, too. Here are five more to give you a glimpse of Cyndie’s view of this October at Wintervale…
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Longest Disappearance
This morning I am writing while seated near our front door, wondering if Asher will ever return. Moments before Cyndie was to drive off on an errand, Asher bolted into the woods as she was about to bring him inside and feed him.
I had just finished feeding the horses and came up to find Cyndie planning to drive to the neighbor’s place where he had recently made unauthorized visits three different times. She didn’t find him there.
Now she is gone and my walk around in search of any sign of him proved fruitless. This is the longest he has been awol in the six months we have had him.
Watching two squirrels chase each other around the trunk of a tree out the front door informs me that Asher is still not in the vicinity. He has trained them well to seek the highest branches and get out of sight whenever he steps outside.
The sight lines are wide open today, which is a drastic improvement over yesterday morning. While feeding horses yesterday, it looked like we didn’t have any neighbors because of a heavy fog. We could hear cars driving on the road but we couldn’t see them.
At least Asher won’t have any trouble seeing our house if he decides to return. Since his recent forays to the house across the road, we have been making him wear his orange vest to which we attach a leash to restrain him. At least he will be easily identifiable as someone’s pet by that vest.
Cyndie was slowly granting him opportunities close to the house to move off-leash while she lured him with treats to pay close attention to her.
Yesterday, after the fog lifted, we lounged on the back deck with Asher tethered on a long leash. He basked in the warm sun.
I hope that my post tomorrow will be able to describe his return without incident. I may spend today thinking about how big an area we could fence off to contain him if that ends up being a solution.
After failing to achieve control with our previous dog, Delilah, I am hoping we don’t end up in the same situation with Asher…
He’s Back!
Before I finished typing the previous sentence, I spotted Asher slowly walking up the driveway. His orange vest is more dirt colored than orange. He took a big drink from his bowl but didn’t seem the least bit worried that he hadn’t been served his usual breakfast.
I don’t know where he’s been or what he may have found to eat, but he seems rather exhausted and perfectly content to just lie down and rest.
I wish that his return would make me feel just as perfectly content.
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Autumn Walk
The ground has started to dry up after the most recent soaking and the sky slowly grew sunnier and sunnier yesterday afternoon making for a particularly picturesque leash-walk with Asher.
Warm, however, was not how the air temperature felt.
I have no confidence that Asher is able to associate being confined once again to the leash with his recent rash of unacceptable sprints across the road to disrupt things at our neighbors’ but it’s the only solution immediately available in our bag of tricks.
The challenge it creates for us is finding ways to burn off some of his big energy with games and exercises in the house. He got a little wound up in the house but he was amazingly tolerant of being tethered every time we went out.
I thought this flipped-over oak leaf with the deep puzzle-shaped recesses was particularly eye-catching. I didn’t recall ever noticing leaves with this shape on tree branches. A few minutes down the trail, boom! There’s a small oak with the same shape of leaves. Doh!
The trail in the woods offered more mystical nature specimens, especially this classically shaped toadstool.
Had me looking for a troll sneaking around in the trees nearby, especially the way Asher was sniffing the ground.
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Sharing Space
I guess it’s nice to see big and small creatures getting along but part of me feels bad when the pigeons poop on the backs of our horses. It’s bad enough that the birds act like our barn was built solely to provide them comfortable space to raise families. As they grew more at ease around the horses, I noticed they began to show up to scavenge pellets of feed while the horses were still eating, sometimes even stepping right into the pans.
Now some of the pigeons have started standing on the horses’ backs.
I sure hope the pigeons are eating a fair share of the flies that are always trying to share space with the horses’ faces.
Meanwhile, I’m back to sharing space with Cyndie who has safely returned from a trip to Santa Fe where she and her friends’ visit just happened to coincide with the Ring of Fire solar eclipse. Not bad timing on their part.
I took full advantage of her return to opt out of dog duties for the first time in too many days. Asher made Cyndie walk through the dark last night to the neighbor’s house where, for the third time in three days, he wanted to share space with their [I’ve since learned] cockapoo.
She was very unhappy about that, which was just the way I felt the first two times he trespassed over there.
I’m afraid our plan of allowing Asher the freedom to roam our property off-leash has taken a serious turn in the wrong direction.
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Can’t Complain
Relative to the news and analysis of my ongoing experiences being chronicled here, I can report from my thoroughly biased perspective that we are emerging this morning from the day-long soaking rain with fresh anticipation for Cyndie’s return late tonight.
One aspect of caring for non-speaking others that I deeply dread is my inability to interpret their expressions of needs or wants. I can’t say that Cyndie deals with these situations any less stressfully than me, but when she is taking them on, I am relieved of sole responsibility.
I’m pretty sure I misread Asher’s whiny pleading last night. I had made the mistake of getting too close to the road with Asher roaming off-leash and he suddenly bolted for a house on the other side of the road to harass their dog while entirely ignoring my attempts to command his obedience.
He was thrilled over being able to lap up whatever was in bowls on their front steps (cat food?) and manically sniff every nook and cranny around their property, peeing on only half of them. Their little barking Bichon Frise-like breed dog had retreated to their back deck. Luckily, Asher was too curious to be confrontational and merely invaded its personal space when conducting a full inspection of their deck.
Our wonderfully sweet octogenarian neighbor, Eileen, was bold enough to grab Asher’s collar when he finally trotted up to meet her. I was busy panicking that he was going to jump on her and knock her over. Since I hadn’t brought a leash along on this walk, I tried walking him by the collar close enough to our property before letting go so I could run with him back to the safe confines of our property.
Asher made a U-turn and went right back to their front door. Eileen stepped inside to grab a leash to loan me so I could get him home.
Inside our house, Asher whined and paced from door to door, wanting to get back outside. I assumed he wanted to go right back over to where that little dog that barks all the time lives.
All this was happening in soaking rain. I can’t complain about the long, slow precipitation. It was perfect for our recently planted grass, but it made it complicated to step outside with the dog. Asher persisted for so long that I decided I needed to put on his vest with a leash, get myself geared up for battle against the elements, and take him for a walk.
He didn’t poop right away. He made me walk several circles through the thickest woods before he finally relieved himself of what looked like uncomfortably loose excrement.
No wonder he was whining.
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Relative Something 