An uneasy truce

As the weather gets colder, the pets get more snuggly. In particular, our cat George becomes a huge couch whore. Wally is also fond of sleeping on the couch, leading to this scene – witnessed and photographed by T:

So there’s your gratuitous “cute animal” post of the week…

The battle of the bags

At the risk of being one of those people who blog about their cats, I had to do a post about this. Our big boy cat George and T have been engaged in a battle of wills over the shopping bags that T stacks on top of our kitchen cabinet. George likes to lay in the bags and mess them up – frequently sending bags overflowing onto the ground below. So, when I came home to this scene, I just had to grab my camera. First, T ejects George from the bags:

George stalks away indignantly. Perhaps the battle has been won?

But you can never underestimate George’s tenacity:

And within minutes, the battle is over:

Final score: George 1, Todd 0:

Better luck next time, T!

Centralia

Today, I had to meet up with Susan to transfer the dogs that she’s so kindly agreed to watch. For those of you who’ve made the drive from Seattle to Portland or vice-versa, you know Centralia as that cluster of Factory Outlet stores and fast food restaurants roughly halfway between the two cities. I looked up a McMenamins pub in town for our meet-up so we didn’t have to eat at McDonalds. The pub turned out to be in the Old Town section of Centralia, which is really cool:

It was nice see Susan and Rudy and we had a lovely lunch next to a very busy set of train tracks. (Note to self, never stay in Old Town Centralia.) When it came time for the handoff, the dogs were so excited to see Susan they didn’t even notice I was leaving. Which is nice, if not a little bit insulting.

Caught in the act…

I don’t know about your pets, but mine do not like being photographed in the act of doing something adorable. Somehow, the second I get that little silver thingy, they know to immediately stop doing whatever it was they were just doing – even if sound asleep. But every now and then, I capture a scene like this:

All together now… “AWWWWWWW… “

Oh, Wally…

Have you ever had that moment where you wish you could just speak “animal” for a little while? Just long enough to explain to your animal how much easier life would be if they would just stop doing x or y? Or at least understand why they are doing x or y? In my world, if that wish were to come true, the animal in question would be Wally. Look at him:

So handsome, but so, so stupid. I love him to death, he’s a very sweet boy, but I would love to figure out why he turns into Cujo when a yorkie walks by the house. And occasionally tries to jump on random passers by. And if in fact anything is upstairs in the beautiful head of his. As of next week, we’re going to find out. I’m taking Wally to doggie school. He’s enrolled in a class called “Growly Dog” where we’ll try to figure out what it is that makes him bark at other dogs (and the occasional passerby.) I have high hopes for the class, they advocate positive reinforcement and using clickers to divert the dogs attention from the things that scare/agitate them and we’ve started using some of the techniques with amazing results.

Fingers crossed. And now, a random cute dog picture. Enjoy!

Back in the saddle again…

The weather was nice and sunny when I got off work, so T and I went for an impromptu bike ride. I wanted to ride the first section of my potential commute to work so that I could get an idea of how long it would take me. The path was a little crowded, but really pretty as it wound under the Fremont bridge and along the water. It will definitely be a nice commute in the morning without all the crowds. It was also nice to be back on the bike for the first time in over a month.

When we got back, I couldn’t resist tormenting Wally by dressing him up in T’s jersey. Isn’t he a sweet pea?

Then George came out to bust Wally’s chops:

Poor Wally, so abused. Luckily, some chicken jerky goes along way to soothe a canine’s soul. A few seconds later, all is forgiven.

Is there such a thing?

After dinner, it was still clear out so we decided we needed one last walk on the beach. Susan and R decided to stay at the house, so it was just M, J, T and I with Smokey Joe and Wally.

We started off playing with the dogs. Here’s the wind-up:

Then the pitch:

And it’s good!

It’s fun to watch the dogs frolic on a big sandy beach without worrying about them disturbing anyone. After the dog antics, we did a nice slow stoll and took some cute pictures to commemorate the evening.

First T and I, taken by me. Not bad, eh?

And here are M and J (as you can see it’s a little chilly)

There was a pretty strong breeze blowing, which made some pretty patterns in the sand. My camera isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to capture the textures, so I settled for a little picture of my shadow:

We headed back home, feeling the satisfaction of thoroughly tiring out the dogs. Here’s Smokey Joe upon returning to the house:

And poor tired Wally:

There’s really nothing more pleasing than having dogs too tired to get into any mischief. And all it took was four trips to the beach…

Fun with dogs

There are times where dogs provide such great entertainment value. This evening, T amused himself for a surprisingly long time at the dogs expense. We started out with a little ball game:

I unfortunately lack the photographic skills to capture the ensuing melee, but trust me – it was exciting!

Then he played with Wally:

Wally is a good boy.

Equal time

T pointed out that I don’t have any pictures of the kitties in our household on my blog, so in the interests of fairness, here are the feline members of our family. (Yes, we live in an ark… )

The oldest of our brood is Dewdrop. She’s like an anime character with her big eyes and unbelievable cuteness. We’ve had her for 12 years, so we’re estimating her age at somewhere around 13+. She’s got a really odd purr, it sounds like a pigeon cooing. She’ll purr at any provocation, so if you’re sleeping in the same room as she is, you’d better be a sound sleeper.

Here she is in her typical state, sound asleep on the dogs’ bed:

Our second cat is George. George used to be a 23 pound fat-ass. We’ve since put him on a diet, an ingenious one at that. Since the cats need to be fed on a table to keep the dog’s from eating their food and George is too fat to jump up on the table without a chair being pulled out, we just don’t pull out his chair until the other cats are done eating. On this plan, George has lost an impressive five pounds and actually looks like a reasonably normal cat.

He’s a big sweetie, though. It’s hard for me to believe that we’ve had him for nearly 11 years. He’s also quite adept at posing to maximize his heft, as seen here:

And the youngest kitty is little miss Godiva. She’s the most bashful of the three cats and we usually only see her when she comes down to eat or occasionally she accosts you in the bathroom. (Cats are so weird.) We frequently refer to her as the kitten, even though she’s eight years old, because she’s so small.

So those are the kitties, so sadly omitted by my blog. Today was my Sunday and I aside from photographing the cats, I spent it cleaning up the house and being nice and lazy. Very satisfying.

Handsome boy

I forgot to include a dog story in the camping novella, I mean post. Because Wally is a rescue and apparently was raised by horses, he isn’t well socialized with other dogs. Usually, he settles down after he gets used to them, but sometimes he jumps on them, barks obsessively at them or tries to lunge and bite them so we tend to keep him on leash pretty much all the time. While camping we generally keep the dogs on a long metal cable, tied to a tree so that we can relax our vigilant eye on them, until the evening rolls around and they are too tired to do anything but sleep by the campfire.

Being the Northwest, I think every other campsite had a dog (or two, or three… ) and one of the more notable dogs that we encountered was named Bear. Bear was a tiny little Lhaso Apso (or similar purse-sized breed) who was very friendly, hyper and had a running game with his owners where he would run out to greet people at top speed and run merrily around the new people, dodging his owner’s attempts at retrieval and acting as if the sound of his own name was entirely foreign to him.

So, one afternoon while we’re lazing around the campfire and the dogs are dozing on their blanket, I see a tiny white puffy streak heading our way. I have enough time to think “Oh crap, that’s going to… ” before Bear streaks past the dogs, startling them awake. Both dogs spring into chase mode and lunge after Bear, hitting the end of their cable at full speed. Wally’s collar explodes and luckily T is able to catch him with a flying tackle so that he doesn’t eat Bear. For the rest of the trip, Wally had to wear his prong collar and not surprisingly, we didn’t see Bear again. (I imagine the sight of his dog nearly being eaten by Wally probably convinced them to keep Bear on a leash… )

Being that Wally is the second dog, I feel sort of bad that he’s always had hand-me-down collars and is sort of in Smokey Joe’s shadow. (Smokey Joe has many cute collars because he was an only dog and his ‘mom’ is sort of goofy with stuff like that… ) So, here’s Wally in his first brand new collar:

Isn’t he handsome?