She Doesn't Learn

*sigh* Lilah is sick again with tummy troubles. Good thing we have some medicine leftover from the last time she had the exact same problem. I started giving her the medicine yesterday, and judging by her level of activity she's feeling better.

Except now that she's feeling better and despite our combined efforts to get her to stop, she's back to chomping down on my mom's blueberry fertilizer, which is what probably made her sick in the first place.

Oranges from the Sky

Lilah has this annoying habit of managing to see something, or thinking she sees something, scurrying around outside, while she is locked away inside behind glass doors. You might think to yourself, "why is that annoying? She should be praised for her great observational ability." And I wouldn't hesitate a moment to say, "shut your mouth!"

Because what follows is non-stop barking and pounding against a 5'x1' glass plane inset into a wooden door frame that I will eventually have to pay to replace from all the damage she has inflicted upon it. If you look carefully, you can actually see the glass kind of flex when Lilah stands on her hind legs and slams her front paws against it, barking incessantly the. whole. time.

Even when we try to block the window up with cardboard and chairs, she just gets on her hind legs and lets gravity aid her in pushing down the barrier.

It used to be more of a problem when the fence was all broken. But now that it's fixed, it's usually easier to just let her rush out the door and hunt down whatever it was she (thought she) saw.

So the other day in the early afternoon while I was relaxing downstairs using my laptop, I heard the scrabbling of feet and the slamming of paws against glass just seconds before the brain-piercing barking began. I pushed her away from the door long enough to unlock and open it a sliver before she squirmed her way past me and out the barely opened door, Ritter and me hot on her heels.

We race to the back of the yard, behind the garage where the phone pole stands slightly leaning. The dogs are sniffing at the base of it. Lilah looks up and watches the squirrel that's perched on the neighbors fence, it's mouth clamped on the partly eaten orange.

Now I can see what it's planning. That squirrel wants to jump, with the orange gripped in its mouth, from the wall to the phone pole, a decent foot away. Lilah and Ritter by that time are either sniffing the ground or looking at me, wondering slightly why I'm not bugging them.

The squirrel jumps! It grasps the phone pole, but has lost its orange during the trip. The orange hits unsuspecting Lilah on the side of her head. She immediately looks up and around her, trying to figure out the origin of the orange. I can't help it, I laugh really hard for the next couple of minutes as she keeps looking up and all around her, paranoid that another orange will hit her on the head.

For a dog as proud as Lilah to be paranoid like that for a moment, it was damn funny.

Doggie Blankets: Are They Necessary?

Now that it isn't so hand numbingly cold, I find it a bit easier to type. Which means that I now have the opportunity to write about some cute things that happened during the more frigid periods of an L.A. winter.

My house lacks heating, so if you want to stay warm in winter, you either have to bake a lot or wear tons of clothes that most people reserve for the outdoors (think down jackets, wool socks and long underwear). The dogs, on the other hand, just have themselves. Neither me nor my mom are the type to dress up our dogs... Well, okay, I'm not so sure about my mom. But so far, our dogs don't wear sweaters or booties. So just how cold do they get, if they get cold at all?

Photographic proof that Lilah was cold!


Look at those cute back feet tucked under her front legs! And she pretty much only does this when she's cold.

Then I got to wondering, if she's arranging herself to stay warmer, would she appreciate a blanket? Because in her situation, I know that I definitely would.


She didn't seem to mind. Under normal circumstances, Lilah would have started playing and tugging at the towel. But in this case, I guess it was a perfect mix of fatigue and desire to stay warm that kept her calmly resting with the towel tucked around her, undisturbed.

Holiday Gifts

I never got around to it, because I was waiting on myself to upload pictures. But I finally did it, about two months later...

Yes, I bought the dogs Christmas presents. I purchased two IQ Treat Balls by Smarter Toys (5-inch). I figured it'd be fine if I got the same toy for the both of them, because Lilah would be jealous of whatever Ritter had, and Ritter would steal whatever toy Lilah had.


My brother got a nice Nylabone for Ritter, which he loves, and a rope ball toy for Lilah, which she immediately started to tug on.


And my mom gave them a couple round and ridgy chew toys and two ridiculously funny looking fabric toys with lots of appendages that are great for whipping around or playing tug of war.


Most of their toys were pretty straightforward, except for the treat balls. It's weighted on the bottom and has a divider in the middle of it with an adjustable hole opening that allows the treats placed in the bottom half of the toy to pass to the top half of the toy. It's the dogs job to bat the ball around until it can knock the treats out of the ball's opening in the top half of the dome.

Lilah immediately figured out how to get the treats out and began smacking the ball all over the room. She even advanced to the level where she was putting heavy backspin on it so it would rotate the ball, but essentially keep it in place.



Ritter was not so ingenious. His approach, as with most toys, is to chew on it until it breaks. I thought the ball was big enough to not fit in his jaw. But apparently it has these ridges that allow him to grip it. He started to gnaw on those ridges after he would try, unsuccessful, to lick the treats out of the ball.

Do Dogs Look Up?

Yesterday when we let the dogs out before settling down for bed, my mom and I noticed a lot of giant spotlights moving around the overcast sky. I guess either we had never really noticed such things before or there were just that many spotlights going all around. Seeing as how it was the middle of the week, we couldn't come up with any readily available explanations that would warrant such a display. So we stood in the cold darkness just staring into the sky, and wondering. Okay, maybe 'wondering' isn't accurate. The lights freaked my mom out.

Surprisingly though, Lilah also noticed. Personally, I think it's rare for dogs to look up towards the sky for prolonged periods of time. But that's what she did. For a good three minutes she sat and stared up at the spotlights dancing along the clouds with the most puzzled expression. Maybe it was also the sound of a passing helicopter that drew her attention. Either way, it was an eerily human reaction to something so curious.

A New Do

Today we took the dogs to get their nails trimmed and to get a little grooming done. Okay, a sanitary cut because my mom insists on wiping them and it's easier to find the target when there's less hair...I know you're thinking about it and making a 'gross' face. Don't.

Normally, for Lilah's nails I try to trim them myself. It involves me following her around the breakfast room for an hour and trying to clip a single nail. She's one of those fussy dogs that doesn't really like her feet being touched, squeezed or gripped. But if I keep at it long enough, she gives up and resigns herself to getting her nails clipped. It's not like I clip it so close it bleeds, so I don't know what her problem is.

I've never had to clip Ritter's nails because for some reason they just don't seem to get that long. Which kind of doesn't make sense when you compare him to Lilah. Lilah runs around a lot, so you would think her nails would wear down from all the activity. Ritter doesn't move nearly as much as Lilah, and yet his are usually short while Lilah's are long like claws. But my mom likes it when the fur between the dogs' pads is clipped short, so she pretty much gets his nails trimmed for that extra service.

For the sanitary trim, I don't mind doing it myself with some scissors. However I'm pretty sure my mom calls it a hack job behind my back. We did take Lilah to PetSmart once to get her nails clipped, pads trimmed, and sanitary cut. It was a disaster that left everyone exasperated and very annoyed.

Strangely though, the dogs seem relatively calm and easier to handle at the vet's. I have a sneaking suspicion that they drugged Lilah because she wasn't nearly as restless throughout the day and there was a suspicious "assistant technician fee"...perhaps the fee required for the guy administering her shot?

For what it costs though, I'd rather spend two hours following Lilah around the house trying to clip her nails and trim her fur. Ritter, well that's my mom's responsibility...

After months, we're free!

For the past few months, we've had to coordinate letting our dogs into the backyard with our neighbor. Our old, dilapidated, rustic-looking fence finally collapsed under the weight of the neighbor's dog, an enthusiastic pit bull-mix puppy. W (for the sake of anonymity) liked to jump on the fence and try to get over to our side, either driven by the desire for new human acquaintances or by the allure of both Lilah and Ritter. Just for the record, W succeeded a couple times in crossing over to our yard.

Well, Ritter would have nothing of the sort and the two would have at it (Lilah doesn't really notice the presence of other dogs). At first we all tried to mend the fence with wooden planks, particle board, metal grates, and poles to prop up the fence. All it did was offer W more purchase when trying to jump up the fence. So, in order to keep the peace and what little hope we had of preserving the fence, we had to call our neighbor and make sure that her dogs (W and B, a friendly, but older black lab) were in when ours were to go out.

It was inconvenient, tiring, annoying and sometimes not well coordinated. It created a lot of stress for dogs and humans alike.

So my mom and our neighbor finally came to an agreement. After this past week of workmen chopping down five huge trees and putting in a brand new fence, the dogs were finally able to run free in a much wider yard without worry of an unexpected puppy visitor.