Overcoat

Here's a link to the coat(s) for those of you who may be interested. They're simple to order, fit beautifully and arrive within minutes (it seems).

Dog story of the day involves the Chuckit! ball launcher wherein we're on the baseball field (featured a couple of posts back) and Stella is fetching her brains out. She comes tearing back to me drops the ball, snatches the BAll LAUNCHER out of my hand and takes off. By the time she got back around to me I was laughing so hard she started high-stepping with it like some canine majorette. I didn't get a picture this time but they have a monthly photo contest over there. Not positive but I think we can win it.

I have to mention a couple of good blogs here that I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to comment on for weeks now. I've contacted a number of people but there are two that I haven't been able to reach and I'm hoping they'll check-in via the e-mail address in my profile. One is Janet at My Semi-Charmed Life and the other is Carey at One Laguna Life. I'm not typically a very prolific commenter but cut me off and I'll come up with all sorts of things to say. One of these women is looking for some new inspirational blogs to check out. My number one pick would have to be Switched at Birth. For more, I'd just set about pilfering her link list if it were me, not that I've ever done that...enjoy.

Winner winner-Chicken dinner

When I got Stella almost two years ago, what I knew about raising a dog would have fit on the head of a pin. Like everything now that deals with unknown territory, I got online immediately, looking for experts. As many of you know, there is no shortage of dog training advice out there. It comes in all sizes and repeats itself often. There were however, a couple of sites that stood out and managed to hold my attention over the ensuing months.

One was Lindsay Stordahl's blog, That Mutt. As a newbie, I found in Lindsay's tone a comfortable, friendly approach. I liked that she used her very own dog Ace to illustrate her tips and occasional set- backs and I was inspired by the fact that she continued on with her routine through winters in Fargo, North Dakota. We like to cry and whine about the cold winter here in Tennessee, heh.

Another blog I discovered early on was Neil Sattin's Natural Dog Blog. I found this page quite by accident back when I was interrogating people in the park, about how they trained their dogs to walk off leash. I didn't necessarily want to walk Stella off leash but I did want to know how it was possible to teach a dog such a thing. Again, Google returned a list of choices that included someone recommending you "get a really long leash" (see above photo). That was both humorous and hard to ignore. I clicked on the link and found an entirely new way of thinking about dogs and their behavior. It explained a lot and I think I've mentioned before, Stella responded to even the tiniest changes, in a totally positive way, or maybe it was me.

I say all that to say this: One day about three weeks ago, Lindsay gave away a set of Neil's DVD's and I'm happy to report - WE WON!!!!!

The DVD's are excellent and Neil didn't ask me to plug him or his blog, I just thought I'd turn you all on to them in the event someone out there is having problems or looking for a new approach that moves beyond the basics. Enjoy.

Aqua Girl

(Ed. note: Stella doesn't normally look this persecuted in the bathtub, I think she was a little suspicious of the fact that suddenly a tripod appeared on the bathroom sink. Her humor improved dramatically once the water started flowing.)

Thanks to some of our regular readers, Stella (and I) won some prizes back in February from a company called Kokos Pet Spa. I was pretty excited when the box landed on our front porch and even more so once the contents of the box were spread all over the kitchen. Stella wasn't impressed at all until I pulled out the stuffed boomerang. She gets visibly wound up whenever I get it out now, six weeks later. Her third place win scored us a fifty dollar donation to the animal rescue of our choice. We sent the check to the Cheatham County Animal Awareness Foundation. They're located right across the road from where I used to live in Pegram, Tennessee and I know for a fact, they need as much help as they can get out there.

Koko's also sent us some treats and one of their Pet Vitamin Showers which filters out the chlorine and enriches the water with vitamin C. I can't say enough good things about this apparatus. We live in a city where the water coming out of the tap smells just like bleach. In the past when I've given Stella showers, her skin is flaky in the days following. It goes away pretty quickly but still... She's had two encounters with the Pet Vitamin Shower since it arrived and the flakiness was reduced to zero. In fact, her skin is soft and smooth and (for those aware of how we approach showers here at our house) for that matter, mine is too.

Finally, the list of prizes included a bath towel (ahem). I had no expectations about this offer other than to think it would be something practical to dry off the dog. Turns out it was about seven-and-a-half square feet of plush, hooded, thirsty entertainment. A couple of minutes with this thing and I'll just be honest, I didn't care if the dog got dry or not. Thanks again. We'll think of you all whenever we're out running through the mud, which seems to be a habit.

School Daze

Stella started Better Family Dog Manners class at Dogs and Kat, on Saturday. I'm already excited because this assumes that she has family dog manners to begin with. In eight weeks, we'll take the Canine Good Citizen test where she will no doubt add some new twist to that "Sit for a random stranger" routine they do. My friend Barney (the very friend who talked me into holding a fund-raiser for her second knee surgery) is officially her sponsor now. Someday I will tell you all a story about where he got the money to pay for her education but not today. She did pretty well on Saturday and I was happy to see that she isn't the biggest dog in class. There's a Great Dane named Hazel that's a year old and already stands something like five foot nine. There's also a Sheltie, a Shepherd mix, a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy, two matching Malteses, and Stella. It really seems like the perfect group to tell you the truth. A class picture would be priceless.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a new training leash. We graduated from a thirty to a fifty footer. It's sweet and a lot more durable than the last one. I like the added exercise not to mention the extreme happiness Stella gets from being able to run semi-free. I have to admit that the weather has made me slightly grumpy of late, but not her. She seems to have no concept whatsoever of frostbite or runny noses but I'm counting the days.

We also got our prizes in the mail last week from Koko's Pet Spa. Stella won third place (thanks to all of you dedicated voters) We haven't used the Vitamin Shower yet but it looks pretty cool and I'm sure it'll keep her skin soft and dandruff free. She doesn't have a big problem with that but the water here is laced with chemicals so it can't possibly hurt to filter them out. We gave the prize money ($50) to the Cheatham County Animal Awareness Foundation. She also won some treats, a boomerang-shaped fetch toy which she is totally excited about and a bath towel that is both useful and hysterical. Pictures to follow.

Crash and Splash

Not having had a great deal of experience with dogs, I had no idea they could (or would for that matter) run at full speed through standing water, biting it continuously the whole way through. I tried to capture this sport on film but was unsuccessful in my attempts. Something to do with her running and my laughing. Oh, and four-foot rooster tails of rain water splashing all over me and the camera. While those variable affected my performance, they only served to enhance hers.

Now that we've been using a thirty-foot leash for training purposes, this field is one of Stella's favorite places to walk when when it's been raining. It's like a giant Slip n'Slide. Sometimes, instead of attack mode, she'll get running and throw herself into the ground chest first, skidding through the puddles all the way to the end. Turns out that leash has some entertainment value as well. She was pretty much wet the entire month of September.

Suds your Duds

Please excuse the graphic description I am about to include in today's post. If you think of it in a Lucy Ricardo sort of way, you will come much closer to the reality of the whole situation. No, seriously.

First the basics. I am a forty-seven year old woman. I weigh approximately 120 pounds. Corndog Stella - weighs fifty-seven pounds. That's like two twenty-five pound bags of dog food stacked on top of each other, with a couple of six packs of soda tossed on. Twenty-four ouncers.

Although her weight varied, from September to February, I gave Stella baths in the shower - with me. That thud you just heard was my mother's head hitting her printer stand on the way down. While I understand some of you may be repulsed by the thought of showering with a dog I assure you, we both come out better for it. The only thing that really suffers are the bathroom walls and my landlord's drain (bummer).

The tricky part isn't the showering, the showering is sort of zen-like to be honest, but it's getting the pit bull into the shower that's the real talent. It's a bathtub. I have to open the shower curtain, step one foot out of the slick-ass bathtub, pick her up NAKED, turn back to the tub and put her down standing, in the water. Typically I will then tell her that she's the best dog in the world and to Stay. At that point I pray that she does, sometimes I even pray aloud (note to Mom).

So a few days ago, after a long hiatus I decide it's time for Stella to have a bath. To be safe (hah), I get out a pair of shower shoes, the old style flip-flops you get at the beach, and put them in the bathtub with me while I shower. At one point I step into them and immediately they suction themselves like a frog, to the floor of the bathtub. I almost fall down. Fine I think to myself, I'll just leave them off and stand in them later, after I get her in here. So here we go with the potential 911 moment and Stella hasn't done this in a while, so she's mighty tense (I'm told this is because I'm tense which would make her a psychic - no?) I step, left foot out of the tub, wrap my left arm in front of her chest, tuck my right arm under her rump and stand upright. Then I move my left foot back into the tub and set her down in it. When I do, her front feet go right into the flip flops and suddenly she's standing on one of them and wearing the other one like a bracelet.

Did I mention before that I am NAKED? In a shower? With a pit bull, wearing thongs? Now I get laughing so hard in there that she thinks I've gone insane and I wonder if maybe I haven't. And she's looking at me like: Are we gonna' do this thing or not? It is at this moment I realize that I'm not always forty-seven years old. Sometimes, when the planets are aligned just right, I still get to visit seventeen, this day thanks to Stella.



[Ed. note] Somebody recently asked if I was absolutely head over heels in love with Stella now that she and I had been through these surgeries together (savvy question, I thought). The answer is yes, of course. I loved her before she was ever injured but the day you find yourself bathing an animal half your size with a warm washcloth because she can't do it herself, you're pretty much done for.

We recommend Perfect Coat natural oatmeal shampoo and, if you should choose this method of bathing for your own big dog, a crash helmet.

Puppy Dreams

People are shocked sometimes to learn that I never did let Stella sleep in my bed. They're equally shocked when I tell them that despite my banning her from the bed, I've been known to sleep in the floor with her on occasion. Apparently that makes me a bigger freak than having a big honking cover-snatching dog in the bed with me every night.

This was taken on the first day I brought Stella home. When she finally did fall asleep that day, she had no trouble figuring out where to do it. It took exactly two and a half months for her to completely outgrow this bed and now she has one that I found on sale at Mammoth Dog Beds. It's pretty uptown for a dog that might otherwise be sleeping on asphalt.