Category: Life

do re Mia

Mia seems to be making herself at home: by sleeping on our furniture, while sorting through our wastepaper baskets, and by retrieving items that I would have thought would be out of reach of a small, elderly Dalmation. She may be eleven, but she is still agile. Fortunately, at one point I was trained by much larger Dobermans, who were even more agile, and I imagine I will pick up the knack of dog proofing the house again.

I lost track of her last night, and had a panicky few moments before I thought to call downstairs on the intercom to discover, that yes, she was down there with Jack. I would say she is bonding with us fairly well, though I suspect from Mia’s point of view, she is making sure that the human residents are firmly under her little paw.

Lody continues to be very accepting of her. Last night, the two dogs looked like they were even thinking about playing with each other but decided not to rush into anything. There are quite a few dog toys strewn around the exercise room right now: toys that Lody had ignored for months but is now getting out of the toy basket to see if she can mix things up a bit.

Comments on comments

Camera: Paula asked me about my camera: I took the photo Small Rapids with my Kodak EasyShare DX7590. It has an optical 10x lens, and I am very fond of it. It works quite well with my operating system of choice: Ubuntu Linux.
Crazy Glue: I still get the occasional comment on I Hate Crazy Glue. Other people seem to hate it too, probably because they find my post while desperately searching for a way to get the stuff off their fingers.
Comment Spam: I noticed, in the ten minutes that it took to upgrade my weblog to WordPress 2.0.1, one spam comment was attached while I was upgrading. (When upgrading WordPress, it is advised that you turn off all your plugins, and I use the plugin Spam Karma to prevent spam comments.) Fortunately Spam Karma worked after the upgrade, but I thought it was a sad commentary that I received spam comment in a ten minute window.

More Mia

Right now, I am doing a little Mia training. The first time a small Dalmatian crawls her front half into your lap as you sit at the computer and looks at you with her soulful eyes is rather cute. By the third time the cute starts wearing off, especially if the dog’s nails need trimming. So I am reprising a clicker training method I used when Lody would do the same thing. I have a stash of hot dog jerky by my keyboard, and when I observe that Mia is lieing on the floor beside me, I click her and then give her a piece of hot dog jerky. The real trick is using one’s peripheral vision to observe whether the dog is down, since even glancing rewards the dog, and I don’t want to reward her unless she is lieing down.

Mia

Image

Mia, an eleven year old Dalmatian, came to stay with us on a trial basis yesterday. She is tiny for a Dalmatian, much smaller than our Collie Lody.

Mia has a sweet, friendly personality, but unfortunately had become very apprehensive around the toddler in her family. They live in an 800 square foot house, and Mia was living in a sort of internal exile to keep her away from being jumped on by the toddler. She had lived with her family since she was six weeks old. They were quite upset about the situation, especially since their vet assured them that it was better to put her down rather than try to find her a new home since older dogs always become so depressed when they are rehomed! I told the owners we had adopted several older dogs, and they seem to feel at home within a few weeks.

Mia was quite apprehensive last night, and clung to the security of the sitting room, which probably had the smells of her family since we had sat and talked there. However, when she heard me scooping up dog food, she indicated that a little thing like being abandoned was not going to keep her from eating. Although we don’t allow dogs on the furniture, I decided to give up on that battle and put the dog comforter on the sofa for now, so her first experience of us isn’t one of being corrected constantly.

This morning she has been wandering around the house and coming up to me to be petted when she sees me. Lody is being very good: she doesn’t seem to mind me petting Mia as long as I pet her at the same time.

Clydesdale SuperBowl Commercials

I just watch because of the Clydesdale ads, honest. To vote for your favorite, you can go to Best Super Bowl Commercials 2006. My favorite was the one with the Clydesdale youngster. I want one, but I keep reminding myself of when I met a young Clydesdale gelding at the Ft Collins stables. He was already as big as my 16, 2 hh Thorougbred Hap, and yet was obviously a baby. I do NOT need an 18 hh horse.

Broadband

That tremendous sigh of relief that you heard this morning occurred when I managed to convince our router to talk to the nameservers of our new wireless broadband provider. Although our installation as originally scheduled for yesterday, the installer got snowed in at his house and he didn’t get here until this morning. I was trying not to get too excited about the appointment to get installed this morning: when we got our first wireless installation it took several weeks to get it working properly.

During our enforced hiatus, I did discover that the local library system machines allow one to access files on a USB plugin, which was rather handy. I also discovered that I really, really prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer.

Out of Touch Updated

We have a sinking suspicion that our previous broadband provider has gone out of business, so another vendor is coming to the house to install on Monday.