Hounds of Harmonville…by Lisa Harmon November 13, 2009

Kenai waiting for his ‘Boo” so he can unleash the zoomie…22 mo

http://hearingelmo.wordpress.com  is one of my two all time favorite blogs, hands down. The other one is http://smartdog.typepad.com/smart_dog/ with Talos the Great Dane SD candidate. One has Chloe the long graduated hearing SD and the other a pup just learning the ropes.

Dog training seems so simple…until you do it. Then the complexities of  relationships with living creatures make their appearance. I just love reading about dogs in various stages of their training, and how their personalities can make them do the same task in different ways for different rewards. 

I’ve been down with a bad cold, so Kenai’s pretty bored. Except for the sneezing fits, anyway. That gets him all excited. This week will finally be rain free, and warm, so I expect he’ll be outside to play more once the ground dries up. Until then he’s stuck with the boring old wheezy monster.

He did get out to romp Sunday morning, with BB providing the lure for coursing on the other side of the fence. He loved it so much he wouldn’t let me nap very long, mooching to go do it all again. Didn’t work, but yeesh, I would’ve like to’ve slept more than 2 hours. Sleep’s great medicine for colds.

My friend Melba’s still under the weather. She finally made it home from the hospital, with the diagnosis of liver damage. She’s on all kinds of medicine, and very weak. I’ve been cooking meals and Mom’s making sure she gets the right meds at the right times.

Kenai doesn’t know why, but he’s not complaining about the additional chances for a nibble of this or that while I cook. He will occasionally get a taste of what’s on the chopping board, or lick the spoon when it’s on its way to the diswasher. Not often, but once in awhile.

Monday Kenai had a huge, morning long car ride, followed by a huge afternoon long nap with me! I snore when I have a cold, which seems to disturb his young golden self. I wake up fairly often these days with tickly whiskers smelling my nose and crookedy headed boy wrinkles looking at me. “What’s up with that, ma?”

Of all the ways to awaken with a cold, that has to be one of the better ways. It’s followed by smushing the curious boy lips, smooches, velvety jowel molesting, leans and snuggles, and eventually…dozing off again. Warm, soft, sleepy boys are the best.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I really need to throw this cold off. NyQuil and wrestling 15 pounds of frozen bird into the oven don’t mix too well. Not to mention how badly a Christmas tree can lean when combining my Meniere’s lean with a drug induced lean. It’ll look straight to me!

Tuesday was a get-over-Monday day, but we did get a lovely outside time in for the boys. Sunshine and pups mix better than turkeys and cold medicine.

That was as far as I got before the cold overran me big time. Yikes. It’s been a solid week, and took all that time to get my blood oxygen out of the 80% range and back up to normal. The week consisted of feed the dog, go to sleep, take the dog out, go to sleep, eat a bowl of soup, go to sleep…showers optional and who needs groceries anyway? 

Back on my feet, I’ve managed to squeeze Kenai’s accupuncture appt out of my energy reserves, and was thrilled to find out that he is concentrating his urine again–no more going out every 4-6 hours. I’d suspected as much since he makes 8-10 hours overnight now. But yippee!

The second shot of Imizol, the treatment we’re using for Ehrlichia, seemed to start making a bigger difference in how he’s doing. He’s eating well, slowly switching back to a kibble and he just looks better. It took 2 weeks but it seems that the incontinence was indeed due to ehrlichia.

Now we just need to get BB’s incontinence under control. He goes to see Doc Robbertson tommorrow, and we’ll decide what to do about it then. Cross the fingers and paws! This three and four times a day carpet scrubbing is getting old.

Kenai also managed to start getting some play time out of me, once the oxygen returned to my body.

Boxes are almost as much fun as balls,(if ya stretch properly anyway, he he) and this one was even more fun since it was closed. Nothing to get ahold of to rip it apart.

It chased him, he chased it, I flipped it end over end, he sasquatched it (caving in the middle with a paw) and the fun continued. A soda pop bottle finished the play time off just right.

After all his excitements, boy needed a snooze. Or was that me? Whoever was to blame, we both got a few z’s in which has been the routine for a couple weeks now.

We have just a few things to do to finish the week, a trip to Walmart today being the biggest. We might miss the tree cutting man, or might not. There’s a 90 foot dead oak just off the front porch, and with winter’s ice storms and winds coming, it needs to be taken down. Without wiping out the dogwoods near it!

The tree removal should provide plenty of guard puppy opportunities for Kenai, who likes to feel manly letting us know there’s peopleses in our yard. Tell him to hush after the first alarm bark and he gives ya a look like “but must I? It felt so good! I the man, I the man.”

It’ll also initiate BB’s who can sound the most like a bloodhound howling contest when Mom and I go outside without boys. Kenai barks like a big dog (unless he’s just gotten a butt-berry when the pitch goes up to complain), but BB is the hound of Harmonville–owwwoohhh.

Maybe I’ll be on the road to more energy and less wheez next week, and schedule a training time with Lisa. They have so much fun being “trained”, and it’s a ball to watch. Till then…