Shiba: 4, chance of getting lucky: 0

Her Majesty dug up my peony.

Boohoohoo I'm so sad!

You see, peonies are good feng shui. They "activate your relationship luck." So I planted two peonies; one that I got in October and wintered inside, and one that I got in May. The October one was alive but not growing... until yesterday. Which is also the day that Her Majesty dug it up.

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. Her Majesty likes to look at men, but she doesn't like me to have any kind of life. If she had it her way, I wouldn't even go to work. And she didn't like my ex, or my male roommate in Yellowknife. She doesn't like anyone very much, and she very much doesn't like people taking up my time. I'm thinking she dug up the peony on purpose to ruin my relationship feng shui.

Then again, if you want to be an optimist about it, she dug up the $13 peony, not the $40 one that's actually putting forth some shoots. So maybe she's not so much ruling out all relationships, as making sure we only activate rich-boyfriend luck and not cheap-ass-dude-with-no-job luck. That kind of guy seems to gravitate to me just fine without any peonies anyway.

Oh well. She didn't dig up all the pansies (yet). Maybe pansies activate some kind of luck I could use.

Tinky-Winky vs. the pigs' ears

Carter's human brought us some pigs' ear strips to thank us for housesitting. That's nice.

Now as you may recall if you're a big fan of Her Majesty (and who isn't?), she and I previously had words over a bag of pigs' ears that she refused to eat. I put them by the garbage for later disposal, but then she was cross with me, and so she stole the bag, ripped it open, and ate some of the pigs' ears, all the while giving me dirty looks. So I put them back by the garbage, and every time she'd get pissy, she'd break into them and eat some more. And every time she gets this "what you gonna do about it?" look on her face.

That was a long time ago, and pigs' ears are not readily available in this town, so there hadn't been a recurrence. So when Carter's human gave me this bag, I simply put it, unopened, on Her Majesty's stash of chews. Sure enough, she found the bag, slew it, and ate a whole bunch. Thus leaving crunchy bits of pigs' ears all over the freshly-Dysoned carpet. Of course.

As much as I admire people whose dogs obey such fancy commands as "go lie down on the mat" or "come", I love my precious just as she is.

Christos a înviat!

Single-bed dilemma... or not

For years, I have wished to go back to sleeping in a single bed. When Tinky-Winky and I moved into our furnished apartment, I asked the landlady if I could have a single bed, but they had none. So for the last four years, I have been sleeping on the hide-a-bed, and Her Majesty favours me with her company... when she feels like it. But now, by coincidence, the landlady had two single beds on hand when I was getting ready for the quasi-foster child, and I borrowed one. Thus I now have a single bed in my house, and I intend to keep it, in case more children come over, and because I always wanted one.

The advantages of the single bed seemed too numerous to count. First of all, I won't have to make the bed every night and put it away every morning, so I won't spend so much energy just on getting in and out of bed. And when I have insomnia, I'll be able to get up, sit on the couch for a while, and go back to bed when I'm sleepy. The apartment looks much more welcoming now, in my opinion, and at night my bed doesn't take up the entire place. And I can have a nightstand with a lamp and other nightstand-ish things on it, which wasn't practical with the hide-a-bed. It seemed perfect...

and then it hit me: where is Her Majesty going to sleep?

Oh no!

Well, obviously she can keep sleeping on her bed, which is her favourite anyway. Or she can sleep on the couch, which she likes too. In fact, I don't think she really likes to sleep on my bed, even though lately she's been doing it of her own free will a lot. So maybe it wouldn't matter to her, but it matters to me. She's my dog and I like having her on my bed.

Accordingly, last night I went to bed in the single bed for the first time. Tinky-Winky considered the situation and decided to jump up on the couch, where her blanky was. So I got up, picked her up, and put her on my single bed.

And...

she plonked herself down and went to sleep. No trouble whatsoever.

So, apparently I was worried about nothing. I can have a single bed and have my dog sleep on the bed.

Of course the downside is that she takes up most of the bed and I'm not quite sure where I am supposed to sleep, but that's really just a detail. As long as Her Majesty is happy, all is well.

Oh no! My dog is autistic!

A couple months ago I scored Tinky-Winky's dream job, which is anything with short hours and home every night. From my point of view, I'm making f-all for money, but she doesn't know that. Other than that though, the job is awesome, particularly the part with the eight-year-old autistic boys. They're very awesome.

But then, I noticed something about autism.

• Lack of connection with others


• Violent outbursts


• Obsessive behaviours


• Lack of typical play behaviour


• Unusual thinking and communication patterns


• Normal intelligence

Ok, not all autistic people have all these traits, but you know who does? Tinky-Winky. Even as a puppy, Tinky-Winky didn't play normal dog games. She still doesn't. She doesn't interact with other dogs and she's rarely affectionate with me, and only on her own terms. She freaks out and beats up little dogs. She spends hours shaping her doggy bed, unless you redirect her. She looks for me in the woods by sight and not by smell. She's not at all stupid, she's just really odd.

Oh no! My dog is autistic!

Hahaha, I crack me up. Is there such a thing as autism in dogs? Is she just one strange little dog?

Well, who knows. I like her. I like my autistic kids. My ex-husband has Asperger's, and my stalker probably does too. I guess that's just the kind of people I attract.

Shiba as service dog

I don't think anyone has tried to use a shiba as a service dog. They're just not very helpful. Tinky-Winky's world view is that people serve dogs, not the other way around. You know that saying, that dogs think "this creature pets me, feeds me, takes care of me, he must be God", while cats think "this creature pets me, feeds me, takes care of me, I must be God." Shibas have cat-like thinking.

So the only way to get a shiba to help you is if what you need also happens to serve his or her purposes.

Consider this. Tinky-Winky knows what time it is, and especially what time I'm to take her for her off-leash walk. For a few years we walked off-leash in the evenings, but now that we have the new bylaw guy, who stays up late but doesn't get up early, we off-leash in the morning. In summer, when it's daylight all night and the sun rises at four, it's easy enough to get up at 4:15 to walk the dog. Now that sunrise is after six, I set my alarm for 5:15... and I snooze it. I'm the queen of snoozing. I can snooze my alarm for two hours or more.

That's where Tinky-Winky comes to my aid.

Snoozing interferes with Her Majesty's morning off-leash walk; therefore she has taken to making sure I get up. I hear the alarm and snooze it once, and then I listen, hoping that she's still asleep. If I'm lucky, I hear nothing. But if she's awake, she'll be sitting up in bed panting, and then I know I better be up and at them. And if she really gets impatient, she'll give her one bark that means "human, do something for me!" I can sleep through two hours of my alarm clock, but not through that one shiba bark.

The only drawback of the shiba as alarm clock is that she's not consistent. On statutory holidays, she will bark at 5:15:00 right on the dot, but on work days, meh...

Mmmm... Comfy...

Garden dog

I think Tinky-Winky dog is jealous of the garden. As soon as I spend any amount of time gardening, she tries to get in the middle of things. She is also fascinated by the smell of bone meal, so here she's trying to get into the bag. Once it was open, though, she wanted none of it. I think the smell of the whole mass is too strong for her. Bone meal is a natural product made from, obviously, crushed bones of animals such as chickens. This one in particular has no cow bones in it - I suppose they tell me that so I won't be worried about Mad Cow? So anyway, I doubt it would do the dog any harm. It smells and looks like fish food, mostly.

Doggy storm shelter: success!

Finally, the dog understands the purpose of the crate. She hadn't stepped inside yet, even though I put all her shredding blankets in there. Then Monday afternoon there was a thunderstorm, and she started freaking out as usual, so I put her in the cage. She shredded for a while and then came back out. But Tuesday, when the thunder started, she went into the cage of her own free will and lay down at the back.

Booya!

Well, that doesn't look very comfortable. I've been meaning to get her some bedding in there, but I really don't feel like spending money on a dog bed and a comforter just now. So, instead I'm lending her some of my crochet blankets, thusly:


The one inside the cage is a queen-size and makes a nice thick mattress. I hope she won't tear it. Crochet blankets are much more resistant than fabric, but you never know. The one draped over the cage is mostly to shut out more light and sound and make it more cave-like, but it also makes it more esthetically pleasing to me. Better feng-shui, hopefully. Also, both these blankets are hand-made by me and have been in the house for years, and were on my bed all winter, so they should be thoroughly permeated with my smell, and hopefully that's a comfort to her when I'm not home.

This morning, the dog went to look at the cage again, and at first did not approve of my modifications. So I grabbed her and put her inside forcibly, and she lay down at the back and made herself at home. I'm not sure she likes having a blanket over the cage, actually. It shuts out some light and noise, but on the other hand, she can't see me anymore, and that always annoys her. She likes to keep an eye on me.

My poor little dog

When I'm not home, the dog sleeps on her lawn. She's dug herself a comfortable little depression, which I've given up on filling, and since the lawn is watered frequently, it's nice and cool in the dirt. She likes it there, which is good since that's the whole point of the lawn.

When I'm home, the dog would like to sleep on her lawn, but she can't, because from the lawn she can't see if I'm getting ready to leave. So she sleeps in the hallway, where it's somewhat cooler than in the living room, and I have to walk past her to leave. I try to tell her that I'm not going anywhere for a while, or that I'll let her know if I'm leaving, but she doesn't understand, so she can't sleep on her lawn.

If I thought she'd understand, I'd get her a baby monitor so she could sleep on the lawn and keep an ear on me, but she wouldn't understand.

Poor little dog. What a dilemma.

The tale of the dog license

This morning, I went to get a dog license for Tinky-Winky. I've had her six years, maybe it was about time I licensed her. Though it makes no difference, really, she has a tag with my phone number, and from a distance the bylaw guy can't tell it's not a town license tag, so he doesn't know she's not registered.

Still, licenses are free for fixed animals, so why not?

So I went down to Town Hall with my bill of sale. First of all, I wrote down the breed on the application as "shiba inu". The town employee had never heard of it, and indeed on her log of tag applications, there are no shiba inus listed. Apparently, none of the several shiba owners in town figure their dog is likely to get caught, either. Probably because none of them ever walk their dogs, so it's not likely to go missing. They're also too fat to run very far.

Next problem: the bill of sale shows the dog's name as "Sunojo's Playmate of the Year" aka "Bunny". But I put on the application "Sissi" which is what I call her at home. ("Tinky-Winky" is her username. I started calling that on my old blog where everyone has blog names, to prevent googling.) The town employee was confused. "This says Bunny, not Sissi," she says to me. Right. Because the seller called her Bunny, and I call her Sissi. Get it?

No.

After some further explanation, she accepted that I don't call my dog the same name the previous owner did. But then she found the registered name, and that confused the issue further. Am I the only one in this town with a CKC-registered dog, or what? The dog has a registered name, and a pet name her breeder called her, and a pet name I call her.

This did not seem to make any sense to the town employee.

Finally I told her, it really doesn't matter what you call this dog, she's not gonna come anyway.

This seemed to settle the matter to her satisfaction, and she gave me my dog tag.

Phew. The next dog is getting Tinky-Winky's old town tag, I can tell you. It's not like anyone here can tell one shiba from another anyway.

Tinky-Winky and the thunderstorm

1:18 am. I can't sleep. Then, the wind picks up. "Oh no," I think, "Tinky-Winky is gonna start freaking out."

Sure enough...

I tried to ignore it, but I could hear her panting in the non-dark. (It doesn't get dark here this time of year.) So I get up and look for her everywhere, which is weird because we live in the smallest bachelor suite I've ever lived in, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for a little dog to go AWOL.

Finally I locate her, grab her and go back to bed. Then I ignore the wind and hope she'll go to sleep.

Ha.

The wind turns into a thunderstorm and Tinky-Winky is completely freaked out. I try holding her, petting her, talking to her, putting the sheet over her head, nothing works. By the time the storm is overhead, she's shaking so hard the whole bed vibrates. Knowing that her favourite stress release is to shred things, I let her get up from time to time and give her a blanket. The top blanket on my bed is always a dedicated dog blanket, so that if she feels shreddy in the night, she'll tear something of hers and not one of mine. But even that didn't work. She kept throwing her blankie on the floor and going after my blankets, sheets and pillows. After the fourth time, I gave up on that and simply restrained her.

It took 40 minutes for the storm to blow over completely, and I spent the whole time trying to comfort my dog. Why? Nothing bad has ever come to her from wind or thunder. I don't think it's the noise, because she can ignore much louder noises of different natures. Is she sensitive to ions in the air, or static, or something of the kind? Who knows.

See, people say your dog picks up how you're feeling and acts on that, but I think that's absurd. I like thunderstorms. I can sleep through any amount of thunder. Tinky-Winky completely freaks out. Obviously she's not getting it from me.

And of course now that it's morning, she's sleeping like a log. Crazy little dog.

Guard dog: fail

I came home and the dog didn't come running to greet me.

Hmmm...

Ok, she must be on the balcony.

I went to have a look and indeed, she was asleep on her lawn, with her back to me. I went back and got the camera. Now the camera beeps when it acquires the autofocus, and again when it takes a picture. So you can see she has an ear toward me. She must have thought she heard something, but she was too lazy to turn her heard. On the second photo she did turn and look.

Do you suppose when she saw me, she came running to me?

No.

She ran inside, past me, and toward the door. Then the little cogs in her head clicked into place, she hesitated, turned around, and came to me, and then she started doing her "I'm happy you're home" thing.

What a strange little dog...

Emergency procedure: fail

I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night. I leapt out of bed, threw some sweatpants on over my pjs and ran for the door. I stepped into my shoes on the way out. We sprinted for the elevator, which came quickly, for once. We raced across the lobby and were out of the building in record time.

As I watched the dog disappear into the tall grass, it occurred to me that it would have been a good idea to put a leash on her. A neighbour informed me it was close to 2:00 AM.

The nature of the emergency? The dog had whined.

Shibas whine. As far as I know, they all do. They have very expressive whines which I think are meant to imitate us. Tinky-Winky whines for all kinds of reasons, but only one of them would have her out of bed and walking around at 2:00 AM: she needs out. I've said before that she never asks to go out, but that's not quite true. About three times in the last six years, she's asked. The first time, I ignored it, and spent a couple of hours cleaning explosive diarrhea off the carpet, and everything else. So now, if she asks to go, we run like the wind. It takes me about one tenth as long to evacuate the building when the dog whines as when the fire alarm goes off. And other than the fire alarm, the dog is about the only thing that wakes me. (Ok, violent crime, too.) I can sleep through almost anything, most of all my alarm clock, but also music, thunder, phone ringing, neighbours partying... but not my dog crying, barking or throwing up. Same when I had cats, the fastest way to wake me was for a cat to start heaving. And I'm active and fully operational instantly, very much unlike the alarm clock. They should make an alarm clock that sounds like a puking cat.

Anyway. A more considerate creature, having relieved herself, would have thought something like "the human got out of bed in the middle of the night to help me, I will go back in promptly so she can go back to sleep." But that would be utterly unlike Her Majesty. She was outside, she was off-leash, and the weather was beautiful. PARTY! (And yes, this means I didn't pick it up, but have you ever tried to pick up liquid off the grass in a bag? I actually have. Turns out you can't pick up diarrhea even if you try.)

2:00 AM on a Saturday night is a really rotten time for a dog to be off-leash in downtown Hay River. The bars close at 2:00 AM, and that night there was a dance, too. All the cops are out, all the drunk drivers, all the drunk walkers, everyone. It's a very busy time. And there is my dog, not only off-leash but without even her collar, which reflects some light.

Man, that was dumb.

So I went back upstairs and got some cheese to bait her. And a Ziploc bag. She can hear "cheese" from miles away, but cheese doesn't have a sound. It has to be in a plastic wrap, so she can hear the wrap. So I'm outside crinkling a Ziploc bag at 2:00 AM, with cheese in one hand, my hair all over the place, wearing my gross sweatpants that would fit a fat man on Thanksgiving, just when every eligible man in town is out and about. And did I mention every cop in town? Then a cop car drives by, then another, and I figure, knowing my dog, that's exactly when she's gonna show up. And she did, too. Luckily for both of us, she had been just around the corner of the building, not across the street, so she didn't run afoul of the cops. That was lucky.

The dumbest thing is, her leash hangs on the key rack by the door, right next to my keys, so it wouldn't have slowed us down one second to grab it and put it on in the elevator. I guess I'm not as smart at 2:00 AM as I'd like to think.

So, new emergency evacuation procedure to learn:

1. Put clothes on.
2. Leash up dog.
3. Evacuate.

That being said, she should be good for another two years or so.

You may be a dog person if...

I don't really bother to look at men on a regular basis, and they return the compliment. (Vice-versa, actually, they started it. But that's beside the point.) Tinky-Winky, however, likes to check out men. Not male dogs, male humans. She just loves to stare at men. She has lousy taste, too.

Conversely, when we meet a dog we like, if it's walking with a male human, I always ask myself if the human might be single and if I should try to bond with him so we can spend time with his dog.

You may be a dog person if you pick men by whether you and your dog like their dog, rather than whether you like the guy.

A man forewarned is fore-armed

It's windy again.

Before I left the house, I put the pillows and blankets in the closet, picked up anything shreddable, and opened the balcony.

I came home two hours later and found... nothing shredded. Booya!

Then I went out on the balcony and discovered she had destroyed her lawn. Oops...

Well, that's alright. The lawn is there for her, and I can always reseed it. I need to make a deeper lawn, though, so she doesn't dig right through to the bottom of the container every time. Other than that, it's all good.

That's one thing I learned from my first two dogs, who were husky puppies: if you don't want something destroyed, it's a lot easier to put it out of reach of the dogs, than to fix it after they eat it.

Nobody's perfect

Have I mentioned that my dog never does anything wrong?

Apparently she does.

Here is what happened. Tinky-Winky is scared of the wind. Not when we're outside, of course, but we live on the seventh floor of the only highrise structure for 500 km, on a wide open plain reaching from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico, so you can imagine that we get some windy days up here. And with windows open on all sides of the building, air shafts, things that don't close properly, what have you, there is quite a lot of whistling and rattling when the wind is anywhere from NNE to SSE. This freaks her out, and when she's freaked out, she wants to hide, or she wants me to comfort her.

Fine.

So it had been windy for two days, and as I was trying to sleep in the morning, Tinky-Winky kept climbing up on my pillow and digging at it. I reprimanded her several times for scratching the pillow, then I kicked her off the bed altogether. She went to sleep on the floor.

Later that day, obviously, I had to go out. I closed the picture window so it wouldn't be as loud inside, and I left. This was a mistake, because if I had left it open, Tinky-Winky would have gone out on the balcony and had a nap on her lawn. (She has a lawn on the balcony. Because I'm nice like that.) Being out in the wind doesn't bother her at all, like I said, it's the noises inside the house. But since I locked her in the house with the noise, she continued freaking out. So she dug everything that could be dug, kicked the pillows on the floor, tore the 300 thread-per-square-inch Egyptian cotton pillowcase, then tore the pillow open, then ripped the fiber out, then must have kicked it around for good measure, as it was torn-side down when I came home.

After that, I guess she must have felt better, because that's the only thing she tore. Or maybe she had just been in the process of tearing it when I came home, and that's what stopped her.

Well, oh well. I guess I brought it on myself. Knowing she was after the pillows, I should have put them in the closet. And I should have left the balcony open so she could get out of the noise. Maybe also, she'd feel safer if she had a nice pet carrier she could crawl into like a little den just for her. I've never needed to put her in a cage, but maybe she'd like it.

In any case, that's ok. A dog is allowed to screw up once in six years. That's like 42 human years. Who doesn't screw up once in 42 years?

Gary Larson on dogs and obedience

Rebuttal from the "puggle" people: "die, bitch!"

I think that was more or less it, but really I didn't waste my time on reading too much of it. One guy apparently went through every bit of information about me that can be found online so he could construct a lengthy essay on why my life sucks. Clearly, a potent rebuttal to my opinion on "designer dogs" and the arseholes who breed them.

So, statistically, 100% of a self-selected sample of "puggle" owners not only have lousy literacy skills, but are also really rude, mean people who don't know how to respond to an argument.

Curiouser and curiouser, isn't it? I know all kinds of very normal people who own mutts, and yet everyone I know, even marginally, who owns a "designer dog" is apparently a nasty moron.

You gotta lay off that "designer dog" shit; clearly it's ruining your mind.

That fox looks just like a shiba!

The thing with foxes is, they move fast. Really fast. Much faster than shibas. So I got two shots at this one. He (or she) is the only fox I know who has more or less the same colour as a shiba. And there are lots of foxes in Yellowknife; you just don't see them on this blog because I'm not fast enough to shoot them. But you can come see for yourselves if you'd like. Foxes, even the species that's called "red fox", are at best a muddy blackish kind of red. This is the only one I've ever seen that's orange like a shiba. Even so, it still doesn't look like a shiba. It's tall and skinny with a huge poofy tail, and it looks like it's on crack.