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Dogzilla strikes again

Ah, it’s been another busy day for me. Wreaking havoc is hard work!

Today, I have: bitten Dad’s big toe (by mistake – I thought it was a shoe) so hard that it bled; stolen Grandad’s reading glasses and two of his best crossword pens; drunk out of Granny’s tea and Mummy’s cup of coffee – when they had just been made, peed on my ice pop toy in the garden; dug a hole in the flowerbed (while growling and barking at it) and tried my very best to jump over the baby gate so that I could go upstairs to find Daddy…even though I don’t actually know how to climb the stairs yet.

I also had a great time chasing my friend Molly round Granny’s and Grandad’s big field…finishing off with a lie down, yes a lie down, in the stinky pond. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings…

H x

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Dover Beach

More great pics from the location immortalised in Matthew Arnold’s poem:

Hector bouncing on Dover beach

I just can’t keep my feet on the ground!

Hector in the sea

Think I’ll just stay behind Mum…you never know what scary things are round the corner. Besides, I can nip her ankles better from here!

Hector meets a dog on the beach

Hmm…I’d better check out that big dog from afar. Clearly Dad needs me to protect him anyway.

Hector resting on the beach

Phew! Time for a rest!

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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A day at the beach

Let’s start on a positive note for people who appreciate a cute looking Deputy Dawg. This is Eleanor’s favourite right now:

He’s getting big – all legs like a young gazelle. Kind of hard to believe he’s just 16 weeks old. This is most noticeable by how far he can reach when he jumps up at the kitchen counter – and not noticeable at all in this picture at all so I’ll try and take one later. Pretty soon, I’m going to have to put some shelves up or one of those Victorian things that’s on wheels and attached to the ceiling.

Still, he’s healthy and happy which is all you can ask for. There’s a line in the Alice Cooper song Eighteen that goes “I’m a boy and I’m a man…” which is pretty much where we find ourselves with Mr Meltdown. Life seems to be two steps forwards, one step back with him right now but that’s a better result than one step forward and two steps back I guess.

Here’s a comprehensive list of things he does that we’d rather he didn’t:

Biting

Apart from this, both of us could probably handle everything else because the rest is nothing more than him being four months old. It’s not just a nip to the hand either – an ankle is a good target, as is a good looking calf. If neither of these are attractive enough, he’s not beyond jumping for your tricep – and that one really hurts. It’s like some kind of doggie martial art but I’m putting it down to 90% teething/10% being young.

It’s not aggressive biting though – sometimes he absolutely knows where your sock ends and your skin begins but all the same, we might need to get some professional advice on this. I suspect it might be part of his herding mentality – then again, if you look at it with dog eyes, it does look like a pretty fun game to play. Let’s see how it goes for the next couple of weeks. If it is teething, we have plenty of socks soaked in water and then frozen to make ‘who cares if they get destroyed’ teething toys if you’re interested.

I make it sound like it’s all under control but every now and then, he can really take you so far to the brink of your patience, you can look over the edge and see it smoking. It’s not all doom and destruction though – far from it.

•••

Yesterday, we went down to the beach to see what he would make of the sea. That’s my cue for a video clip:

Seems pretty obvious to us that the beach is going to be a great place to go. He was so tired when we got back, he slept for hours and best of all, he smelled like a dog that had been in the sea instead of a dog that accidentally on purpose fell in the pond over at Eleanor’s folks house – but as I write this that’s where they’ve gone right now, so we might be back to square one again in an hour or so.

More later… I hear the car pulling up.

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A tale of two settees

What a week it’s been. Mum and Dad have been off work, so every day we’ve been going to meet Molly (Granny’s rescue cocker spaniel who is scared of everything – except me of course – and guards her bed like the crown jewels). When we get together, we spend ages romping around in a huge paddock and there’s even a pond for me to be all Poodle-y in. It’s brilliant! I love it!

But even better than that, Mum has bought me a new bed – just look at the pics below. She also seems to have bought herself a new bed, but for some reason she doesn’t like to sit in it. Weird.

H x

Bordoodle on sofa

Here I am chilling on my new buffalo leather settee…er bed…with Mr Puppy.

Empty dog bed

Mum’s new ‘bed’ which she never sits in. In fact, she’s always trying to hog mine. She should know better!

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In the sin bin

Although everyone can see that I’m just a fun loving kinda guy, even I admit that I can be a bit over the top sometimes. This is normally when Mum starts saying ‘calm down’ and I totally ignore her or go and hide under the reclining sofa. But I think I might have taken it a bit too far today (er… and yesterday and the day before).

From the minute I got up, I barked at Dad to play with me…and pulled his socks, his pyjamas, his hands, his arms…you get the picture. And I barked and barked for two whole hours to get his attention. All I wanted was some supersonic action and tearing round the house and treats and a biting session and tug of war and the snake game and a walk and Mr Poindexter and the rope thing and my Kong Wobbler and my squeaky space hopper and a play in the paddling pool. Is that too much to ask?

Ok, maybe the space hopper just pushed it over into the realm of ridiculous. Anyway, I’m sorry Dad!! You’re just such a great person to play with. Especially when I get to lick your beard afterwards 🙂

Here I am being good, just in case you had forgotten what it looks like.

Hector on slobbery cushion

Mmm…chicken Kong… (said in best Homer Simpson voice)

H x

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Deputy Dawg

Well we both survived being alone in the house for a few days. I have an uncountable number of puncture wounds to my hands but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because those teeth are coming through live, loud and clear. I know this because I had to get my hand in there to remove a piece of cardboard that had got stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Let me see, he’s been with us for five weeks now. Training is going well but he gets too excited to sit down and have his collar on before we go out for a walk (I’ll try and shoot some video of me trying to get his collar on – it’s funny in the way that watching Hulk Hogan trying to wrestle an eel into submission would be) but he’ll quite happily sit perfectly still when we get back to have it taken off – so somewhere in that black curly head of his, he knows exactly what’s going on.

His legs are growing fast too. He’s like a miniature gazelle and his coat is getting quite thick and curly. On the plus side, he’s starting to get better at playing by himself and a new thing is that when he’s tired, he gets his blankets out of the crate and makes a bed somewhere that he wants to be.

Me and my bed

Me and my bed

I’m looking on this as a big step forward as it can’t be much more than another three months before he comes out of that crate for good. Right now though? I trust him about as much as er… well, I don’t trust him at all. He’s good and getting better but “I’m an idiot puppy” mode can reappear in the blink of an eye and that’s when the storm-bringer shows up.

Puppies sure grow up fast. I’m looking forward to being able to get all of the nice rugs in the house back out of the cupboard and consign these ‘temporary’ hessian rugs that have been ergonomically designed to take the skin off your body, into the trash. We also have puppy class tomorrow night – half the deal of going to puppy class is to learn something but I’m sure that the other half is to make you feel good about yourself that you don’t have one of the other dogs that are there.

Eventually, we’re going to need to do something constructive with him. I guess it will take a few years but Eleanor has been looking at training him to be a search and rescue dog. I think they go out and try to find people like dementia/alzheimer patients (they might be the same thing – sorry) who have wandered off but I guess there are many reasons you might want to use a dog to track a person who had gone missing. It’s not a criminal thing, so there will be no tracking across the Grimpen Mire in search of Stapleton but it exists as a ‘thing to do’ and could turn out to be pretty interesting for all of us.

What I do know is that if we don’t find something for him to do, he will find himself something to do and that can only end in trouble and insurance claims.

•••

A word to others with a new dog: a great distraction technique is dancing to ‘Young Americans’ by David Bowie. He really didn’t know what to make of that. Then again, not many humans do either. It’s also my professional opinion that he absolutely much prefers Everybody Loves Raymond to Ugly Betty over breakfast now. This is a change for the better I think.

S.