The Final Round Of Doggie Updates…For Now!

I think, maybe, this will be my last completely dog-focused post for a while. *puffpuff*. That was a lot of notes.

I learned a lot more about Tansy the plant when Steve and I went to Cambridge Centre one Sunday. We met a lady who dyes her own yarn, and she says she uses Tansy to do it. Cool, I learned an actual use for the flower.

I had mentioned once during one of my novels about Tansy that there was a puppy in training at work with me too. I wanted to mention that Tansy and the pupster got to play together one weekend. That was a lot of fun. Brad was down, so we brought Trixie too, but Trix would have none of this dog park stuff. I hope I managed to write that down before Trix retired, but we tried to get her to play with other dogs, and she was not a fan. Well, that persists, so we put her in the friend’s car who brought us so she could watch from a safe position. But Tansy had a really good time. And good on her and the pupster, when we got back to work, they weren’t magnetized to each other. That pupster is almost ready to go to her own puppy college. I hope she makes it.

Tansy’s puppy raisers are really sweet people. They keep sending us little gifts. I have gotten chocolates, cookies, seasonings, a blanket, dish towels, clothes, and more that I’m forgetting, and Tansy has gotten lots of her cute little puppy toys. It’s amazing that there could be a time when she could play with that without decimating it. She treats them with care now, it’s almost like she understands sentimental value. She kisses them, and one night, she fell asleep with one. But I hope they know that the greatest gift they ever gave me is black, fuzzy, playful and a genius. That’s the only gift I ever need.

As I was picking up Tans’s poop, I got thinking something. Dogs pick up scary patterns like “If she says ‘goodbye’, we are probably leaving after that,” or “when that talking box says those things, someone’s at the door,” or “cuckoo when we’re standing here means it’s our go,” but how come they never pick up the pattern of “when I crap, we’re always going to have to go to a trash after that.”? But neither dog has. They seem almost confused about when I would need a trash and when I don’t. It’s like the poop that I now have in a bag had nothing to do with what they just did. Every single time Tansy does anything relieving wise, she thinks we should go to the trash right after, even if she’s just peed. Or, sometimes she’ll seem almost surprised that I’m saying “find the trash” as if she has no idea why I would need such a thing. Dog brains are so strange.

Ever since I’ve moved to KW, I get a lot more people asking me if Tansy lives with me. I got some in Guelph, but I get more now. It really makes me wonder how they think this whole guide dog thing works.

A couple more Trixie things, and then I’ll shut up for a while. It makes me laugh that now that she has retired, she has gone back to loving water. I heard about how she swam in her puppy days. So, finally, near the end of her career, I had the chance to take her to a quiet river. She didn’t know what to do. She sort of skipped from log to log, stuck her nose in the water and snorted and sniffed, and bounced back out. But now that she’s retired, Brad says she’d practically drag him in if he wasn’t careful. That makes me happy that she loves water again.

And man does that dog need a Furminator. I had one for most of her time with me, and it would always get out a bit of hair, but it wasn’t monumental. But when I gave her to Brad, I said I wanted to keep the Furminator because I didn’t know what kind of a shedder my next dog was, and I didn’t think it did huge things for Trix. Boy was I wrong. In the last nine months, Trix has shown herself to be a shedding machine, and has developed this puffy feeling to her coat. We took the Furminator to her, and holy lord! I think we pulled out a whole dog! So she’s getting one. I guess I hadn’t noticed all the good it was doing because I was using it every couple of days.

Sheesh. I’m going to stop now. I have other stuff, but at least I got all the pure doggie stuff out of the way.