Humiliations and General Grossness (Part 4)

I slept very poorly. I kept having mini panic attacks that once the septic guys dug up the other side of the tank they would find something even more horribly and expensively wrong. What if the reason the pipe had broken within the tank was because that whole end of the tank had collapsed? That would suck.

At the ass crack of dawn, I finally arose to await the arrival of Terrance and his assistant. They'd said they would roll in around 7:30. I made extra coffee in case they needed some and commenced to wait. While I did, it began to snow. We'd had nary a flake since mid-November, which I've attributed to the fact that I'd had my snow tires installed in mid-November. But down the flakes were coming now. I wondered if it would mean a halt to the project for the day.

Around 8:30, Terrance and his assistant arrived driving a different truck from the previous day. This one was a smaller and with a flat black metal bed in the back upon which was mounted a bright and shiny new portajohn pump. Hitched to the back of the truck, though, was a long trailer on which was secured a medium sized backhoe. Terrance unloaded it and soon its treads were rolling up my driveway and then across the yard to the septic dig site.

As they set up, I told Terrance the story of Sadie rolling on the pipe. They agreed it was an awful experience, but I know it was far from the worst septic-based thing that had happened to them, so they didn't feel too bad.

With a bit of digging from the backhoe's scoop, a new hole was opened a few feet to the right from the previous one. Some fine tune digging with a hand shovel later and the tank's other lid was exposed. This time they hooked the chain for it across the backhoe's shovel and lifted it off. Inside was a deep dark and relatively empty space, save for some liquid in the bottom. Terrance borrowed my flashlight again and poked his head into the tank to have a look around. He explained that he needed to see which direction the pipe leading out to the drainage field was headed. The interior portion of that pipe was the broken one that Sadie had rolled on, which is why he had to look inside the tank to see where it had been connected before the break. It seemed to be at the southern end of the tank, so that's where they next began to dig to expose the pipe leading into the yard. As expected, this pipe was also broken and partially collapsed. He said this was likely due to the whole tank settling at some point and sheering off the pipe on the outside, which led to the breaking of the interior part of the pipe as well. It probably still worked to some degree, but not at prime efficiency.

Within half an hour, Terrance and his assistant had dug out around the pipe, sawed through it below the break, installed a new section of thick PVC pipe that ran from within the tank, through the tank wall and connected to the drainage field pipe. We were now back in business.

"Wait about two weeks then pour a whole box of Rid-X down the toilet," Terrance advised. Then he added, "You still want that tree pulled up?" I explained that the wife did not want that tree dug up at all, but had agreed to it on the grounds that within a couple of months this would no longer be our house and we would not have to be concerned with whether there was a tree imbalance in front of it. Terrance's assistant hooked their chain around the middle of the tree, the other end to the backhoe and with a smooth application of reverse they pulled it right out of the ground, roots and all. Then it was just a matter of recovering both sides of the freshly repaired tank and smoothing the mud back down in a mostly level fashion. It doesn't look too bad. Not nearly as bad as the wife expected. The tree itself I sawed all the limbs from and will shortly carve it up for firewood with my chainsaw. I'll plant grass over it and hopefully by the time the place sells we'll have something of a yard over there again. And when it comes time for the new owners to have the septic inspected, we expect it will get a good grade. Much like the one the house that we are purchasing has received. The location of that new house and the story of how and why we came to buy it, however, is another story.

Humiliations and General Grossness (Part 3)

I went back in the house and was greeted by our dogs, who were very interested in getting outside to potty and explore and see what smells these strangers had left behind. Oh, you'll smell some smells, I thought. I opened the back door and out they ran.

After several minutes, I began to wonder why the dogs had not returned to the back door. They're usually only good for a couple of squirts in the yard and then they're back wanting to be let in. Oh, they're probably around front checking out the smelly hole in the ground, I reasoned. So I stepped out onto the front porch where I could see them over by the hole. I clapped my hands to call them and they came running. Moose trotted up the steps first, happy to see his pa as always. Then Sadie rounded the edge of the porch, a huge smile on her doggy face, and I was afforded a horrifying sight nearly as bad as the gates of hell earlier. Sadie's neck and shoulders were coated in something black. To the untrained eye, it might have appeared to be very black mud. But to my trained eye and nose, I knew it to be raw sewage.

Where did she... ? How did she...? What the f...?!

And even as I watched, she gave me my answer by dashing back to the poo tank pit where I witnessed her bend over and roll gleefully onto the sewage-coated piece of broken pipe that was still laying in the grass above the pit.

"LEAVE IT!!!!" I screamed. "YOU! LEAVE! IT!!!"

Sadie looked up through a haze of filth and flashed a big ol' grin of satisfaction. This was by far the greatest and best stinky thing she'd ever found to roll in and she was in doggy heaven.

Cursing, I threw open the front door and yelled at Moose to get in the house. I then marched back to the bathroom to prepare to give that damn dog the queen mother of all baths.

But which bathroom to use? Normally we bath the dogs in the big tub in the master bathroom. But we'd not yet sealed the new grout in the master bath tub surround. I could bath her in the hall bathtub, but did I really want to chance this dog shaking wet sewage all over the freshly painted walls? Onto the good towels? I finally opted for the bathroom with the most room and the most tile and went with the master. First things first, though, I snatched up my phone and texted "YOUR DAUGHTER JUST ROLLED IN SEWAGE!!!" to my wife. Then I started the tub and turned it to hot before undressing and putting on my ratty painting shorts and a T-shirt I wouldn't mind throwing out. Sadie could not, after all, be willing to come to the tub on her own, so I would have to capture her in my arms and carry her. This would mean time spent in physical contact with sewage.


Sadie was on the back deck when I went to look for her, but she caught a glimpse of what I was wearing and went into red alert. I tried to coax her over, but she dropped her front down to the deck and woofed. Any move I made toward her sent her skittering away. She knew I was out to get her and bathe her. I opened the back door and ordered her into the house, determined to get her into closed quarters where her running range was limited. I then cornered her in the kitchen where I was able to reason with her until she let her guard down enough for me to slip my arms under her chest and lift her up.

I held my breath as I carried Sadie back toward our bedroom, but half way there I had to take a breath. Oh, it was awful. I felt my throat tighten, suppressing a gag. You never consider when you use the bathroom that you'll ever see, let alone touch that waste ever again, but here I was carrying a dog coated in it.

I lowered Sadie into the tub and set about spraying her off with the shower hose. I avoided her head, though, because that's usually the trigger that makes her shake and the longer we could avoid that the better for the surrounding room. Pulling the shower curtain as far closed as I could, I then sprayed it off too then growled loudly at her when she did shake. Dots of dark water struck the shower surround and dripped down. Ewww.

Unfortunately, in my haste to get things ready I neglected to actually bring doggie shampoo into the bathroom. What I had brought was doggie conditioner. I couldn't leave her there to go look for any shampoo, either, or she'd be out of the tub and dripping diluted sewage around the house for sure. So I grabbed the next best thing, a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and started pouring it on her. I gave the bath extra attention to detail and spent a lot of time scrubbing her face, neck and shoulders. Then I rinsed her off and, since I'd brought it in, poured on some conditioner. Finally, I took a sniff of her neck to see if the sewage was gone. It took my nose a few seconds to process it, but it seemed like the smell was gone. I gave her some extra rinsing to make sure, then toweled her off with three different towels--all of which were popped into a hot washing machine before the dog could finish her triumphant post-shower victory prance around the house.

This accomplished, I cleaned up the bathroom, washed all the sewage drops away and then had a shower myself using the same H&S technique as with Sadie. After I too was dry, I grabbed one of our industrial strength contractor's trash bags and went outside to deal with the poo pipe. I managed to get it into the bag without actually touching it, then sealed it inside the trash can.

It took a few hours before I risked letting Sadie out again and even then I watched her every move and called her back every time she tried to head around to the front of the house. I had dispatched the pipe, but who knew what sort of drippings she could sniff out and roll in. I only hoped the following day's adventure would prove fruitful and far less disgusting.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Humiliations and General Grossness (Part 2)

Terrance said that when he was first starting out in the poo game, about the same age as his assistant, he was working on pumping out the tank of a man and wife whose septic system had become clogged. After they got the tank open and the clog roto-rooted, the man of the house came out and asked Terrance what had been causing the clog. Young Terrance said, "Condoms."

"What?" the man said.

"Condoms. You know, rubbers?"

The man of the house said that this was not possible. He and his wife didn't use condoms.

"Well, maybe they're from house guests," young Terrance reportedly had offered.

No. This wasn't likely either.

"Well, maybe it was the people who owned the place before you," Terrance said.

At this point the man of the house said, "I built the house." The man then excused himself, went inside and there shortly followed a great deal of shouting. Terrance's boss, who had been at the truck during this, came running up at the sound of the screaming from within the house and asked Terrance what he'd said to cause it. Terrance told him.

"Boy, you never tell the customer what's in the tank!" the boss said.

I laughed at this story, but within mere minutes we were to discover something of a different brand of disturbing within my own poo tank. As the level of the poo decreased within the tank, a large PVC pipe was exposed near the entrance. This was the end of the sewage pipe that ran from our plumbing beneath the house. It ended in a vertical T-joint, allowing the sewage to freely fall into the tank--at least until it had been submerged by it. Unfortunately, as the level of poo finally reached the bottom of the tank, yet another section of T-capped pipe was exposed, lying in the muck at an odd angle. It was not running from the house, but was instead broken, as evidenced by the shards of its non-T-capped end.

"Ohhhhh," Terrance said when he saw it. "If that's what I think it is then you're in for a world of shit."

"What?" I said.

Terrance borrowed my flashlight then got on his hands and knees and lowered his head down into the gates of hell for a look around. He shone the flashlight into the darkness, specifically toward the easterly end of the tank which extended several feet beneath the ground, running in front of the tree. When he came back up he looked grim.

"Yeah, you're in a world of shit."

It seems that the piece of broken pipe at the bottom of the tank was actually supposed to be connected within the other side of the tank and was the pipe that connected to the drainage field of the septic system. The way a septic system works is that all the waste from the house enters the tank where solids sink and paper and general sludge float. The solids are digested by microbes from the monthly Rid-X treatments we send down. The liquids (which include waste, but also gray water such as shower and general water runoff, fill up the tank faster until they reach the pipe leading out into the drainage field--which are a series of porous pipes running down into the yard. The pipes of the drainage field are surrounded by gravel and dirt and the whole thing acts as a filtration system, allowing the moisture to run back into soil where it is further filtered until it eventually returns to the ground water. According to Terrance, though, the broken pipe was preventing this system from working naturally and all the waste had just been building up in the tank itself. The system was broken and if not repaired would just lead to more cleanouts more frequently.

I shook my head in annoyance at this, but was not entirely surprised. After all, it's not like anything around here is ever going to be simple or go to plan. No, it all takes three times as long, cost three times as much and drives me nigh unto madness before the end of it. At least this time, though, I had two guys who were willing to return, venture into the gates of hell and fix our poo pipes. We'd be able to include their work in our packet of Cool Things We Did to Make the House a More Attractive Purchase for prospective buyers.

The poo tank assistant fished the broken pipe out of the poo tank with the poo rake and then dumped it in the yard. Terrance then picked it up and used it as a visual aid to explain the work that would need to be done, including replacing that thin chunk of pipe with much thicker modern PVC that wouldn't break. The work would involve a lot of digging--including possibly digging up the offending and dangerous tree, if we liked--to expose the other lid to the poo tank where the bulk of the work would need to be done. Until the work was done, the septic system would be inoperative and would just fill up to the gates of hell once again. It would take a while, but far sooner than if the drainage field was operational.

Knowing we couldn't rightly sell the house with a broken septic system, I agreed to the repairs. Soon the men were plugging the gates of former hell with their concrete lid again and winding their poo hoses back onto their truck. Terrance promised to return at the crack of dawn the following day.

If only the gates of hell had been the grossest thing I'd see all day.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Humiliations and General Grossness (Part 1)

One of the most humiliating experiences I can imagine is to take a huge dump in the front yard and then invite someone over to have a look at it. It's just not something that is ever done. Even more humiliating and nonsensical, though, would be to then ask them to dispose of it for you. As unbelievable a scenario as this is, it's exactly what I did today, only several thousand times worse.

Let me back up.

We're in the process of getting our house ready to sell. Don't get me wrong, we love our house and would not want to sell it at all, except that certain opportunities have presented themselves and we are pursuing them. (I'm sure I'll have more on that in future posts.) As part of this process, we've been going down the list of home improvement projects we've intended to accomplish for the four years we've lived here and have been finally getting to some of them while consigning others to the "let the new owners do it" heap. Thusly, we finally had the automatic garage door opener on my side of the garage replaced, redid the hall bathroom--though not the complete overhaul we'd planned--regrouted some places in the master bath tub, finally painted another bit of the master bath that we'd intended to completely remodel and had left the old color up so we wouldn't have to paint it twice, etc. Other items, however, were added to the list out of the blue.

"We should call someone to come clean out the septic tank," the wife said over breakfast. I'd already been thinking about that, oddly enough--not because of breakfast but because a cleaning of the poo tank was probably due. According to the paperwork we'd received with the house, the last time it had been cleaned was the year prior to us moving in. So if you figure once every 3-5 years being the norm for emptying a poo tank (according to some standards), it was about time. The thing is, I've never lived in a place with a septic system before. We also had no real clue as to where the tank was located for most of our time in the house. We deduced it was somewhere in the front yard, because that was the direction in which our poo pipe ran from beneath our house, but we were not at all sure where exactly the tank was buried. Our upper front yard has a lot of trees, so it seemed like it would have to be located in between some of them, which didn't leave a lot of room for a 1000 gallon concrete tank.

During our troubles with the well a few months ago, I had to spend some time on the phone with the health department to try and determine when our well was dug. While I was on there, I asked if they had records of the septic tank's installation and, hopefully, location. They faxed over two diagrams, one for the proposed tank and drainage field location and one for the inspected tank and drainage field location. These diagrams showed different locations for the tank, but I figured the inspected one was correct. However, this put the tank somewhere outside my office window, with the drainage field further down into the yard. I didn't do any digging to check, but figured that would be where I'd have to direct any poo removal specialists when that day came.

That day was today.

The poo removal specialists arrived around midday and were soon awash in the oh-so-vicious barks of Sadiemoose (the collective name for our two dogs Sadie and Moose). While the dogs snarled and slavered from behind the front window glass, I went out to meet the poo removal specialists carrying with me the aforementioned poo tank diagram. I explained to them our lack of knowledge about the poo tank's location, but proposed they check where the diagram showed.

"Has it been backing up on you at all?" Terrance the poo tank man asked.

"No, not at all," I said. "We just want to get it cleared before we sell it."

Terrance and his poo tank assistant then walked out to the area in front of my office window and poked the ground with a pointy metal pole for a while in the clearing in front of the two pine trees planted there. They made their way around the clearing, then back up between the trees near the house, then back down a way. There were occasional thunks as the pole struck either concrete or rock. Still, several minutes passed this way with no real consensus between the men as to where digging should commence.

Terrance took something plastic and orange from his pocket and handed it to me.

"Could you go inside and flush this twice?" he said. I looked at the plastic device. It was about the size of a flattened golf ball, but had a slot along one side within which I could see a small metal disc, about the size of a thick watch battery. By "flush this twice" I knew he meant, flush the tracker down, then flush the toilet again to send it on through into the tank. So I went inside and did this. When I came back, Terrance had produced what looked like a metal detector handle minus the pole and detecting disc. He aimed it at the ground until he found where it seemed to be the loudest, which was beside and beneath some of the limbs of one of the pine trees. They stabbed the pole down once more and struck something solid.

Digging began, hampered a bit by the limbs of the tree.

"That tree's in a bad location," Terrance said. His point was that with the tank being as close to the tree as it was, there would be root problems eventually if not already. They might not make it through the concrete tank, but roots could certainly bore into the septic pipe leading into the tank and gum up the works. He recommended the tree be taken out.

Within 20 minutes a foot and a half deep pit was dug out and the upper surface of a section of the concrete poo tank was exposed. There was a rectangular concrete plug in the top of the tank with a rebar hook embedded in it. They looped some chain through that hook and then lifted the whole thing off. And exposed there before us were the gates of hell itself.

I will not go into detail as to what the gates of hell look like in this case, but I will say that the gates were hellishly FULL. To the brim even. I will also not describe the smell, which you already have a pretty good idea about I'm sure. What I will say, though, is that having four years worth of one's own... um... leavings, exposed to strangers is a VERY embarrassing experience, even if it is the job of those very strangers to view and smell such leavings on a daily basis. I wanted to apologize and run away and issue denials all at the same time. But there was just no denying what we were all looking at and smelling, nor which of us had produced a goodly portion of it.

"Looks like we got here just in time," Terrance said. Then he and his poo tank assistant went back to their poo truck. Soon poo hoses were hooked up and stretched across the yard and into the gates of hell. The powerful poo pumps on the poo truck soon began to make quick work of their 1000 gallons worth of burden. And Terrance stood by with a giant poo rake to help the process along. He seemed pretty skilled with that rake, and was able to use it to retrieve his orange radio tracker, which he then tossed to his assistant. Made me wonder exactly how clean that thing had been before it had been handed to me earlier.

"I been doin this a couple days," Terrance said with a grin. "Thirty five years, actually," he added.

"Wow," I said. "What's the strangest thing you've pulled out of one of these?"

"A dead body," he said. Then he grinned again and said "Not really."

But he then told a story that was nearly as good.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

This is why we can never have "nice" things.

JUICE'S EARBUD LAW #1: Our dogs will not utterly EFFing destroy earbuds that cost only $5 at Big Lots. Earbuds over $20 in value? U.F.D.

The first act of destruction was for a pair of Bose earbuds my goodly wife purchased for me as a birthday gift three years ago. Magnificent things, they were, and actually fairly tough. But they lasted under a year before Sadie, in her puppy exuberance, jumped on their cord one too many times, severing the line in one channel. I still have them, on the off chance that one day nanotechnology will progress to a point that they can be repaired.

After that, I returned to using the Creative Labs earbuds that came with my old and dearly missed Zen Vision-M mp3 player. They too were leaped upon numerous times by Sadie, causing me to develop a tick comparable to the retarded younger brother of Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary. In the throes of these ticks, I am driven into furious screaming rages whenever my earbuds are violently yanked from my ears by a jumping dog. Again, my neighbors must absolutely love me. Eventually, the plastic casing of the headphone wires began to crack, so I repaired them using dabs of J.B. Weld. That worked well enough, but they were unsightly, so they became my backup pair that lived in the car.

After the untimely and dog-unrelated death of the Creative Zen Vision-M, I got another pair of Creative Labs buds with the purchase of a Creative Zen X-Fi, a player that I cannot recommend less. While the Zen Vision-M was a talented and elegant soul trapped in the body of a fat shlub, the Zen X-Fi was more like a really klutzy pop singer/actress with a substance abuse problem and an eating disorder. Sort of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman vs. Lindsay Lohan kind of thing. The earbuds that came with it were pretty good, though, but they too were met with doggy destruction. While I had finally trained Sadie to stop jumping up on me, we now had Moose who to this day refuses to stop doing that. In fact, after destroying the new Creative Buds, he then helped destroy the old emergency backup buds as well.

I then spent several months buying only $5 earbuds from Big Lots. They were Sentry brand buds, each pair contained within stout metal housing and not at all bad in the sound quality department. One pair lasted me nearly a whole year, with scarcely a doggy jump at all. I even managed to run them through the washing machine on more than one occasion and they still sounded fine. Eventually they too died and I bought another pair. In fact, I took to buying two pairs at a time, to have an emergency backup pair. They were great.

Nearly two months ago, I purchased a set of Tweeked Audio earbuds, which can be seen in remnant form in the accompanying photo. Tweeked is a frequent sponsor of the Nerdist Podcast, a show I wanted to support. And for about a month and a half they were great earbuds. My only beef with them is that the plastic coating is of the textured rubber variety, which catches on cargo pockets, plus the fact that the cord itself is long enough to reach my cargo pockets in the first place. My other beef is not a design flaw, but that the dogs seemed to sense I'd spent a little money on them and they were starting to get jumpy around them again. I found myself guarding my cord when in the presence of the dogs, always ready to turn a hip to the side to catch any enthusiastic leaping.

Last evening, while out playing with the dogs and listening to Jordan, Jesse, Go!, I called Sadie over to me to try and get her to play stick. As she arrived her fluffy tail caught the cord of my earbuds and its curly end deftly wound around the cord. I think she felt the cord on her tail and thought something was trying to get her, for she then tried to dash away. The buds were yanked from my ears as her tail slid up to the buds themselves. Oddly, I didn't scream even once. I just said, "Oh, Sadie, Oh, Sadie, NO Sadie!" as the cord tightened and then broke, leaving me with the lower half of the cord dangling from my pocket. One of the buds flew apart in mid-air and I saw it land. The other bud and the rest of the cable disappeared in Sadie's tail. I later found it ten feet away, where her tail must have flung it.

That's it.

No more.

I'm headed to Big Lots and will stock up on a whole pile of cheap ass Sentry headphones. I may even buy an extra pair to sacrifice to the dogs in advance.

All right, no one is to stone ANYONE until I blow this whistle. Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "Jehovah. "

I left the house to run a few errands, yesterday, and left the dogs outside to their own devices. I didn't even bother to put Sadie's "shock" collar on her, because she knows well her boundaries and only rarely ventures past them. (Plus, if she's not wearing it, I can hardly forget to take it off of her and shock her on the way down the driveway.) Moose, for the most part, orbits her and has not been seen to stray far from her side, unless it's to go hide in the mud beneath the back deck.

Upon my return, I found both dogs waiting for me at the top of the driveway, as though they'd been sitting there the whole time planning my welcome. I gathered up my grocery bags and we all went into the house through the interior door of the garage.

Around 20 minutes later, I noticed something odd with the back door of the house, the one leading out onto the deck. Crammed behind the handle of the door were two rolled up mini-magazine-sized pamphlets. I opened the door, already knowing full well what they would be.

"What are these?" I asked Sadie, holding up the November issue of The Watchtower and October's Awake! Sadie saw what I held and then looked away with a guilty air. "What Are These?" I repeated. Again, she dropped her head in shame.

"You let Jehovah's Witnesses get to the back door," I said sternly. "Moosey, I can understand, because he's new and he likes everybody. But YOU..." I said, waving the magazines at her, "YOU let them get all the way to the back door."

Then I noticed that I'd actually left the back door unlocked when I went out. I gasped.

"Jehovah's Witnesses could be in this house right now!" I said. "They could be lurking in the house right now, waiting to jump out and... and witness to me!"

Sadie lay down on the floor and looked suitably wracked with guilt. She was probably regretting not simply pulling the magazines out of the door and letting Moose chew them up.

"For shame," I added.

That the visitors at my back door were Jehovah's Witnesses was not actually the issue. I was mainly putting on a show for the dog's benefit because it struck me as funny for their appearance to BE a problem. The fact is, though, I don't so much mind visits from Jehovah's Witnesses or most other religions, but I also don't tend to invite them in to discuss religion either. My own religious views often conflict with theirs so the discussions I've entertained in the past have quickly degenerated into the three of us (there are always two of them) just conflicting at one another and moving no one's view even a smidge'.

No, the real issue here was that Sadie had allowed strangers to reach my unlocked BACK door. The front door would have been fine, as that's the door that strangers to a home SHOULD be visiting in the first place. I mean, really, isn't it a bit rude to just walk around to the rear door of someone's home uninvited? I would have been pissed off about it if I'd been home to meet them and would likely have pointed this out to them. But to the back door they had gone and Sadie had, apparently, not even attempted to eat them.

Now, I'm not suggesting that she should have attempted to eat them. However, she is an imposing enough dog at 80 plus pounds, with a bark twice as powerful as most male dogs her size, so she could have at least stood in the strangers' path and given them pause to consider whether or not she might eat them. Nope, they'd made it from my driveway, across the 30 feet of boardwalk leading to the back deck (as opposed to the 35 feet of nice clean boardwalk leading to the front door), had time to carefully deposit their magazines behind the handle of the back door, and, presumably, made it safely back to their vehicle. I didn't even see any scraps of clothing that might have indicated a hasty retreat with canine in hot, slavering pursuit.

Oh, I'm sure she barked at them, as she barks at everyone, but I rather expected more of a defensive front from her. Then again, maybe she had guarded the walk to the front door after all, and left Moose to guard the back one where he would have been completely ineffective. Or, maybe one of the Jehovah's Witnesses had cornered her in the front while the other snuck around the back. I don't know.

Regardless, it appears our fearless guard dog, who is impressively brave when it comes to defending us from the ever-present threat of vicious, rabid deer, isn't so good when it comes to smiling, peaceful strangers. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. I guess, instead, what I should really be thankful for is that I don't have a lawsuit on my hands, filed by a mauled Jehovah's Witness or two.

Anna Tolien? I think I went out with her once.

The wife and I have determined for ourselves that our puppy Moose (at right) is not a "damn little chow chow" as has been suggested. The chow features have failed to manifest, beyond a slight spotting at the tip of his tongue. However, we've still been doubtful as to his alleged status as a Leonberger/St. Bernard mix. While he has some Leonberger features, he also has some definite German shepherdy features too, though his flopped forward ears would seem to indicate he wasn't full blooded German shepherd.

At some point while watching TV, a breed of dog called an Anatolian Shepherd flashed across our screen and it struck us that it looked an awful lot like an adult version of Moose might. We quickly dashed to the innanet and looked it up.

Check it.

This is a picture from an Anatolian site. Same black face, same coloration, same curly tail, same love of sticks. The more we read, the more this breed (or a mixture therewith) was the better fit for Moose's ancestry. And from everything we've been reading, like Leonbergers, Anatolian Shepherds are supposed to be great dogs, not to mention exceptional guard dogs. They're also about as enormous as Leonbergers, which makes the wife happy, and with no drooling to speak of, which makes me happy.

Meanwhile, he's really come a long way as far as his potty training is concerned. I think we had at least three consecutive weeks without any piddling in the house and only one or two poop incidents. Mostly, when he needs to go, he either goes to the back door and looks at us until we notice him there, or he comes and finds us and barks at us until we ask him if he needs to go potty at which point he barks louder and/or tries to bite us in the face. The later is discouraged, the former encouraged. However, his efforts don't always work so well when we're asleep.

We've been encouraging both dogs to stay off of our bed. This is not easy, because they LOVE our bed and are fond of sleeping in it with us, if they can get away with it. However, beyond the matter of shedded dog hair and stank residue in the bed, there's the matter of massive and soon to be massive dogs hogging up all the leg room in our bed while we're trying to sleep. We could banish Sadie from the bed fairly well, but without a working crate (due to the fact that Moose destroyed the zipper in his "nite nite" collapsible crate) it was more difficult to keep moose out of it.

So not long after Christmas, we bought them both dog beds stuffed with recycled memory foam shredding. These we've stationed beside our bed and have been enforcing their use. So far this has worked surprisingly well. And the timing of Moose's potty training success finally kicking in around the same time was good. This way, we could sleep through the night with the dogs on their beds and didn't have to worry about puddles in the morning.

Two nights ago, Moose drank a lot of water before bed. At some point in the wee hours, he woke up, had to go potty and began trying to wake one of us up to let him out. Unfortunately, we were solidly asleep and the first we heard of any of this activity was when Sadie snarled after Moose crawled too close to her bed. We snuggled in and were on our way back to sleep when I heard a disturbing sound.

"Why do I hear running water?" I said. And, sure enough, it sounded exactly as if someone had left a faucet on in a steady pour. Immediately, we both thought of the pipes. With night time temps hovering between zero and ten for the past few days, it wasn't inconceivable that we'd had a pipe burst. I thought, Oh, please, let it just be Moosey peeing on the floor.

I leaned up and looked over the edge of the bed. In the low light from the night light in the hall, I could see Moose's little brown body directly beside the bed.

"Moose? Are you pottying on the floor?" I asked him. As I swung my legs out of the bed, Moose turned of his "faucet" and hauled ass for the back door. I followed and let him outside then went back to clean up the mess. I couldn't even be mad at him, because I knew he had probably tried to wake us up before succumbing to the pressure. And from the amount on the floor, his bladder had probably been at capacity.

We're pretty sure this was a one off event. Mostly, he's been sleeping through the night, so we think the days of having to get up with him three times are, at last, done.

Our New Family Member, the Third

A wise man once said: when a puppy piddles on the carpet, whose fault is it, the puppy's or its owner's? Answer: the owner's, because he's the one not paying attention to his puppy. That's paraphrasing, but we read something very similar on a puppy potty-training website, back when we were first trying to train Sadie. It's as irritating a statement as you're likely to find, but it's also true. Potty training a dog to "go" exclusively outside is a long and uric-acid soaked process that can drive you nigh onto insanity. Complicating the process further is that we refused to go the half-step route of first training to "go" on paper or floor diaper, opting for the whole hog "yer goin' outside or ye'd better get used to holdin' it" avenue.

It's the same process we used on Sadie, starting a year and a half back. We must have done a good job of it, too, because Sadie is completely awesome when it comes to whizzing exclusively outside. Point of fact, she's a pretty awesome dog all around, which we can see now that we have Moose (or Piddles McGillicuddy, as he's come to be known) as contrast. Whenever Sadie has to go "potty," she literally asks to go out; she comes and finds us wherever we are, and gives us an urgent-toned series of grunts and growls. That's our cue to say, "You need to go potty?" at which point she steps up the urgency of the growls. In the early days of this, we used to also have episodes of what we called "potty lying" in which the dog really just wanted to go outside to sniff or investigate the possibility of deer lurking in the yard and would use pottying as her ticket to be let out. This was annoying because at the time we didn't have our nifty wifi shock collar system in place and would have to accompany her into the cold using a leash to prevent her from tearing off into the night after said lurking deer. These days, though, she's so well-trained by her shock collar that she doesn't even have to wear the collar anymore and we completely trust her to stay in the yard and let her out whenever the mood strikes her.

As well trained as Sadie now is, we can't for the life of us remember what exactly we did to reach that level of perfection with her. How was it, for instance, that we were able to get her to verbalize her potty needs? We'd really like to know, because it seems silly to punish Moose for piddling in the house and yell at him to only go outside when he seemingly doesn't have any recourse for letting us know that he needs to go outside. So for the past few weeks, we've tried to remain vigilant for any signs that he needs to go and immediately let him out. Trouble is, he's a stealth-pisser and covert-crapper, capable of squeezing out some waste in seconds, usually choosing to do so in a room other than the one we're in and dashing back before we know he was even gone. Until about three days ago, we had not had even one single day without an accident in all the weeks he's been here. And I'm not convinced he even achieved that record feat, because I found and cold, old link in the guest bedroom two days ago, and who knows when he deposited that?

Fortunately, I think we're finally seeing the light at the end of Poop & Piddle Tunnel. While we have had some excretory indiscretions in recent days, they've all been of a solid variety, so he's either getting the message that the yard is where he needs to wee, or he's developing better bladder control. Maybe both. He's even begun to go to the back door when he needs to go, which makes us extremely happy. Now if we can only work on his verbalizing, we'll be good. As shiny and perfect as Sadie appears in this regard, in actuality it took her several months to achieve this state.

Meanwhile, Moose has been easier to train in other regards. He's actually sitting and waiting on command--at least most of the time--and is already shaking hands with enough regularity that it's nearing on-command level, too. He also fetches far better than Sadie, (who is perfectly willing to go get any item you throw, but will then only play keepaway with it); Moose actually brings things back, provided you don't tell him he's a good dog until he returns with them, otherwise he drops whatever it is and runs to be praised.

As much as we've hated having to be back in cleanup mode again, we're really digging Moose as a pup. He's a far less high-maintenance dog than Sadie was at that age and it's been a fun guessing game as to what sort of dog he really is. We keep telling him he'd better not be a damn little chow chow, but we'll probably survive okay, even if he is.

He and Sadie are great friends--except before she's had her coffee in the morning, when she tends to growl at him. Same goes for Avie kitty, who has wisely chosen to make friends with him while he's still tiny. They have lots of fun chasing one another around the house, with Avie running only until Moose gives up the chase, at which point she turns and slinks back in his vicinity to get his attention and start the game anew.

The other thing I'm trying to do with him is to take more pictures. We took lots of Sadie as a puppy, then a few more as an adolescent dog, but very few in between those stages and then adult. Got to get more in the bank before he loses his puppy cuteness. Everyone who sees him falls in love with him, even down to our vet. I've taken him in three times now for initial checkup and shots and each time the vet and her staff have trouble giving him back to me. This past visit, they even apologized that I had to wait around the waiting room for so long, because they didn't want to let him go. He's a charmer.

Small Deaths #9 : Behold a Fresh Victim

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

Oops. Called that one a bit quick.

Small Deaths #8 : Behold a Survivor!

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

A quickly snapped shot of a live green mouse.

As evidenced by its missing ear and maimed forehead, this mouse has had a run in or two with our dog, but has thus far lived to tell the tale.

Our Ferocious Child

There are several ongoing cold-wars being fought around my house at any given time, most of them involving our dog Sadie versus various populations of woodland creatures. Chiefly she has it in for the local deer, who frequently mill about in our yard, peacefully eating acorns just to spite her. However, Sadie's willing to extend her ire toward squirrels and birds, too. She even knows each animal group by name. If we say, "Is there a deer?" Sadie will rush to the front window and peer down the yard. If we say "Is there a bird?" she'll do the same thing, only looking up into the trees. For squirrels she does both. If she sees any of the above creatures, she will bark ferociously and dash back and forth between the windows in search of a better vantage point for barking. If one of us is nearby, she will also make a third stop at the front door, hoping we'll crack it open for her and let her blaze out into the yard, where she will chase after whichever creature she sees until it A) escapes up a tree; or B) travels past her shock-collar boundary. (The funny thing is that 95 percent of the time we don't even make her wear the shock collar, cause we keep forgetting to take it off of her when we drive anywhere. Yet, still she respects her boundaries.)

However, there's another animal type that Sadie doesn't quite know what to do about: other dogs. Unlike deer, birds and squirrels, who flee from Sadie, giving her something fun to chase, dogs are wildcards and may decide to stand their ground. Having never been in a fight, Sadie's not sure how to deal with dogs that are unphased by her terrifying, fluffy presence.

Take, for instance, her boyfriend. This is a neighborhood dog who wanders around freely at night and typically stops by our house at some point in its trek through the area. While I haven't gotten a great look at him, he's a "Terrierish" sort of small to medium sized dog and from his behavior does not come off as being at all aggressive. The first time I saw him was when he happened to sneak up into the yard while we were working in the garage one night and startled Sadie by suddenly being in a place where she had not previously been aware another dog was at. She didn't utter a sound. Another time was in the middle of the night while I was out letting the dog go "potty" and he came bounding from the woods with great energy, making a direct line for Sadie. I wasn't exactly concerned, cause she outweighs him by twice. And to her credit, she didn't run, but she certainly seemed confused as to what to do about him when he halted in front of her and sniffed her about the nose. Then, he turned and dashed off down the driveway with nary a problem.

Since then, he's been back frequently. The closest they've ever come to fighting was when he tried to sniff Sadie's ass and she jumped around and growled at him. Normally, though, Sadie's reaction to his presence is to pretend he isn't there at all. If he's not actively sniffing her, she will ignore him and, instead, sniff areas of the yard he had occupied only moments before. It's as if she's far more interested in having sniffed evidence of another dog that had been in the yard in the past rather than deal with the dog that is right there in the present. The best example of this was a couple nights ago, when she began whining at the back door to get out after hearing our neighbor's fenced-in dogs barking at something. I opened the door, she dashed into the yard and then began running full out toward what turned out to be her boyfriend. As soon as she realized he was a dog and not a deer, she immediately put on the brakes and then trotted a little further down the yard to sniff, as though the dog wasn't there at all. It could only have been funnier if she'd looked back over her shoulder to see if I'd seen her seeing the dog.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want her to get in a fight no matter how well I think she could defend herself. I just find her "dog-blinders" very amusing.

It is, however, more evidence that our dog is in need of more socialization. Or, if my wife has her way, a doggie sibling.

Small Deaths #7: Scavenger Caught!

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

Often times scavengers take advantage of a recent kill for a quick meal.

(Which is only fitting, in this case, as it was Avie's toy to begin with.)

Note its irritation at being captured on film.

The scavenger hides, blending seamlessly into its surroundings, awaiting the moment when it can return to the carcass.

Small Deaths #6 : Punk Cow 4.0 Even Deader Still

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

We only thought Punk Cow 4.0 was dead before.

Our gifted child

A few evenings ago, the wife and I were sitting on the couch enjoying some tube. Our dog, Sadie, had evidently not received as much attention as she wanted in the form of play time, so she rushed through the open back door and ran to find her stick.

The dog has had many sticks during her year and a half of life, many of them bordering on logs as she has grown to her current above average dog-size. Her current stick is actually part of a branch from a tree the wife and I had to chop down one day, which is nearly three feet long and sporting two sub-branches that make it form something resembling the letter F when viewed from the correct angle. She loves it, probably because it's big and unwieldy, offering her a variety of structures on which to chew, yet is still quite portable unlike some of her previous sticks/logs.


So, Sadie rushed out to find her stick, located it, gnawed on it viciously for a little while, then decided that if she brought it inside and showed it to Ma and Pa one of them might be enticed to follow her outside to play and allow her the opportunity to play keepaway from us with said stick. That decided, she raced back toward the house with the stick held horizontally in her mouth and attempted to run through the open back door with it. And because our back door is a bit wider than average, she might even have cleared it had our back screen door not been slid about four inches from being fully open. One end of the stick hit the screen and the other hit the door frame and the dog came to a sudden and violent halt, a comical act for which the wife and I had front row seats on the couch.

Before bursting into uncontrollable laughter, we first paused to make sure the dog hadn't just brained herself. She immediately looked a little surprised, sat down and dropped the stick. Then her expression shifted into a cartoon bluebirds flying about the head dazed sort of look, but as she saw us rising to examine her she walked into the house easily enough and seemed to be little worse for wear. We checked her teeth and mouth for cuts, but all looked fine. Soon she was back to her usual self, though she gave the stick a wide berth for a few days.

Cut to last night. The wife, being on call, came home late, so it was already dark. The dog, who'd been waiting patiently impatiently for Ma's usual evening arrival for hours, went nuts and began happily mouthing (we call it biting) her Ma and jumping around excitedly slashing everyone with her claws. (It's really the cutest thing you've ever seen, provided you're wearing the proper protective gear.) When she gets into one of those moods both she and we know the only thing that can be done about it is for her to take some of her pent up excitement out on one of her toys. And in these cases, we simply say "Where's your toy?" or "You'd better go find a toy" at which point she dashes off, finds one and then dashes back to show us how good she is at mauling it. All of her toys were outside at that point, so I opened the screen door and she dashed out to go find one. Unfortunately, I closed the screen door behind her and when she shortly returned with one of her toys she plowed headfirst into the screen door, knocking it off its tracks and bending part of it into the interior of the house.

I was standing right there when she did it and happened to look down at witness the whole thing. It was one of those slow motion moments in which I remember thinking, Here she comes. She'd better slow down. She's going to stop. Any second now she'll... *SLAM* What an EFFing moron.

Sadie stood still for a moment looking pretty surprised. Her expression was one part dazed and one part concern that she might be in trouble for breaking the door. I pulled the door a little further into the house and told her to come in, which she did. Again we checked her out and she seemed okay, not to mention relieved that she wasn't in trouble.

I've now reattached the door, the dog watching me all the while. It too is okay, though there's kind of a double crimp in one side of it from the two recent impacts.

How to Zap-A-Dog Yet Again, Pepe (a.k.a. "Even more Electrical Problems")

Monday night we went to see the new Trek film. I met the wife at the hospital and we drove to the movies from there in her car. On the way home, she lamented that she wished we didn't have to go back to pick up my car, cause that would add another ten minutes to the trip home.

"How bout I just take you to work in the morning and pick up my car then?" I offered. She accepted.

In the morning, we got ready to go and decided to pop by Biscuit World on the way. We decided to let Sadie ride along, because she's a big fan of Biscuit World ever since the day the lady at the drive-through line fed her six pieces of bacon. This act of generosity permanently marked the location on Sadie's internal map of great places to go. She piled in the back of the wife's car, the wife got in the front and I was about to climb in when I remembered I'd not turned off the wireless fence. I stepped back inside, flipped the switch and then went back to the garage where I was met with a series of painful yips and yipes coming from the car. The wife didn't know what was going on at first and thought perhaps the dog had found a bee in the car. I knew instantly, though, that it was Sadie's shock collar.

As she's been taught, Sadie dashed out of the car, no doubt thinking it had somehow become off limits despite its lack of warning flags, and began dancing wildly around the interior of the garage.

Now what I should have done was run back inside and switch the transmitter on again. What I did instead was rush into the garage and try to capture the dog to remove her collar. This was far easier in concept than execution, because the dog was jumping around, fearfully trying to get away from whatever was attacking her and looking at us both in confusion as to what wrong she'd done to deserve such a fate. Within a few seconds I had captured her, but couldn't find the clasp on the collar and managed to get shocked a couple of times in my search for it. Once I got it off, the thing continued to buzz until its 30 second time limit ran out.

My theory on why the collar had begun to shock her is that the wireless fence, when switched off, sends a signal to the collar to go into standby mode, not shocking the dog until such a time as the transmitter signal (or that of another transmitter) is detected. I further think that the metal of the car's frame may have interfered with that signal reaching the collar, so when the transmitter stopped the collar deduced that it was now outside of the boundary and began to shock the dog.

So, reissued memo to self: remember to take the damned collar OFF before going anywhere.
As for my Trek review...

Don't-Actually-Zap-A-Dog-But-Threaten-To-Zap-A-Dog (Zap-A-Dog Week Part 4)

Back when we first got Sadie, she was tiny enough to fit beneath the back deck of our house, which is one of these low to the ground decks not designed for animal traffic beneath them. It used to drive me crazy that she would do this there because I could imagine all manner of venomous serpents living under there, ready to strike any unwise puppies who happened to like sniffing and thrashing through the leaves and muck. We tried to head this off by putting logs and large rocks along most of the lower bits of deck edging and full on foot-wide boards along the higher bits, but there was still one section beneath a part of the house that juts out over one of the flower beds that we could never seem to successfully wall off which she could still squeeze through.

Of course, when we returned from our July spent out of state, the dog realized with great frustration that she had grown so much in the intervening month that she couldn't fit under any of it, so we stopped worrying. And, some time during the winter, we even removed the boards from the higher section of the deck, thinking there was no way Sadie could squeeze under there.

We were wrong.

A few weeks back, I heard the crunching and scuffling of leaves from beneath the deck and realized that Sadie had indeed squeezed under there and was actively getting as filthy as she could manage. It wasn't really snaky weather, yet, so I wasn't too concerned, but wanted her out all the same, on principle. With the application of Pupperonis I was able to coax her over to the edge where she spent ten minutes teasing me and snatching bites until I was at last able to grab a paw and haul her out. Still, I failed to replace the boards, thinking this was somehow a one off.

A few days after installing the wireless fence, Sadie dashed back under the deck. It was rainy out and I didn't want to have to give her a damned bath from all the mud she would no doubt wallow in, so I very intelligently stood atop the deck and screamed at her through it to no avail. It then occurred to me that a timely scare might work wonders.

I stole away to the wireless fence transmitter in the laundry room and, after some consideration make certain I was not about to act too unethically, I quickly dialed the fence's field range from its highest setting of 8 down to 1 and then immediately back up to 8. In theory, this would reduce the wireless fence from a radius of 90 feet down to 5 feet and then back again. The key to my plan was that the sudden reduction would set off the warning alarm on Sadie's collar without actually shocking her, prompting her to take action.

Worked like a dream.

Almost as soon as I'd dialed the fence back up to 8, I heard a sudden THUNK as Sadie bonked her noggin on the underside of the deck in fright at the sudden BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPing coming from her collar. And, miliseconds later, she was topside and looking relieved at her collar's silence.

I told the wife what I'd done and we laughed and laughed and laughed. Then we put a baby gate over the space beneath the deck to block it until I can find some suitably large rocks. Now that I consider it, though, it would probably be just as effective if we just planted one of the wireless fence border flags there, instead.

Zapping-A-Dog Yet Again

I've discovered some more bits of advice for owners of the wireless fence: it's a good idea to remove the correction collar when taking your dog ANYWHERE outside of your yard regardless of whether or not you first remembered to turn off the transmitter--but especially if you didn't

Couple of examples...

My dog is fond of daily walks in my neighborhood, but there are a couple of different routes I can take her on depending on my mood. One is downhill for the first half, then back up, and the other is uphill for the first half, then back down. Since installing the wireless fence, we've only gone the downhill route, which passes by fewer houses than the uphill route. A couple days back, I took her out (making certain to turn off the transmitter first) and we went the uphill route. Everything was fine on our way up the hill, but upon our return trip, Sadie strayed too close to the property line of a neighbor who, it turns out, has the wired version of the invisible fence installed. Sadie stepped onto his driveway and crossed the wire he'd embedded in it, which put her in the warning zone of his yard. Her collar immediately began beeping, causing Sadie to freak out because she didn't know which way to run. I didn't realize what was happening, at first, because I had my earbuds in, but I could see the dog was distressed, made the proper deduction and unhooked her collar without shocking myself.

Example Two: Sadie LOVES to go on car rides. So while the weather is still fairly cool, I've been taking her on all my errands. One day, two weeks back, I decided my car had reached the saturation point of exterior filth and was in need of a scrubbing. I thought it would be fun to go through a car wash and see what Sadie thought of it. I paid the automated system and drove into the car wash, and it started up, at which point Sadie freaked out. She whined and growled and barked as the rag rollers began slapping against the windshield and roof. After a few seconds of this, though, she leaped from the back seat into the front and climbed into the front passenger floor, where she curled up, practically burying her head beneath her paws. She only stayed there for a few seconds, though, before jumping into the back seat again, where she worriedly growled at the massive creatures attacking the car, then jumped back in the front floor. This happened three or four times during the process, but we were sort of in it for the long haul at that point, so I could only pet her try and reassure her that it was okay and that she was a good dog. We think the front passenger floor is her place of refuge, because that's where she used to always ride when she was a small puppy and that's where we found her cowering one day this winter when we parked near the door of a Cracker Barrel and suspect she was startled by the other customers walking past the car or by someone trying to talk to her through the window.

Jump ahead to yesterday. I have an errand, I have a dog that wants to go, I let her in the car, back out of the garage and head down the driveway like normal. Just past the warning flags, Sadie wedged herself atop the arm rest between the two front seats, right in my way.

"Get in the back," I told her. She didn't budge. "Get in the back!" I said, pushing her with my elbow. She remained. "Get in the damned back!!" I shouted. This time, she leaped between the seats and hopped into the front passenger floor, where she spun around facing me, then sat down in her best straight-backed "LOOK, I'M BEING A GOOD DOG" pose and appeared very very concerned. Only then did I notice the beepbeepbeepbeepbeep coming from her collar and realized I'd forgotten to turn off the transmitter.

I stopped the car, pulled the collar off of her and then spent a minute apologizing, saying things like "I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Pa did not mean to shock a dog!" while she did the I'm a Good Dog dance all over the front seat.

Zap-Another-Dog

The instructions for our dog-zapper fence indicated that the collar's default setting was at level 1, which only emits a warning beep. It suggested that the collar's correction level be set to level 2 for training, instead of level 4 which provided the maximum voltage. I mentioned this to the wife as we were initially exploring our box of wireless fence. I also read her the part that suggested that level 4 might be necessary for overly energetic dogs and how I thought Sadie might qualify. And while I saw the wife messing with the collar later, I didn't think she'd changed the levels at all.

On the first evening of owning the system, I turned it on and set it for the maximum boundary area (#8) and went outside to trace the safe zone by walking until the collar beeped and then planting a flag along the perimeter. The system actually sets up a shockless warning zone at the outer edge of the safe area where the collar will simply beep. If you stray further than that, the collar will continue beeping and give a warning shock and will continue administering shocks until the collar returns to the safe zone or 30 seconds passes, after which it shuts down. I couldn't tell, of course, if the collar was actually giving off any shocks, just from the beeping, so I stepped across the boundary beyond the warning zone and touched it. It gave off a very strong shock--powerful enough that I jerked my hand away. That would definitely get a dog's attention, but if that was level 2, I'd hate to see level 4.

What I didn't know was that the collar was actually set on level 4. It's not the sort of thing you can tell by looking at it, because changing the levels is done by pressing a single button until the proper number of flashes occur on the collar's LED light, alerting you to the current level. Evidently, the wife had adjusted it to 4 or it was simply set there when we bought it.

Still unaware of the level, I soon saw just how much the dog's attention was captured by level 4 when I allowed her to step across the boundary for a test shock. At first, she just heard the warning beep, telling her she was in the warning area. I told her to come back and, as usual, she ignored me and kept going until the shock kicked in. She yelped, nearly flipped in the air and then practically fell over trying to get away from whatever had clearly just stung her on the neck.

I felt awful. I took her in the house and gave her a Pupperoni and told her she was a good dog. I then sat down with the collar, was horrified when it flashed four times when I tested the setting. I changed it to level 2 and tested that on myself, too. It was still uncomfortable, but far less powerful than level 4.

The wife and I had to do some reconfiguring of the safe-zone to fully encompass our back yard and partially cover the upper part of the front. This basically involved moving the transmitter from the garage to the laundry room. After that we planted flags around it, noticing how our safe zone flags seemed to match up nicely with the ones remaining from the previous owners--which might mean they had the same system. The only problem area seemed to be at the driveway, where there was something of a dead zone that refused to beep. In fact, the wife walked most of the way down the driveway before the collar kicked in. We thought this might be a problem.

Now, while it was certainly not a fun experience for Sadie to be shocked at level 4, it might have been a good thing in the long run. It only took two real training sessions from us and she pretty much knew to stay away from the flags. I don't think she was even shocked a second time, as she had learned to associate the beep from her collar with "get the hell out" and would run back toward the house whenever she heard it.

After her second training session, I thought she seemed pretty clear on the whole stay away from the flag system, so I decided to do an early road test and see how things went. I unclipped her leash and let her free. For about half an hour, Sadie stayed with me in the back yard and played and chased the water stream from the hose while I was trying to water the grass seed I'd planted. Then, just as I was ready to head back inside, she looked over toward the neighbor's house, did the "I'm not on my line" math and bolted. I walked to the edge of the house to see how this played. Sadie made it all the way in front of the next door neighbor's house before the collar began shocking her, at which point she gave a sudden jerk, stopped and looked back in my direction.

"Come on back, Sadie," I called. She then turned and ran as fast as she could back to our yard, then came up to me and did the "Am I a good dog?" dance.

"That's the way it's gonna be," I told her.

We've now had a week of solid use for the wireless fence and we still like it a lot. Sadie does, too, cause now she can go pretty much where she wants and has a lot of space to run and play. She still tests the system now and again. For instance, being a smart dog, she's discovered the dead-zone in the driveway and has dashed through it a few times. She can usually make it nearly to the bottom of the driveway before the collar kicks in. This gives her an extra long run back up the hill to get in the safe zone, assuring her a couple of shocks in the process.

We've also discovered that instinct overpowers pain, as she willingly ran through the barrier in pursuit of some deer. She got 30 seconds of shocks with that one, but kept right on chasing her adversary until the collar shut down. She returned to the yard, soon enough, and the collar kicked back on. I suppose if we have too many such incidents we'll have to raise her level to 3.

Finally, we don't think we'll have to buy a battery backup for the system after all. I think PetSafe has made some improvements over the one our vet told us about, because we've unplugged the transmitter to move it while Sadie was wearing the collar and there were no accompanying beeps or shocks.

If any of you were on the fence about buying such a product, it certainly has my household's endorsement. It's pricey to be sure, but far cheaper than installing an actual fence around a half-acre.

Zap-A-Dog

Over the past year, our dog Sadie has grown from a timid puppy, afraid to leave our sight, into a large dog more than eager to flee the confines of our yard and dash about the countryside chasing all manner of creatures--usually her arch-enemies the local deer. It's not such a bad thing, as our neighborhood is kind of out in the woods without a lot of heavy traffic. However, her escapes do cause us some concern that she might do things to annoy the neighbors, chiefly going to the house of the attorney next door and chasing his dogs up and down their fence line with all three barking furiously (though still playfully). We've really wanted some manner in which we could keep her in our yard, beyond our usual tactic of tying her to her pull line or keeping her on a leash.

Fencing would work, but we don't really want a fence, nor do we want to do the work to put one in. We also looked at invisible fencing, which many of our other neighbors have, but that too requires a good deal of work, not to mention expense. We knew that the previous owners of the house had something like that at one time, because we found their little marker flags all over the yard when we moved in, but we've never found any sign of the wire that usually accompanies them. Then there was the matter of whether or not an invisible fence would even work on Sadie. The wife has had some experience with invisible fence systems and St. Bernards in the past. She once wired up the entire back pasture of her grandmother's house in order to let her former St. Bernard, Honeybee, run free. Once the system was hooked up and the collar placed on the dog's neck, Honeybee stepped across the wire line, twitched at the shock, looked annoyed and then bounded away. It never worked. We would hate to burn money and calories on setting up such a fence only to have it fail to work on our St. Bernard mix.

Then, on one of our near daily visits to Lowes, I saw a product that I hadn't before known to exist: a wireless invisible fence. This product purported to be a radio transmitter that would establish a half an acre area in which a dog could run free, but which if the dog attempted to leave would cause the accompanying collar to give off a warning beep and then a shock. The kit cost three times as much as a wire-based fencing system, but the more we thought about it the more we were of the opinion that it would be worth paying that much more if we didn't have to hassle with burying damned wires. Furthermore, the system was portable, which would make keeping Sadie in line at the in-laws house a much easier prospect.

During our last visit to my in-laws house, we took nigh on the entire animal population of our house, with Sadie and Avie sharing space in the car. My sister-in-law and her family also visited that same weekend and brought their two dogs and cat. This, too, was great, as Sadie doesn't get to play with other dogs much and she loves it, so we were prepped for a dog party. What complicated matters, however, is that it poured rain almost the entire weekend and my in-laws were in the very earliest stages of resodding their yard. In other words, Dog Fest `09 became Mud-Dog Fest `09. My sister-in-law's two dogs are very well-behaved creatures and stuck around the house. Sadie, however, likes to roam and frequently ventured out into the neighborhood and toward the nearby highway, whenever she was set free to run with her cousins (or whenever one of the wife's cousins dropped by and thoughtfully let her out of the house). By the end of the weekend my white dog was red with mud and no amount of bathing seemed to help. And, a mere two hours before we were scheduled to hit the road back to WV, Sadie found something dead and spent a good ten minutes rolling in it. This made our drive back a miserable affair.

So you can see that the thought of a wireless fence system that could help prevent some of the above was an attractive one. But, again, would it work?

While we stood there considering the purchase, a guy who was standing nearby piped up, saying, "Hey, if you're thinking about buying one of those, I just wanted to let you know something," he began. We over and noticed that the man happened to be our trusted and much-liked veterinarian. He went on to tell us that the wireless fence was a very good product, but if we lived in an area prone to power outages we should be cautious because if the power went out it would shock the dog. He said his parents used the same system, but had also purchased battery backups so their dogs would not be harmed. We thanked him for his advice and bought the wireless fence immediately.

The instructions for the system suggested that it would take a good two weeks of thrice-daily training sessions in order to make an average dog understand where it could and couldn't go in the yard. I'm proud to say that ours had it down within a period of 12 hours and 2.5 training sessions. She's a very smart cookie, but part of it might stem from a poorly planned .5 of a training session I started with.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Our Medcon Adventure, Part 7

The MedCon adventure culminated with a massive banquet on Saturday night, complete with a fabulous meal and the obligatory convention banquet banter from the podium filled with inside jokes I didn't get. I didn't care, though, because I was full of good food and decent wine and an assortment of tasty desserts.

On Sunday, the wife and I lit out around noon and headed up to Georgetown so I could introduce her to Five Guys Burgers. She agreed it was a tasty burger, but I suspect she didn't find the journey nor the crowds nor the near obscene lack of parking to be worth the trip. We didn't stick around very long after lunch, preferring to get the long journey back to Borderland underway.

The whole trip home, we kept talking about how we really wished we could go pick up Sadie from the vet that evening. I knew this was a futile wish, as the vet was closed, but despite knowing she was well taken care-of, our parental guilt at having left her with strangers for six days was overwhelming. I told the wife that I'd promised Sadie I would be on site at 8:30 when they opened to pick her up. Unfortunately, the vet told me that pickup time for the kennel didn't start until 10 a. Add to that the fact that this was also daylight savings time weekend, which added another hour and then add that I neglected to set all the clocks ahead and it was nearly 10 a by the time I realized it, and Sadie had a bit longer of a wait than promised.

I brought the new video camera with me to document her release.



The staff said she had been kind of freaked out for the first day of her stay, but settled down after that. One of the vet techs who worked there had even befriended her, for she went right over to him and licked his hand when he came out to say good bye. He mentioned that he thought she was too smart for her own good, as it had taken him 20 minutes to corral her back into the kennel after one of her five or six daily yard-sessions.

After leaving the vet's we headed for the wife's office for a reunion visit. After that, we had a good long walk in the park, which is where I noticed that Sadie was attempting to take a whiz about once every two minutes. I knew this wasn't normal behavior for her, but didn't know if the exposure to the no doubt stratified layers of dog urine in the vet's exercise yard had blown a territorial fuse in her, causing her to pee on everything, or if she was suffering from what I suspected was a urinary tract infection. Turns out the latter, which I learned after returning her to the vet's office that afternoon. The vet said that such infections were common in stressful situations, such as a first time away from home and owners, and a couple weeks of antibiotics would knock it out. They did.