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| Front row: Glacier Back row: Brody Holding leashes: Husband |
The Terrierist has gotten her name honestly. She's like the sweet little old woman you'd never expect to be plotting some evil plan - she's just too angelic-looking to even consider that as a possibility. But make no mistake, after baking cookies for the church bake sale, she's headed back to the hidden room in her basement to fine-tune the plan. That's Glacier. She will be sound asleep (AKA plotting with eyes closed) on the couch snoring one minute (I've really got to get a good video of this - it's incredible how loud she is for her size!) and the next she will stroll by nonchalantly, grab Brody's rear leg to test if he's up for a wrestling match, and then walk into the dining room and pee on the floor. Mind you... she has been outside within the last hour (Opportunity #1 to do her business properly), she has walked right by me (Opportunity #2 to indicate a need to go outside and do her business properly) and strode past the door (Opportunity #3!) but she has ignored those opportunities and moved right onto Action Plan A which includes peeing in nearly the exact same spot in the middle of the dining room floor each time. (I really can't be too mad because she's only done it three times [once in the middle of the night and twice while I was sitting in the living room five feet from her] but when she does do it, it just seems so deliberate.)
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| Plotting. |
The Terrierist likes to keep us guessing as to how she will strike next... like a few weeks ago when we had begun to trust that she wasn't going to chew anything so we started letting her stay outside of her crate in the dining room with Brody when we weren't home - She did this successfully for at least a week with no nonsense... then I came home one day and she had nibbled two pork chop sized holes in the slipcover (that my dear friend had made for us!) on one of the two arm chairs in the dining room.
And for today's strike, she hit where it hurts... Last year I found the most perfect pair of purple "warmies". (Warmies are the socks that my husband strongly dislikes because they can't go in the dryer and must be hung on the drying rack over the stove. Warmies can be wool, alpaca fiber, or a blend of fibers that will shrink and/or break down in the dryer.) This particular pair of socks were just the right length, thickness, and had just the right amount of stretch to be comfortable and stay up. They were perfect.
We have finally started having some real fall weather and I pulled out the warmies last week. I often go to sleep with socks on and slip them off after I warm up. If I'm conscious enough, I'll toss them in the general direction of the laundry hamper and then get them the rest of the way in the morning.
Saturday was chilly so I wore my perfect purple warmies... and tossed them toward the hamper somewhere around 2am (or maybe it was 1am - I don't know - the clocks changed and that always throws me for a loop for a few days). At 3:30am Sunday morning I had someone call out sick from work for a 7am shift so I had to get up very early and spend the next several hours in my office trying to cover that shift and a few others that had also come open throughout the morning.
When I finally came down to the kitchen, my husband said "I have some bad news. The Terrierist struck again" as he held up one of my perfect purple warmies displaying the completely chewed off toe area. I was not a happy Dog-ma and turned, with sock in hand, toward to offender now lying peacefully in her bed on the kitchen floor. "Naughty!" I said as I presented her with the sock. She nosed it and turned away like I'd offered her liver - okay... that's me that hates liver... - substitute liver with whatever grosses out a dog... which judging from her rolling in deer doo at Grandpa's farm last week, isn't much, and that sums up her reaction.
I brought her attention back to the sock and said again "Naughty! This is MINE. NO chewing. No! Naughty!" I then put the sock on the floor next to her bed... and she spent the next 35 minutes resting her chin on it before I threw it away.
She is the "run silent, run deep" type of Terrierist as she tends to begin to lull you into believing that her puppy nonsense is behind her when !WHAM! she slams you with the cold hard truth that she CAN and WILL do whatever she wants if and when the feeling moves her. yay. That's small and all lower case in order to emphasize my enthusiasm for this phenomenon. I have none. This does not thrill me.
When we brought Brody home he chewed up his bed in his crate twice then, just to see what would happen, we tried him out in the house for an hour then two hours, then all day... and he was an angel! He's never been in a crate since then (except when he would sneak into Glacier's crate to steal the peanut butter-filled Kong she had ignored while busying herself with the prime order of the day... chewing her way out of the crate instead of occupying herself with the tasty "busy treat".)
Brody has always been a perfect gentleman in the house - no peeing, no chewing, no garbage, no... no... wait a minute! He's NOT perfect! I just remembered when I bought chocolate covered Halva for my nephews for Christmas and Brody stole it out of a shopping bag and ate it... on our bed... smearing chocolate alllllll over our handmade quilt - I won't describe what it looked like when he was done but I was happy it smelled like chocolate when I approached...
Okay... I feel better about this. Glacier's got room to grow! YAY!
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