Newsflash!

Bulldogges snore.

Ho hum, you say, we already knew this.  But if that is your reaction, I don't think you understand just how LOUD Dorothy's snore is.  I'm sure that many evenings, people in the Poconos think they are about to be besieged by a strange early winter thunder storm.  But it isn't thunder!  It's Dorothy Hyacinth snoring down in Philly.

I had a pug in my bed for seventeen years, so I thought I knew from snoring.

But it turns out pug snoring and bulldogge snoring are two different things:  a pug snore is a merry little whistle, with perhaps the occasional snort, snuffle and grunt.  Dorothy's snore is so loud I swear if my bedroom were bigger, her snore would be enough to propel the bed from one side of the room to the other.

Her snore goes down a few decibels when her head isn't on a pillow, so on occasion I will rotate her counter-clockwise so that her head is level with her body.  This buys me a few minutes to fall asleep myself, before the lawn mower honk-shu starts up again.

I'm on the verge of trying to plaster Dorothy's snout with some breathe-right strips.  I'll let you know if they work.

Dorothy thinking: I don't snore in your ear; I whisper sweet nothings.

Red-Nosed Dorothy

I had a few ideas this month regarding my pets and the holiday season.  My first idea for Dorothy was to get her a pair of antlers.  And what could be more festive than a pair of red tartan antlers?  I know!!

However, the tartan antlers didn't work out so well.  Dorothy actually fared better with them on her her head than I thought she would.  Strangely enough, she didn't try to rip them off and tear them to pieces within minutes.  She kept trying to see what was on her head, though, so I couldn't get a good picture.  So as you will see below, it looks like Dorothy has someone's old plaid slipper on her head.  And that is hardly festive!

The slipper pictures:

From the foot of Archie Bunker:

Now we get a wee bit more antler-like:

Dorothy singing, O You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch!

So the antlers didn't really work.  Never fear!  I have more holiday pet humiliation to bring your way.  Stay tuned!

Knitting and Bulldogges: Like Oil and Water?

When Dorothy arrived in my home, a healthy, active 10 week-old puppy, I had to put a few of my hobbies on hold, primarily reading and knitting.  I soon resumed the reading, as it was easy enough to reach over stealthily while Dorothy was snoozing on my lap and grab a book and begin to read.  Knitting on the other hand, is not a stealthy activity.  By the time I fetched the knitting and opened the pattern book and started moving the needles, Dorothy, who by then would have one eye open, thought my activity looked like too much fun to ignore.  So I thought it best to just not make any knitting attempts for a few months.

When I got Dorothy, I was almost finished with Rowan's "Dominika" sweater, and had knitted all but one sleeve.  Here's a picture of what it should look like if being worn by a beautiful model:

It's pretty, right?  It's a little more of a poncho shape than I would normally wear, but I really liked the colors and the designs and thought it would be fun to knit, which it was.

In October, practically a year after I started knitting the sweater (sigh), I finally finished it and sewed it all together.  Here are some pictures:

Not too bad!  The sweater is closed somewhat awkwardly with a kilt pin, which I found and ordered from a seller on etsy (it has a beetle on it!).  So once that arrives, I can wear my handiwork.

Now that Dorothy is 11 months old, she is better at ignoring my knitting, so I've been able to do a little more of it on the weekends.  The problem is that if I am sitting on the couch, she likes to lie across my lap, causing me to have to bend my elbows and knit right under my chin--not very comfortable or swift a method.

If I'm lucky, I can get Dorothy to just lie next to me, like so:

As you can see in the picture above, however, "next to me" soon ended up being "with my thigh as her pillow".  Note how she is covering my pattern book with one jowl, and snoring on my ball of yarn.

Of course, I can --and do-- often revert to Plan B, which is to chuck a bully stick her way and have the couch to myself while she chews it.

Soon I shall have to knit a sweater for Dorothy!  I'm thinking perhaps something like this:

But I always could knit her a dinosaur sweater like I did to my poor Tulip.  Here is Dorothy as a puppy wearing Tulip's fine handknit sweater:

Hmmmm [steeples fingers], how can I most embarrass my Dorothy?.....

Pitbull Prejudice

I was looking at my blog stats the other day and saw that someone had reached this blog by searching for "the prettiest pitbull in the world."  I giggled.  I hoped they were pleased with what they found.  Dorothy is certainly the prettiest something in the world, but that something is not a pitbull.

The other day I was buying pastries in the bakery, and Sean was standing outside with Dorothy.  A woman came walking by and tried to scoot around Dorothy (who wasn't paying her any attention, intent, as she was, on making sure I remembered to buy her a bread bone in the store).  She said in a panicked voice:  "I'm scared of pitbulls, can you move your dog?"  And Sean replied, "Well then this is your lucky day, because she's not a pitbull," as he moved her aside.

I thought it might be time for a wee tutorial.

This is Dorothy, an Olde English Bulldogge:

This is a pitbull:

I'm sure this pitbull is a very fine fellow, and he is most certainly handsome.  But I don't quite see the resemblance between him and Dorothy myself.  

And it seems a bit silly to be scared of passing one certain breed on the street (especially if you can't identify that breed correctly).  I'm always reminded of a study I read in which the author kept a record of the people who went to emergency rooms after getting bitten by dogs--and by a large margin, the kind of dogs that were doing the biting were cocker spaniels!  (No offense to that breed either--Dorothy has a cocker spaniel friend, Potter, and she likes him muchly!).  

Be scared of the dogs that are growling and showing their teeth and acting menacing, and trust that you can walk safely past all the rest, no matter what their breed may be.

Dorothy, thinking "I'll bite your bloody kneecaps off."

The Bed Asked For It

Dorothy has always behaved beautifully in her crate.  She is in the crate from 8:45-12:00, and then again from 12:45-5:15, and it has almost never been a problem.  She goes into the crate willingly, knowing that I will give her a treat when she does so.  As far as I know, she has never barked or cried while in her crate.  In fact, as I have written about in this blog before, it is sometimes hard for me to get her out of the crate at lunchtime.

Starting a few weeks ago, however, Dorothy began attacking the bed that I put in her crate on top of the crate pad.  Spaced apart by about two weeks, there were two incidents where she tore the cover off the bed, turned the bed over, and then began snacking on the foam rubber that makes up the bed.  Finally this past week she began to do so every day.  I'd come home and be greeted by this sight:

So on Thursday I didn't bother putting that bed back in the crate.  Which means that she had just the crate pad plus the quilt her Aunt Elsie had made for her.  Now when I come home she has the pad and the quilt scratched up and arranged in strange lumps upon which she then perches herself.

I don't know why she is doing this, whether she is getting tired of the crate or just realized one day that it was fun to take her bed apart.  I think she is almost at the point where she might not have to be crated, and I've been experimenting for the past few months with leaving her free-range when I go on errands or to exercise for an hour.  I don't completely trust her yet though--she will still chew things she shouldn't, and she can also be a bit too rough with Posy.  She'll stand over Posy and look down on her half-playfully, half a bit threateningly.  For the record, Posy isn't fazed by it, but it still makes me inclined to not leave her out on her own yet.

One family member was very happy that the bed is no longer put in Dorothy's crate.  Plum is now quite pleased to be able to get in that bed whenever he is so inclined:

Plum thinking:  It's quite comfy, and the dog smell disguises my scent.

Rats in Rittenhouse Square

"Does Dorothy have a prey drive?" you may ask.

Yes, yes she does.  I answered this in the affirmative to myself the other day as Dorothy was flying me like a kite.  She was zooming after a rat she spotted in the park at 9:00 pm and was pulling me with such strength and such speed, that I was sure that I would soon be flying out behind her like a horizontal Mary Poppins.  Turns out Bulldogge is STRONG.

I don't know what was going on in the park that night.  I have seen the occasional rat there before, but always on an evening when it was 95 degrees out even late at night, and I always assumed they were out looking for water and refreshment, something in the slurpee family mayhap.  But this night was a cold one.

"Do rats hibernate?" I mused as Dorothy spotted another rat in a tangle of rose bushes and tried to pull me behind her into the thorny thicket.  For if they do, maybe this was their last hurrah before slumber, a kind of rat rumspringa.

An alternative idea was that perhaps rat poison had recently been distributed throughout the park and these rats were all woozy from hemlock.

At any rate, I realized that Dorothy has perhaps inherited her mother Nancy's penchant for hunting and catching frogs, only being a city bulldogge, her prey of necessity was varmint.

I also realized that night that it was a very good thing I had looped her leash twice around my wrist.

Dorothy being walked by a park denizen in an empty fountain,

sniffing for Templeton:

Many Furry Turkeys

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner for two this year....two humans, that is.  There were three four-legged creatures lurking about, two of whom showed much interest in helping cook the turkey.  Every time Sean opened the oven door to do a little basting, I had to hold Dorothy and Plum back from reaching their snouts near the bird and sampling the wares.  As the time for eating was nigh, Plum was practically pacing back and forth in front of the oven door; and Dorothy at one point saw her reflection in the oven window, and as you can imagine, it was love at first sight.

While we ate, we had a hard time keeping them off the table:

Dorothy, wondering if we know that bulldogges love turkey?

Dorothy just can't bear looking to see if Plum was given turkey:

Posy, wondering if we have buttercream frosting somewhere on our plates--

for what is a feast without it?:

Posy actually spent the entire day completely uninterested in the goings-on in the kitchen, and I in fact had to carry her away from this spot in the bedroom to see if she wanted to eat her normal meal:

Plum was finally given a tiny taste of turkey and gravy.  Here he is in the midst of his subsequent tryptophan food coma:

Considering that my kitchen has only one 18 inch by 18 inch square of counterspace, our many-course feast was quite an accomplishment.  And for once, I made a cheesecake that turned out perfectly (a pumpkin cheesecake with a ginger cookie crust and candied pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top.  Yum).

And I'll leave you with a few thematic pictures that capture the essence of the holiday:

Indeed.