Spring Walk with Jake

One of Jake’s favorite things to do is show out of town visitors around his town.

Here he is pointing out some beautiful daffodils on our morning walk.

Spring! At Last!

Here’s a long due post updating the status of my dear pups.

First, Jake, or Mr. Jake as I’ve been calling him lately. He’s taken his squirrel chasing duties very seriously this spring. The well-fed squirrels in our neighborhood are nearly as big as Jake and they taunt him mercilessly. Jake is now six years old! Some think he would never make it. He is maturing, slowly, and has become quite the serious guy. Jake has his routine, listening for the mailman, barking at dog walkers passing by, rearranging the dog beds in the living room, ignoring his food bowl and playing the blanky game with my husband.

I just ordered a new set of clipper combs and a doggie beauty parlor day awaits both dogs. The spring haircut is always the most challenging as I let their hair grow all winter and it gets quite long and bushy. Needless to say, neither dog likes to look and smell good.

Here is a shot of Jake in a winter sweater that his mom made for him.

As for Gillie, she is ten years old now! She sure doesn’t act like it. She still rules Jake with an iron paw. It’s funny to watch how easily she makes Jake get out of his cozy bed when she wants to lie in it. He does growl a bit but gives it up right away. She also does this dominant move in our bed at night. Jake is usually the first one in bed and picks his spot and then Gillie will stand over him until he gets up and moves to another spot.

I thank my lucky stars every time I get to watch these two wrestling and playing together. I have had six Yorkies up to now and none of them ever played together. It had to be luck on my part as I never would have guessed that they would have matched up so well.

Hopefully more to come with current photos. Happy spring!

Another Year Comes to an End

Gillie always looking up at me.

It has been a very busy year for Jake and Gillie and VERY busy for their mom and dad. There was lots of time spent traveling for the humans and lots of time spent with Auntie Jane for the pups. No complaints from the pups. 🙂

Jake is coming up on 6 years old in March 2015! Hard to believe he’s been with us that long. He has come a long way with his anxiety issues but they will never completely go away, and that’s ok with us. Sometimes he’s a cuddly puppy and sometimes he’s a grumpy old man, we just deal with it. We are never bored.

Gillie is 9 years old and the love of my life! She never gets tired of hugs and kisses and is my constant lap buddy. We still have issues with house breaking, but I knew that was a possibility at the start. It’s a small price to pay for her sweet company. Her health is great since we got rid of those nasty teeth 5 years ago and she eats like a lumberjack.

Sorry I’m not better at keeping this up to date, but I’ll try harder next year. Merry Christmas, happy holidays and happy new year to our followers.

Gillie is staying inside and cool!

Gillie says, “Mom takes us for a walk in the morning and only walks me in the shade. When I come in I drink lots of water. I like water.”

Memorial Weekend

We are going away for the weekend and, sadly, no doggies allowed. Don’t feel sorry for Jake and Gillie, though. A friend’s daughter is house/dog sitting for the first time while we are gone. Jake and Gillie met Katie a couple days ago and they all got along famously. I have printed out an instruction sheet that’s a couple pages long and most of it is for the dogs.
Katie will be sleeping over so Gillie will have someone to snuggle with in bed. I know she will not miss me much.
Since it is spring, I have been working on my garden. It’s not finished yet, but Jake and Gillie are always there to help out. Jake chases the squirrels and Gillie picks up leaves and chews on them. Very helpful.
They love being outside with me when I plant and weed. Gillie likes to sun herself on the pathway, I worry when the bricks get hot, but she doesn’t seem to mind the heat on her belly. I still shoo her away when the bricks are hot.

Above is a shot of Jake nosing around in my perennial bed. He’s not allowed in there and hops out when I yell at him.

I will miss these guys like crazy but we’ll only be gone a couple days and they will have fun going for walks with their new friend.

My Bad!

Ok, I know it’s been a long time since I posted here about my furry kids, but I really have been busy with them and MY life.

Lets do Gillie first. She has been an angel, as usual and keeps me constant company when I’ll allow her. She does tend to be a tad clingy and I don’t like to have her in my lap when I’m eating.

We have discovered that she only pees in the house when I’m home or if I’m home and she gets anxious about visitors or has a panic attack. These panic attacks can happen any time and for no reason that I can see. It started in the middle of the night and she woke me up by climbing on my head and shaking her whole body. Of course, this woke me up and I just grabbed her from my head and tucked her into my armpit, under the covers, and she settled down and we both went back to sleep. This happened a couple more times, no thunder, rain, or loud noises that I could hear. I’m guessing she had a bad dream flashback of her previous puppymill life, which I don’t even like to think about as she was horribly treated. The other 2 times she panicked happened after I had a student over for a fiddle lesson. She was fine up until my student left and I started playing some tunes by myself. She tried to climb on me as I played and was panting and drooling and very agitated. The only way she would calm down was when I pulled out a tiny tennis ball and started playing with her. She LOVES to play ball! She will stop any behavior, ignore food, stop in mid pee, to play ball. I have to keep this tip in my pocket for later use.

She was pretty good about going outside to do her business during this long, long winter season. We lost sight of our grass early on and she usually requires some brown or green to pee on but she adapted well to peeing on ice. Makes a mom proud.

We had bath day this week and Gillie got her spring crew cut. She does have such a cute figure. I’m holding off on Jake’s haircut, he only got a bath. Gillie decided to leap out of the sink during her bath and I just caught her by her butt and back legs before she hit the floor! No easy feat as she was pretty slippery at the time. After all that drama…Play Ball! She got over the humiliation very quickly.

Now Jakes turn. Some of you know about the physical problems we have had with Jake. Without going into all the gory (yes, I chose the right word) details, I’ll summarize. Jake is special and even though he has been neutered since he was a year old he gets regular erections. We got used to that in our first year with him. Since he turned 5 in March he has stopped humping his bed, Shirley, and now just gets them when he gets super excited… or sometimes not so excited. Last year we enrolled Jake in a K9 camp and he started going for half days and sometimes a full day if we thought he needed to get super tired. About a month into going to camp a couple days a week he started bleeding and we all thought he may have injured his penis at camp and when the erection came the cut would bleed. Long story short, we discovered that the blood was coming from inside him during his excitement. He’s had a blood test to check testosterone levels, xray to check for stones and finally an ultrasound to check everything else. They say he is perfectly normal; nothing wrong. I don’t know what else we can do but keep a close eye on him and we don’t encourage this type of excitement.

I hope this post is not too rambling, but like I said, I’m really behind in my observations.

More later

 

First Snow of the Year

I would have taken a photo of Gillie, but she runs down the stairs, squats, and then runs back up the stairs. I guess she’s been too cold many times in her life and has no interest in it now. Jake, on the other hand, doesn’t mind the cold or the snow.

Caught in the Act!

He has made it his business to keep all the twittering birds out of our yard. He’s not good at sharing toys or his space. He also makes sure I see any poos he left behind. He’s kind of a neat freak that way. He will go over to the pile and sniff it until I come over and pick it up.

Funny thing happened yesterday. I went over to fill the dog’s water dish and I couldn’t find it. Jake has a habit of pushing this dish around on the floor when he wants it filled with water. Now, it’s a ceramic dish and it makes a racket when he noses it over the tile kitchen floor. I looked all over the place and even enlisted Tony’s help. We couldn’t find it anywhere! Finally Tony found it in the dining room under a curio cabinet, about twenty feet away from the kitchen! I think he thinks that even if we are not home if he moves that dish it will fill with water. What a guy.

Got a Call from Jake’s Dog Camp…

I took Jake to his daycare camp today with the idea that he would be there all day and I would do some much needed yard cleanup before the weather gets too cold. I dropped him off at 9:00am and when I got home Gillie and I took a leisurely walk around the neighborhood before I started on the yard. After filling up 4 large trash bags with garden junk I came inside to take a break. Since my back was starting to throb from all the bending, I sat down with my laptop and thought I’d take a peek at the web cam that the doggie daycare has set up for just this purpose.
I put an orange tshirt on Jake; makes it easier to find him in a crowd of dogs. He was inside an enclosure with about twenty dogs of similar size. I noticed that he was mounting a cute little bichon and also a slightly larger Yorkie type dog was chasing Jake around and climbing on his back, too. This was typical Jake behavior and I didn’t worry about it.
About a half an hour later my cell phone rang and it announced that it was from the daycare place. My heart went in my throat! I thought the worst, maybe a dog attacked Jake or Jake got hurt somehow.
The first thing the manager said was, “Jake is ok, but we want you to come get him.” It seems that he was overly excited all day and this causes him to have erections. Now if you know Jake, and I know some of you do, this is not unusual. The people at the daycare hadn’t seen this on him before and they were worried that the problem would not go away and the other dogs that he was around were not helping with the situation. I had to laugh, but they were very serious. I said I’d come and get him right away and I did. He was ready to go home and now he and Gillie are asleep on my recliner chair with me as I type this.
It’s always something new with Jake. He keeps us laughing.

My well-behaved pups in action.

This is the most challenging thing that Gillie, on the left, does all day. Jake is my pro. He learned this almost from day one. He sometimes looks at Gillie with an exasperated expression as if to say, “Sit still, will ya?” I just love how excited Gillie gets at mealtime. She has such a joy for life. I’m glad I was able to save it for her, and for me.

Jake Starts the Week at K9 Camp

Saying goodbye to mom through the fence.

We are starting the week off right by a half day at the doggie day care. Jake hooked up with some of his pals as soon as he got in the yard. I pulled my car up to the fence and jumped out to take a couple pictures of him. Of course all dogs got excited and ran towards me, including Jake, and when he saw that it was me, he started barking and yelping. I waved at the helpers in the yard and said, “Taking pictures for Jake’s blog!” They seemed to understand.