Straydog UPDATE posted MONDAY 5/19/03 at ~9:52 p.m. CT

Pat's Daily Dog Log

MONDAY MAY 19 2003

More mixing and matching: Puppy Benny visits Puppy Kimberly and gets homesick at sunset

     Sometime during the day yesterday we moved Puppy-Dog Benny in to be a companion to bigger Puppy-Dog Kimberly, since Kimberly's previous companion, Brigitte, had been adopted the day before at Saturday Adoption Day.

     Benny and Kimberly had a fun time playing together all day, but when evening rolled around (after I had finished writing my part of the Sunday Update), Benny wanted to go home to his mommy, Rosie, and his brother, Rudy.

     Bill had just come in from taking Frosty (who has been Bill's dog since shortly after Danny Boy died) to the play yard, which is adjacent to Rosie and Kimberly's kennel, and Bill told me to hurry outside! Benny was fussing so loudly because he missed his mom (Rosie) that Rosie was frantically digging at the fence line to try to get to her son "in need."

     As soon as I opened the kitchen door, I heard Benny's howls of distress, and I ran across the play yard to get him to return him to his mom and brother, who resided across the big play yard and about five or six kennels from where Benny and Kimmy were. I looked over at Rosie's kennel as I hurriedly passed by and saw that she had dug a big hole leading into her neighbor's kennel (that of Mommy Dog and her adult kids, Bobby and Briar). Rosie was already about a third of the way into this family's kennel! I yelled at Rosie, "Rosie, NO!" and she stopped digging and ran to the gate of her kennel to watch me run to "save" her child in distress.

Mother Rosie and Puppy Rudy wait for Pat to bring Puppy Benny back. The hole they've been digging is at the top right of the photo.

I scooped Benny up and rushed him to his mom

     As soon as Benny was back with his mom, Rosie had to sniff the little fellow all over (kind of roughly as if she were scolding him) to make sure he was okay, and then all was fine.

     Benny was happy and went to play with his brother, Rudy, and Rosie went to her scoopy hole to rest in the shade. I filled the big hole with a shovel (with a little help from the kids from time to time), and then I plopped one of their water buckets on top of the patch job, which would hold until today when we would be able to add concrete blocks to that area as a more permanent repair job [which has been done by the posting of this update].

Kimmy gets a new friend, little Puppy Willie

     With Benny settled back with mom and brother, Kimberly then had no playmate, and she was lonely, but it was past my bedtime, and we couldn't provide her with a new kennel mate right then, and it was going to be dark soon. This morning we could see that Kimmy was still lonely and sad. The solution to this problem was to take Puppy Willie out of Amy and Annie's kennel and put him in with Kimmy. Willie is smaller than Kimmy, but the two pups are very playful, and we were sure they would get along fine.

Willie meets Kimberly and the two are off and playing!

     We put Willie in with Kimberly early this morning, and all went beautifully between the two pups. Now Kimmy is happy, and Willie is having a great time with his new friend.

     Whew! Everyone is happy once again at our Happy Home for Strays.

8:15 p.m. U P D A T E

Rosie and her kids are digging under their corner-cut feeding gate!

Pat's end of the trailer was quiet and dark (as she tries to be asleep by eight o'clock every night with her alarm set for four a.m.) when I came out of Frosty's end of the trailer (where I was working on editing the above update) to let Toby (our old Australian Shepherd) in thru the kitchen sliding-glass door, and I looked out over the kennels and noticed Rosie and her kids digging along the fence line in a back corner of their kennel. Not wanting to wake Pat, I went out and had to go into this kennel of rough-and-tumble puppies and a mother (Rosie) who was equally excited about having me, Bill the Cameraman, come into their kennel with a shovel and without the camera. (I totally understand why Pat gets mad at me when I ask her, "Did you take some pictures?" after she's just told me a story about one or more of the dogs trying to dig out.) With puppies you've got to fill the hole with your shovel while trying to keep a couple of BIG puppies from tearing your pants off. Then the mother dog is running around like a nut all the while, and if I accidentally stepped on one of the kids and he yelped, Rosie would give the poor kid a stern reprimand, which had me worried once, but the smart kid accepted his mother's "reprimand" and everything was fine.

I finally got the hole filled and checked in the feeding gate area for dropped and missed kibbles but didn't find any. Next I had to get out of that kennel "alive," which was probably something like when a celebrity tries to get thru a crowd.

I made it (no rips or tears in my pants), and I told them all they were good doggies, and I came back here to get this update on asap. It's the photos that really take so long. If Pat gets me her update by seven, I can usually get the update posted by nine, unless there are a lot of photos to (electronically) process, which is the case tonight, which means that most of the photos will come in the morning.