The Search Goes On

I know a few of you were anxious to find out if my experiment with the ultrasonic anti-bark device worked.  In a word: no.

Last week was a rough, long one at work, and I felt like I barely saw the dogs - or anyone or anything else for that matter - so it was my daughter who reported that Sirius was actually trying to trigger it.  She said he walked up to it, barked and she saw the green light go off telling her it reacted to him.  He then started barking at it repeatedly, setting off a furious series of green beeping.  I think he was trying to train it, but it's certainly done little to train him.

Sirius: entirely too smart for his own good

For my part, one late night/early morning after I'd finished a particularly taxing day, I stood in the quiet kitchen with Sirius, munching on a piece of cold pizza sort of staring vapidly out at the yard, and saw the light blinked green once, meaning the battery is working correctly, then again a minute or two later.  All fine.   Then it started fluttering rapidly, meaning it was picking up sounds on the mic.  I couldn't see anything.  I wasn't hearing anything.  Sirius wasn't reacting, but then again, he was concentrating on that piece of pizza in my hand.  The pulsing stopped for a moment and then picked back up again.  Something was out there.  I found that rather disconcerting.  So I double checked the locks on the doors, and Sirius and I took ourselves to bed where I couldn't see that stupid blinking light and worry about what or who on such a chilly night could be out there rustling around.

When the dogs are out at the same time as their nemesis, the pointer named Cocoa, their barking has become, if anything, angrier and more insistent, almost as though they assume that annoying noise is being caused by poor Cocoa, and they're really mad at her about it.

Fortunately, with the full human contingent back in the house, there are more of us to monitor them and make sure they are, if you will, on a very short leash.

But, in short, our permanent solution still remains somewhere in the cosmos. 

Bored...

In the meantime, the poor dogs have been cooped up a lot.  Of course, as the weather begins to really turn towards winter, that was naturally going to happen anyway.  But they're more bored than usual, and as the work-life teeter totter went in the wrong direction, as tends to happen to all of us from time-to-time, they found slightly more destructive ways to amuse themselves.  I've lost some Christmas decorations that Baby H would get a hold of and feed to the dogs, and they happily chewed them up because - why not? - there's nothing else to do.  But while I had a couple of moments of, "Oh my!  Do you know how long I've had that?" you realize that all of that is just stuff.   That's no big deal.  The far bigger deal is finding the right balance of peaceful co-existence with the neighborhood with the dogs' need to just run around without a leash and play at will.  I'm assuming we will get there, but if you had a little black and white birdhouse in your Amazon cart just waiting for a report back - delete that from your cart!

Playing so furiously they're just a blur!