A Quick Video Leftover From BeagleFest 2008: Feeding Time

Here’s one item I meant to post last week back when I was still watching Imola and Minardi over at my parents’ house, but never got around to cleaning up to post it.  In order to show the different personalities of the two dogs, I recorded a short video of how they react to feeding time.  As you can see, they both get pretty excited, but react in different ways.  Imola always likes to follow the people around, and when it’s time to eat, she starts to jump around excitedly.  Minardi, on the other hand, isn’t quite as animated as Imola is, but in this video you can hear the cute little howl that she makes when she gets excited (it’s either that or she starts barking loudly, which usually happens upon arrival at the dog park.)  Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t seem to let me embed videos from Photobucket on their pages yet (and I’m too lazy to go sign up over at YouTube) so I’ll have to link the video for now.  The link to the video can be found below:

Feeding Time

I hope to gradually start adding more video to the site, but I’m still getting used to using the new digital camera.  For some reason, the mic on the camera is really sensitive to breathing, which could probably get annoying after a while.

BeagleFest 2008: Wrapping Up

Seen on a Random bumper sticker in town earlier this week:

“Lord, let me be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”

I’m pretty sure there was a time at some point in the past when if you told me that I’d not only spend ten days dogsitting, but that I’d be blogging the wole entire thing, I’d probably think you were crazy.  Of course, there was also a time when I thought that my parents would never have a dog, but that one went out the window years ago.  To briefly summarize the whole thing, here are a few statistics I probably made up out of thin air for the whole thing:

• Days Spent with the dogs: 10
• Trips to the Dog Park: 18 (give or take one or two)
• Average Hours of Sleep per Night: About 6
• Accidents in the house: 4
• Uncontrolled Barking Fits: 3
• Bad Habits Picked Up: 3 (I think the dogs might have picked up a couple of those too…)
• Dog Treats Consumed: Don’t ask.  And no, I’m not THAT crazy….

I do have to admit that the whole thing turned out not to be quite the ordeal I was expecting it to be though.  The dogs seemed to quickly accept me as their packleader (of course, it’s not like I was exactly a stranger to them going into this) and for the most part managed to remain pretty well behaved during this time.  I think that the frequent trips to the dog park really helped out here.  To be honest, I think the dogs might be just a little bit spoiled by being able to go over there all the time like they do, but given how difficult it is to get them from the front door of the house to the car without them getting distracted by one thing or another, I suspect it;’s a lot easier to get them their exercise this way than it would be to take them out on a walk through the neighborhood.  Besides, the place is practically in our backyard anyway, so why not?

BeagleFest 2008: Sometimes You Just Have to Let Go

 As I’ve spoken of a number of times here, Beagles are by their very nature explorers.  Much of their time at the dog park is spent investigating whatever catches their attention, be it a scent, a molehill or even a particularly interesting (and/or tasty) plant.  This means that they tend to spend a lot of time wandering off in one direction or another.  At times, they’ll venture into the bushes, or into tall grass that takes them out of my sight.  When I first started taking the dogs to the park, this worried me to no end.  After all, the last thing I want to have to do at this point is tell my Mom that I lost one of her dogs, and it’s easy to get paranoid about this type of thing.  The advice that I was given on the topic was to just go ahead and let them wander into the bushes, and trust that they will want to stick close enough to the pack leader that they won’t get themselves lost.  I was also told that whatever I do, I should not try to chase them into the bushes either, as they will then think that they are the ones leading the way and go further in.

To be honest, i still worry just a bit when the dogs wander out of sight, but as I’ve gone through this last week and a half, I have found that this piece of advice has been true.  Even though Imola and Minardi may chase something or another into the bushes and out of my sight, they won’t wander far enough away to lose sight of where I am, and so far at least,  they have always come back.  The trick seems to be for the pack leader to just stick to the usual route, and although I do slow down a bit to make sure they can find me when they come back, you can’t just watch them the whole time.  If you do that, they’ll start to think that you are looking to them for guidance, and they are likely to head off in a different direction than you had originally intended.  As you walk along the path, you can see them glance back at where you are every so often, looking to you for direction.

You have to realize that the dogs are going to look to you, the pack leader, for guidance, and that as long as you can trust them to follow your lead, you should be fine as far as actually having two dogs with you when you get home from the park.  You’re not always going to see where they are going, and you’re not always going to be able to follow them there.  For that matter, on many occasions it turns out that following them is just going to cause problems.  Of course, the fact that I came into this already having the trust of the dogs was a big advantage.  In fact, it surprised me somewhat just how well the dogs accepted me to be the one in charge while my parents are away, even though I only see them occasionally.  My Mom was expecting them to be stressed about about her being gone for at least the first couple of days, but as far as I can tell, this never happened, and the dogs have just stuck with their usual routine, even if the pack leader looks a little different than normal.

BeagleFest 2008: Living in the Doghouse

If my calculations are correct (and if someone at American Airlines manages to figure out how to get an airplane or two off the ground, I’ve got about three days worth of dogsitting remaining before my parents get home.   On one hand, I will definitely be glad when I’m done with this, and can go back to not waking up at 7am.  On the other hand, this whole thing hasn’t been nearly as difficult as I expected it to be.  The dogs have been surprisingly well behaved throughout the week (although a built-up immunity to dog slobber probably helps out some in that regard.)

In some ways, this whole thing is almost like a bit of a vacation, even though I’m only about a mile from home.  Sure, I’m still going to work like I normally do, and downtown Redmond is not exactly my idea of a sunny tropical destination, but every once in a while it is kind of nice to break out of the usual routine for a bit and have an excuse to get outside more often than I normally do.  For the most part, I’ve had to limit my technology use to the portable stuff (most of my blogging this week has been on my notebook.)  Even though I can go home pretty much whenever I want, I haven’t spent more than a couple of hours there at a time, and that was really only because I needed to do laundry.

In order to entertain myself, I’ve had to resort to something that I haven’t done much of lately:  Watch television.  When I’m at home, I normally don’t watch a whole lot of TV, and what little TV I do watch is the stuff that’s recorded on my DVR.  Not having that luxury available to me, and having Imola just wanting to sit on my lap and take a nice little nap means that I have done a lot more channel surfing than I normally do as well.  Apparently I’m not missing much these days, but what else are you going to do when you’re sitting on the comfy chair in the living room with a contented dog napping on your lap?  I get the impression that there’s some basketball and hockey playoffs going on, but beyond that I don’t think I’m exactly making any new discoveries in my TV viewing habits.

It’s not exactly a tropical vacation, but in its own way, it’s kind of a nice break from what I’d normally be doing, which is sitting on the computer all night.  On the other hand, I’m thinking that sunny tropical vacation is starting to sound pretty nice around now…

BeagleFest 2008: Tale of the Tape

By this time, things have pretty much settled into a routine with Imola and Minardi.  As long as they get their two trips to the dog park per day, they’re generally pretty well behaved, although they’ll still get worked up about one thing or another if the opportunity arises.  Since this doesn’t leave a whole lot of adventure and/or misadventure to report, I thought I’d go ahead and take a chance to discuss the two dogs, and their personalities a bit.

Imola is pretty typical for a beagle in many ways.   She has a slightly smaller build than some beagles, and a fairly typical appearance for the breed.  She is by far the more adventurous of the two, and when we’re out and about, she will usually be the one to lead and Minardi will be the one who follows and the one whose attention will be caught by whatever happens to be interesting.  At the dog park, this means that she will wander a lot more than Minardi does, although it doesn’t take much to get Minardi to follow along.  Of course, if  one of the two gets to barking, the other one will usually be barking right along in no time at all.  And man, can these two bark.  If one of them finds some reason to start barking, you’ll know it, and pretty soon half the neighborhood is going to know it as well.  On the other hand, Imola also likes to be around where people are, and when the time comes to wind down. she’s usually going to find her way into someone’s lap.  She also gets very enthusiastic at times, and will frequently try to lick your face whenever she gets excited,  She also seems to spend a lot of time just sniffing around at various things, and is generally a lot more excitable than Minardi is. 

Minardi is a bit unusual for a beagle in a number of ways.  Both of these dogs (as well as one of the two owned by my sister) came from the same breeder at the same time, and if I understand correctly Imola and Minardi have the same father, but came from different mothers, which would make them half-sisters.  Some of Minardi’s personality and appearance are a bit different from that of a typical Beagle, which has led us on occasion to wonder if she might actually have picked up a bit of Jack Russell Terrier in her genetics somewhere along the line. For all intents and purposes we just consider her to be a Beagle, and she passes off as one just fine.  The fact that her and Imola have grown up together has made the two inseparable, and you will very rarely find one of these two without the other close by.  Minardi was the runt of her litter, and has a bit of a crick in her tail as well, but at her fully grown size she is only very slightly smaller than Imola.

Compared to Imola, Minardi is a bit more reserved.  Although she will gladly follow Imola around in a lot of instances, there are also times when she will just stick close to the pack leader at the dog park, especially if there are other larger or more aggressive dogs around.  At home when things are quiet, she will often find her own little place to take a nap away from the hustle and bustle, although she has no problem with people being around her when she’s napping.  On occasion, she can be excitable though, and frequently she ends up being the first one to start the frienzied barking if something gets her attention.  She also has a cute little bark that she makes when she gets excited, mostly as a result of being given food or treats. 

Compared to some beagles that I know, these two are actually rather well behaved a lot of the time, although if they get ramped up there’s not going to be a lot you can do to get them to calm down until they managed to get it out of their systems.  As I have said previously here, Beagles are very friendly and very loyal dogs, but they can also be too smart for their own good at times, and also tend to be very high-maintenance at times, especially for a small dog.  Still, I enjoy having these two around, especially when I can actually go home and let my parents take care of all the dog-keeping chores.

BeagleFest 2008: A Tour of the Marymoor Dog Park

 As much as I enjoy the chance to hang out with Imola and Minardi this week, there are very good reasons that I have never given much thought to getting a Beagle of my own.  Sure, I might have names picked out already if I ever do happen to get a beagle or two of my own (the next ones would be named Mugello and Fiorano,) but in my current situation I would be ill-equipped to take care of any dog, much less a challenging breed like a Beagle.  Most beagles do not do well at all in confined spaces, and very few beagles do well in apartments.  Even in a decent sized single family house such as this one the dogs can get a little loopy if they aren’t given the chance to run around for a while use up some of the energy that they seem to come by so easily. 

It is for this reason that we are fortunate to have the Marymoor off-leash dog area nearby.  Although there are a number of other off-leash dog areas in the general vicinity, the one ar Marymoor is the closest, and by far the largest, encompassing nearly 40 acres of space.  To a human unfamiliar with the place, it doesn’t look like much more than a big open field with some trails crisscrossing it and a couple of places to access the river.  To a dog, on the other hand, this place must be something like Disneyland, with all sorts of open spaces to run around in, plenty of interesting new dogs to meet every day and scents to follow, and places to go for a nice refreshing ball-fetching swim.  The nice weather we had on Saturday brought a multitude of human and canine visitors to the park, so I thought it would provide a good opportunity to take some photos of the place.  After the jump, a tour of the Marymoor off-leash dog area.

BeagleFest 2008: Raining Cats and… Oh, Never Mind

No, the weather at the dog park this morning didn’t look anything like this.  When I woke up this morning (at 7AM no less, these two seem to be determined to turn me into a morning person whether I like it or not) there was some light to moderate sprinkling outside.  As we went through the morning routine (still having some issues with getting them to go to the bathroom outside) there appeared to be an opening in the rain showers to take the morning trip to the dog park, so we headed out.  Once we got there, it had started raining again, but not too much, so we continued as usual hoping that it would let up again.  Unfortunately, it never did, and in fact about halfway through our usual loop through the park the rain turned into a torrential downpour,  The dogs didn’t seem to care too much though (which seems odd, since they don’t seem to care much for the water at the edge of the dog park,) and just proceeded along on their walk as usual.  My jacket, which normally does a pretty good job of keeping me dry in the rain, was thoroughly overwhelmed by the deluge, and by the time we made it back to the car, the jacket was completely soaked through, as was just about everything else I was wearing.  If there was one thing I was thankful for, it is the fact that I picked a very good day to accidentally leave my cell phone at home. 

Fortunately, the temperature was warm enough that this wasn’t too big an issue, and I made sure to dry Imola and Minardi off some before they went into the crate this morning.  If I was thinking far enough in advance, I could have just brought along some dog shampoo and took care of two things at once (although someone might get mad about that if I tried it…)

BeagleFest 2008: Bored, Wired, and Something’s Crawling in the Yard

Yesterday, the sun finally managed to chase off the clouds for a while, which gave us a nice clear day with temperatures in the seventies.  Given the fact that it was snowing here less than a week ago, this was a welcome relief from the not-so-springlike weather we’ve been getting around here lately.  While the sun was out, the dogs seemed content to just hang out on the back deck and lie in the sun.  Because of this, I thought that one trip to the dog park in the afternoon would be sufficient, since I was going to be attending the Mariners game in the evening.  Naturally, with the nice weather, the dog park was packed, which caused Imola to take a wrong turn once in the confusion of the mass of people and dogs.  This was only for a brief time though, and other than that the walk went without incident. 

The ballgame was somewhat of a disappointment, even though many people from the Singles Ward were there, and the Mariners won on the strong pitching of Erik Bedard.  In my experience, baseball games don’t really work out as well as some activities due to the fact that there’s usually too much socializing going on to pay much attention to the game, and too much baseball going on to properly socialize.  Although the ticket to get into the game only cost me $5, a parking spot near the stadium went for $25 due to a simultaneous motocross event going on across the street at Qwest Field (parking spots closer to the stadium went for as much as $40) and since we were in the cheap seats, there wasn’t a whole lot to see.  I ended up leaving before the Seventh Inning Stretch to get back home since the dogs hadn’t been fed yet.

After getting home and feeding the dogs, it quickly became apparent that the lack of a second trip to the dog park had left them with a surplus of energy, and I suspect that feeding them at this point probably didn’t help the situation any.  As soon as Imola caught a glimpse of something running around in the yard, they spent a good fifteen minutes running around, staring out the window and barking at the top of their lungs, and spent most of the rest of the evening trying to track down whatever it was that caught their attention (I’d guess some sort of small animal.)  Eventually they (mostly) settled down, but it was clear that they had a bit too much energy.  Needless to say, I think I’ll probably be sticking to the two trips per day for the rest of the week, since it certainly makes them a lot easier to deal with.

BeagleFest 2008: Wait, Didn’t I Live Here at Some Point?

It is now day 3 of BeagleFest 2008, and so far, everything seems to be going well.  The dogs managed to get themselves a bit wound up before last night’s trip to the dog park, but seemed to be just fine while we were there.  The weather has gradually improved over the past few days, so last night the dog park was rather busy.  Fortunately, Imola and Minardi seem to be pretty good about keeping track of where I am and usually remain reasonably close.  Imola tends to wander a bit more than Minardi does, but if Imola comes across something that catches her attention Minardi will follow her pretty quickly.

As for myself, part of the deal was that I am staying at my parents’ house while they are gone to take care of the dogs.  Even though I lived here for ten years while I was growing up, a lot has changed around here since then.  For one thing, me and my parents are the only ones in the family who live in Redmond anymore (I’ve got a brother and sister and brother-in-law who live down in Provo Utah, and my other brother and sister-in-law live in the small town of Sultan in Snohomish County, as do my other sister, brother-in-law, their two boys and two beagles of their own.)  This, combined with the fact that I remain single for the time being meant that I was the only one who was really in a position to take care of the dogs.  The house itself has seen an extensive remodel in the past year, and although it is still easily recognizable as the house I grew up in, a lot has changed as a result of that remodel.  This includes a number of shiny new appliances with all sorts of bells and whistles, although I’m led to wonder if that’s always a good thing.  In the apartment where I normally make my home, the stove is a fairly basic model, and is rapidly approaching an age where it would be old enough to vote if the 28th amendment to the Constitution happened to grant suffrage to household appliances.  This means that you’ve got a total of six knobs (one for each burner and two for the oven.)  The recently purchased new stove at my parents’ house, on the other hand, has a control panel that looks like this:

So far, I haven’t even bothered to try to figure out what half of those buttons are supposed to do.  So far, I think I’ve figured out the “incinerate” and the “show seizure inducing flashy patterns on the display” buttons, but I haven’t ventured too far beyond those basic functions yet.  In what may be one of the greatest feats of dubious engineering in the 21st century, somehow they’ve even managed to complicate the temperature knobs for the burners on this one, providing two different low/high scales for the front burners.  It’s not just the stove either;  The toaster’s encrusted with more than its fair share of buttons (I’m trying to figure out exactly when people decided that toasters needed “cancel” buttons to pop the toast back up instead of just lifting the slider back up, but that’s another story,) and i haven’t even tried to operate the dishwasher yet.  I’m dreading the inevitable day when refrigerators start coming with “open” buttons instead of handles to open the doors…

Fortunately, I think there’s enough cold cereal here that I could probably survive off of if I can’t figure out how to cook anything else without setting it on fire, and if worse comes to worse, I’m only about a mile from my apartment anyway, so I’ll probably not starve.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see if I can find the manual to explain how to get the front door open again… 

 

BeagleFest 2008: Schedule Conflicts

The good news is that I actually managed to get some sleep last night.  Of course, not having to get up at 3:30 in the morning to drive to the airport probably didn’t hurt.  The bad news (for me, at least) is that the dogs don’t seem to be in sync with my somewhat later sleeping schedule just yet.  Those people who know me know that I’m a serious night owl, to the point that I tend to get to bed around 1AM on most nights.  My Mom,  (who usually takes the dogs out on their walks in the mornings) is a serious morning person, and tends to be up fairly early, which probably explains why the dogs were trying to get me to wake up at 6am this morning.  Even though I attended my chuich’s early morning Seminary classes for four years while I was in high school, these days I tend to regard 6am as a theoretical concept best left to the morning people.  Apparently Imola and Minardi have different ideas though,

Fortunately, by displaying just the right combination of thick-headedness and laziness I was able to finagle roughly another hour worth of sleep out of them before getting up for the morning dog park run.  Aside from an inexplicable barking frenzy from Imola near the beginning of this morning’s walk, it was pretty uneventful.  It was interesting to note that Minardi, who usually rushes to join the barking whenever Imola gets started, opted instead to just stick close to me and follow along while Imola barked her little head off in the distance.  Eventually she managed to get it out of her system though, and the rest of the walk proceeded without incident, although I put them on the leash a bit earlier than normal just to make sure there weren’t any problems at the exit.  My Mom was concerned that when they left for the cruise that Imola and Minardi would be stressed out for the first couple of days, but in spite of the picture you see above (actually taken before everyone left,) I don’t think they seem all that stressed at all.  I’d be expecting them to hang out at the front window a lot and wait for one of the pack leaders to come back.  The spent a bit of time hanging out at the window yesterday, but I think that was because the neighbors (and their dog) were out in the yard during the evening.  For the most part, they seem pretty calm and content to just do what they usually do (even if the pack leader happens to be a bit too lazy for their liking.)  Either way, they seem to be doing fine so far.