Merry Christmas Everyone

I'm sorry I've not posted for a while, I've been working (even on Christmas Day) and so it's been a very busy, in fact busier than normal for busy at this time of year.



So here is Christmas, Henry's second with us, also Molly's second Christmas with us and Badgers first ever Christmas with anyone. At the begining of the week it hit me that I had an enormous amount of stuff to do before the big day. I always put myself under an immense amount of stress, trying to get the house impeccably clean, perfect and decorated as well as trying to get the garden nice and enough supplies and food in to last at least until March.



And it always goes wrong.



Or if not wrong then I usually have to give up on trying to get something done. This year for instance I wanted to finish plastering the front hall. It's still not finished and looks dreadfull as half of it is plastered and the other half is bad homemade artex with pink plaster adhesive all over it, looking like a very bad 90's paint effect. I;m sure no-one has noticed, although the guests we have coming this week for New Year may well notice it as I started it in November just before they last visited us.



Due to having so much to do I decided to double up on some tasks, walking the dogs is always a big chunk out of the day so I decided on Monday to out them in the boot of the car and walk them on the way to the the supermarket where I was going to do my food shopping. The supermarket is a 72 mile round trip away so the long journey would also help to tire them out and it worked a treat. We walked round the grounds of local castle where I decided that they should have a couple of herds of deer like in Knole in Kent, anyway the dogs really loved it, pulling me this way and that and lots of general excitement. They then snoozed in the car to Tescos and again on the way back.



As this plan worked well I decided to do the same on Tuesday as I needed to go out to buy coal and logs and also to replace a couple of Christmas presents that had been chewed by Badger. How he managed to get them was a mystery until I caught him climbing up on top of the dog food bin, from there on to the rubbish bin, from there onto the window sill and then on to the kitchen worktop. He is 13 weeks old and already learning Leaphound tricks!



Off we went round the castle again, then on to the saw mill which was closed Oh no!! Luckily they sell bags of logs in the Spar (can you beleive that!) so Christmas with a log fire was saved in the nick of time. I also managed to get the presents locally and then we went off to get the coal which had to go in the middle of my car as the dogs were in the boot. The only problem with that was that it left the small gaps in the dog guard exposed when I folded the seat down and that meant that Badger shot out through it and straight into the arms of the coal man who really loved him. We put him back in the boot only for him to crawl through five minutes later and sit on top of the sack of coal for the rest of the journey.



Then suddenly Christmas was here. It always creeps up on me like that after weeks of planning (and doing very little about the plans) and days of running around like a nutter. You'd think after all these years of having Christmas we'd be experts at it and be able to organise it without a second thought (or any thoughts at all) after all August Bank Holiday is a breeze, and even family holidays away are easy compared to this.

Canine Chaos

Well the tree chaos has not stopped. Or should I say canine chaos. I got in from work quite late last night and let the dogs out last thing for a wee. Two hours later they wanted to go out again. Then two hours after that they wanted to go out yet again. This sometimes happens when there is a fox or deer lurking around so I decided to ignore them and go back to sleep.

Bad move.

In fact very bad move as when Other Half got up he found three piles of diorreah and two wees downstairs.

It was Henry. We decided to try him on Bakers food. He'd had it a few months ago and he got quite bad trots but we thought it could be because he had been starved and his system wasn't used to it so we put him on Eukanuba and that suited him fine, but not our bank balance as it's nearly £40 a sack. So we tried Bakers again which is far cheaper and more readily available but what a price to pay!

So I had to go out today and buy more of the expensive stuff for Henry, while Molly is still on the Bakers which she loves and Badger is on puppy food, doggie diets in this house are getting more complicated by the day.

When I got back it looked like the dogs had been having a party in the living room. Badger had managed to sneak a plant pot full of peat into the house and had thrown the peat all over the carpet. He'd also been chewing on a bauble from the tree which left a red stain on the carpet and also pink stains up his front legs so now he is a tri-colour collie of the red, white and black variety.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Badger had also been in at the coal bucket, adding grey to his white bits. Very strangely he eats coal, Henry does the same from time to time so I can only imagine that there must be something in it like a mineral or something that is good for dogs? Who knows? What I do know is that it leaves very black and difficult to remove marks on the carpet.

All the dogs had been running about and jumping on the sofas making the whole place look completely dishevelled, I'd only been gone a couple of hours and it would take me the rest of the day to sort it out! So I spent the afternoon vaxing the carpet and cleaning away peat and coal and then after all that I went to work for a rest!

Christmas Tree

Oh dear. We finallt have the tree up for Christmas after hours of moving furniture about and trying to work out how best to fit eveything in the living room without it looking like an exlposion in a junk shop.

Other Half came up with a very good idea which was to leave the tree undecorated for a day or so, so that Badger would hopefully not be too tempted to try and climb up it or worse, knock it over. So we duly did this and decorated it on Sunday, along with a few other things about the room. All dogs ignored the tree, brilliant we thought. We went to bed and still all dogs ignored the tree (well actually Badger sleeps in the kitchen to minimise any mischeif he can get himself into during the night). Monday morning came and again, all dogs ingnored the tree.

Until today.

I have had to rescue five baubles from the tree out of dogs mouths. Some are beyond repair, others have begun to make a different display along the mantlepiece where I can arrange them so that the chewed bits are to the wall and can't be seen.

It's like a treat tree now, the dogs just seem to wander past it, pluck a bauble they fancy off the tree and chew it. Where will it all end?

Luckily Other Half is working and probably wont notice the additions to the mantlepiece decorations but what's particularly annoying is they have chewed the decoration I made in England with my Mum while my Dad was in hospital getting a new knee. I spent ages pinning sequins into a model egg and tying it with ribbon which made a gorgeous sparkly bauble only for me to find it five minutes ago on the hearth rug, with most of the sequins expertly removed and layed all around it.

No dog will own up to having done the deed, all look as guilty and innocent as each other - but all know that I am mighty p***d off with them for this.

I will spend the rest of the afternoon in the living room writing cards and guarding the Christmas tree until I go to work. Hmmmppphhhh!

Good Boy Henry

Being a Saluki cross, Henry is not to be expected to be super well behaved. Fergus (also a Saluki cross) was typical of the breed, very aloof and only ever did what he wanted, even if he layed down when you told him to, he was actually going to lay down at that moment anyway.. Ferg would also spend allot of time upstairs on his own, even when visitors came he would say hello and give them a sniff, check out any luggage they might have (you never know if they had food) and then shoot up the stairs to lounge about one of the bedrooms.

Henry is much more sociable. He's never gone to lay in another room away from me, apart from at night when he sleeps in the living room and that took serious tenacity to acheive. He's also really affectionate, liking to cuddle up on the sofa with you, managing to get all four legs across your lap and his head buried in your stomach. He's very different from Fergus who the closest he really came to that was to lay down the side of the armchair.

The biggest problem with Ferg was recall. He just refused to come back. Sometimes it was like he was just having a laugh with you. In the early days I tried. I took a bar of chocolate on walks with me .I know, I know, you shouldn't feed dogs chocolate but it was the one thing that Ferg would do just about anything for, except come back. He did come back for the first bit of chocolate, then for the second he snatched it so fast I didn't even see it go and by the third he was two fields away and ignoring me. After a year of panics, thinking he would never be seen again I gave up and bought a long extending lead and got 13 years of stress about people leaving doors and gates open.

Consequently I have become paranoid about Henry. All in all he is much more responsive than Ferg. He comes back in the garden every time (Fergus would just look or simply move an ear and ignore me). He even came back the couple of times he escaped, but I just haven't got the bottle to let him off the lead.

So imagine my suprise when the day after we had the log burner installed I realised that the garden gate had been left open and for one night and a day Henry had been at liberty to run abuot on the track and yet he didn't run away, never to be seen again!

I still can't pluck up the courage to actually let him off yet but I do feel much more positive about it. Well done Henry my boy!

Christmas Time

This time last year Henry had only just arrived and I was somewhat worried about putting up the Christmas tree as I had a feeling he was just the sort of dog to try and climb up it with the obvious disasterous results.

Amazingly Henry took to having a tree in the living room really well, unlike Fergus he didn't pee up it (a trick Ferg learned to do without ever getting caught in the act in 14 years), nor did he steal any of the decorations from it.

The tree did fall over, but that was because it was too heavy on one side and Henry was no-where near it at the time, even though he looked incredibly guilty about it!

So now it's that time of year again and just when I thought we were out of the woods (scuse the pun) as far as dog worries were concerned, we are back to square one as we now have Badger. Badger is currently into everything. When I say everything I mean that nothing is unturned by his curiosity.

It's sometimes very maddening.

This week Henry taught Badger how to jump accross from the arm of the sofa onto the living room window sill. This is a skill that Henry taught himself and which we tried very hard to stop but to no avail. And now we have two dogs doing it. Badger has also learned not only to go up the stairs but also back down. This means that he can go up there, chew my shoes (the ones I need for work are his favourites of course), drag the clean laundry about the floor, chew anything paper and generally cause havoc and of course it was Henry who taught him to go up the stairs.

Anyway I digress, today we had a suprise delivery. It was from the people who own the forest along the track and they very kindly gave us a Christmas tree. When I found out I couldn't stop smiling, I love Christmas trees and now we have one. I'll just have to get a stand for it, preferably a Badger proof stand, that won't fall over.

I just hope that being a real tree, Henry won't feel the need to pee on it...

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I forgot to say that we had a log burning stove installed! It's fab, really really great and has made our house a home. It's so good to see smoke coming out of the chimney and the sound of the crackling fire is just so nice.

We took bets on which dog would discover this source of heat first. Bearing in mind he was rather bald this time last year and an expert in seeking out warm radiators, Henry worked it out before the other two. He has taken to lazing in front of the fire, stretching out in pure luxury, turning over when it gets too hot to even out the warming of his lovely new fur coat.

It's also lovely when he gets up and climbs up onto the sofa with me all warm like a big leggy skinny furry hot water bottle.

Molly hasn't bothered with the fire at all and Badger seems to dislike the heat, if he spends too much time snoozing in the living room he starts to pant and goes off to lay in the kitchen on the floor - he's from outside dogs and his coat is really think and warm so he really dosen't seem to like the heat.

So the log burner is a hit with just about everyone in the house but there are one or two wee problems, caused of cause by the dogs, the have decided that it's great to have an ever changing supply of logs to chew, this is ok except they leave lots of little bits of wood about the place. They have also decided that they like to eat coal! Very odd indeed and certainly not good for the living room carpet!

Puppy Power

Goodness it's been a while since I posted. I'll blame Other Half for bringing a puppy into our previously relaxed household.

Since I last posted the snow has come with avengance, it's brilliant and the dogs love it too. All of them keep going outside and eating it as well as running around in it and rolling about. Molly for some strange reason keeps sitting in it which must be odd as she has rather thin fur on her back legs.

Henry won't stop barking whenever he goes out, this then gets the dogs in the farm yard to bark which in turn echoes around the hills and the dogs in the next farm along also start barking.There is a cottage in the other direction about half a mile away and the dogs there have started to bark to. I wonder how far this chain of barking goes? Maybe down to Cornwall and up to Durness? I'm sure Henry knows this and does it on purpose.

Indoors, it's been the usual chaos, caused mostly by the presence of Badger. He can't be left alone for two minutes without chewing something or generally getting himself into trouble. His favourite item to chew is any electric cable. This is not good and it doesen't matter how many times I tell him off he goes back to it as soon as he thinks you've forgotted about it. He;'s also chewed almost every pair of shoes and boots belonging to Other Half, removing the insoles and biting up the laces, my wellies which is completely banned, a corner of the sofa, the kitchen table leg and horror of horrors he chewed a small hole in the living room carpet, systematically removing the fibres one by one while I was sitting next to him. When I realised I couldn't beleive it, I honestly thought he was chewing a toy or something.

Molly and Henry have also calmed down their play fighting with him. It used to be constant, all day every day, getting rougher and rougher and noisier and noisier. I think maybe my yelling at them at regular intervals may have had something to do with the better behaviour.....

So life is settling down a bit, not much but it's getting better, but three dogs is still very hard work.....

Snow

Today it's going to snow. It was forecast and there are already little fluffs of it occasionally drifting down from the sky. Now that it's light I can see the clouds are absolutely packed with white stuff just ready to burst out like an over-bashed feather pillow in a pillow fight.

There is nothing quite so magical as dogs when it snows. Especially the moment when you open the door and they realise the world has turned white and soft. You can see their momentary hesitation in the doorway, the crinkle of their noses and widening of their eyes as they try to work out what has happened.

Then they tentatively put a paw out as if they are testing to make sure they wont sink and then they leap. And leap, and bbound and run and smile and bark and roll and leap again.

Snow and dogs is a great combination as long as the dogs stay toastie warm of course but I've never come accross a dog who dosen't love it.

And today I'm going to miss it as I'm off to the Country Living Show in the SECC Glasgow with my freinds in the village, where I will try not to spend any money and will be envious of Other Half who will be here with the dogs in the snow...

Ouchhh!

Poor Henry had a bit of an accident earlier today.

We were in the house laughing at Molly bombing around the living room at 200mph which was extremely funny when we heard a sort of dog sreaming noise from outside. After a moment of looking at each other asking 'What on earth was that?' Other Half and me ran outside to see what the matter was.

Poor Henry had jumped the fence which seperates the grass in the garden and was holding his front leg up and crying in pain. He had really hurt himself but we couldn't work out what he had done as he was so frightened that it was difficult to hold him still to have a look.

It seemed he didn't want to walk so Other Half lifted him over the fence and then I carried him into the house where we could take a better look and calm him down. He was so frightened and making little whimpering noises as I carried him in.

Once inside we realised that he had somehow scraped the inside of his front leg almost right down to his paw. It's really deep and has pulled the fur off but not actually cut his leg, it's more like a really bad graze. It also seems that he has bruised it quite badly as he's limping on it slightly.

He will be ok, just rather sore for a few days, although I think he'll most likely have a bit of a scar which will be a shame but at least he's going to be alright and he's been cuddling up to me on the sofa for most of the evening for extra special Henry cuddles which are lovely.

Dog Walk Chaos

Yesterday we took all three dogs for a walk. Although Badger hasn't had his second injections yet we think he is pretty safe around the farm but for the next two weeks all dogs are confined to close quarters.

We decided to walk down the long track and as sometimes happens some holiday makers came along to park up and look at the view. As we got closer to the car we thought we'd better scoop Badger up as he has a habit of going under the cars on the driveway and we didn't want him to get run over if the car decided to move off.

Badger was in a particularly playful mood and wasn't wanting to be caught so we scurried about trying to catch him while Other Half held on to Henry and Molly's extending leads. When we finally go hold of Badger we looked up only to find that Henry and Molly had their heads and front half of their bodies in the open window of the car!

If it wasn't such a shock it would have been really funny (well actually it was quite funny) and I ran up to get them down and the occupants of the car were really nice about it, despite the mud that Henry and Molly had put all along the window ledge. I had Badger in my arms and the lady in the passenger seat immediately wanted to stroke him and while she was doing that I realised that Badger had got his undercarriage slightly coated in cow poo at some point of the walk so there I was trying to be very nice about the dogs and thankful that they didn't actually jump in and hoping no-one would notice the smell of cow poo which was probably transferring itself from Badger to the nice lady.

By this time Henry and Molly had started to whine as they wanted to get moving so we made a hasty retreat along the track.

I thought that the problem with walking three dogs would be about getting tangled in leads and dogs going off in all directions but it seems that there is more to it than that!

Isn't blogging great?

Ok this is a post by me about blogging and the unexpected delights I've found in it. Over the last week of so I've clicked on the odd 'Blog of Note' at the top of the Blogger page and found some really fab blogs, the first was Back Porch Musings which is just wonderful and all about decorating and interiors. It's just like buying a really expensive magazine but without the expense or ads.

From there I found Catherine Holman Folk Art, a style I've always loved and adored. Catherine's blog led me to Nie Recovery, this I clicked on purely out of curiosity for the logo and found the most heart breaking and ongoing story of a beautiful family, the parents of which have been seriously injured in a plane crash earleir this summer. Looking at the photos of the family happy together before the accident makes it such a terrible thing to have happened.

Then on Friday night through Back Porch Musings I found Cape Cod Memories (Beachy) and oh my, clicking on this one is like spending the day somewhere truly peaceful and beautiful and once you've read it all you feel just like you've had a lovely holiday somewhere. This one is definately my favourite at the moment

So the moral of this post is about how great blogging is. It starts from a purely nosey begining right up to feeling you've found new friends even though you'll probably never meet them. And most of all it's stopped my bad habit of sneaking expensive interiors magazines into the shopping trolley!

Routine

One of the most important things in a dogs life is routine. And strangely since Badger arrived we have adherred to a very strict routine. So much so that it's actually becoming boring.

Early Morning Routine
The dogs wake around 7.30 to go out for a pee and a general snoop around the garden. Badger gets his breakfast. All dogs go back to bed until we have breakfasted and showered etc.

Mid Morning Routine.
Henry plays with Badger. Badger Plays with Henry. Molly watches and adjudicates where needed. All dogs go back to bed.

Lunch Time.
All dogs look through the kitchen door while we eat. We go out for a walk, unless we have sideways rain and wind which no-one likes.

Mid Afternoon.
All dogs go back to bed.

Late Afternoon.
All dogs eat dinner, go out for a wee, then go back to bed.

Early Evening.
All dogs watch us having dinner. All dogs go back to bed.

9.30pm
All dogs wake up and start running around having play fights, barking, growling, rolling about the floor.

10.30pm
Same as 9.30pm

11.00pm
I give up and go to bed leaving Other Half to it.

Somewhere in the middle of my slumbers, Other Half settles the dogs, sends them out for a wee and all dogs go back to bed.

So pretty much all our dogs do is just eat, sleep and wee and play. Not a bad life eh?

Badger Watching

The latest craze for Henry is Badger watching. Other Half decided that Wee Pup should be named Badger as he is black and white and looks a bit like a badger. I got the wildlife book out to check and there is a similarity I must admit.

So when the opportunity arises Henry will drink Badgers water, eat his food and generally keep a close eye on his new friend.

Some of this vigilance turns into knocking his new friend over and rolling him about like a football, very strangley Badger seems to love this and never seems to get scared even when Henry grabs his back leg as he walks away and drags him back. It's really funny to watch but was quite scary to begin with as Henry has rather huge teeth.

Hery has also taken possesion of one of Fergus's favourite toys, a large furry bone. Ferg loved this bone and never ever chewed it or tore it. henry has made a large hole in the side and is intent on removing the insides to throw them about the living room. I have of course done my best to stop this and do intend to sew the hole up but the bone is now all dog slebbery which makes that not such a nice job, and to wash it forst would probably mean blocking the insides of the washing machine.

The arrival of a new pup has certainly livened things up around here, not that they were quiet in the first place. Molly has started to play, both with Henry and Badger and she's started to do a really crazy thing which we have called 'trolley bumming'. This involves running round and round so fast that she becomes a bit of a blur, while that happens her back end gets lower and lower to the ground so much so that it seems she much have trolley wheels on her bum to facilitate this!

Ssssshhhhhh...

It's very quiet here. It's half past seven in the morning and I've decided to take action about the constant dog goings on around here.

Henry is in on it too and he came up to get me at 6.50 this morning and we sneaked downstairs without waking Other Half to let Wee Pup outside for a pee. We then gave him his breakfast, took him outside again just in case and then put him back to his bed.

He's still there. And is quiet.

Bliss.

Henry has gone back to bed too (Molly didn't get up) and I'm just checking my emails for work while enjoying the quiet.

Henry and I are thinking about slipping Other Half a sleeping potion to keep him in bed longer so that the house stays nice and quiet without Wee Pup constantly moving and disrupting anything.

Mad playing dogs

It's complete madness here.

Since the arrival of Wee Pup Molly has decided to become really seriously playful. Not with Wee Pup but just on her own. Henry plays on his own as well as with us and Wee Pup is currently enjoying almost constant attention from Other Half (he is meant to be his dog so he's taking full responsibility for everything which is really good).

So, the house is something like 'Doggy Daycare' at the moment. There isn't a moment when there isn't something doggy going on - it's not good when you are used to a peaceful life and right now I think it's just me that had a peaceful life.

On the up side, Henry has been a superstar with Wee Pup, he is tolerating him, looking out for him and running after him when he wanders off in the garden. It's brilliant although we aren't letting Wee Pup get too amourous with Henry as several times Henry has got a bit too rough with his big paddy paws and also Wee Pup has decided he needs to test his teeth on everything and we'd rather not have nasty recriminations.

Molly has been brilliant with him too, taking very little interest in him until he is scared or gets a Henry paw on top of him. She seems very caring about him which is so lovely.

On the Leaphound front, Henry has been making full use of the fence that I've had put accross in front of the grass in the garden. I put the fence up last winter as Henry kept bombing around the grass and started to wreck it. We are really exposed to the elements here and a bonfire on the grass takes two years to mend so a Leaphound tearing it up is almost terminal.

The unexpected advantage of fencing the grass off was that the dogs stayed nice and clean during the winter so I didn't have to clean the mud off their feet every time they went out for a pee so I decided to put the fence up again this winter.

The trouble is Henry has decided that this winter the fence is not for sectioning off the garden, its a hurdle for him to practice his Leaphounding with. He takes four steps out of the back door and takes off while accelerating at an incredible rate of knots before landing half way accross the other side of the garden.

This is instantly and fluidly turned into a rapid bomb around the garden, sometimes hurdling back over the fence and sometimes running so fast towards the wall or fence that it seems impossible for him to stop or turn in time before hitting it but with total skill he seems to angle his skids so that he never hits either of them.

Of course this all leads to major muddy paws which then have to be cleaned before Henry can come back in otherwise the carpet and sofa get all dirty. I wonder if the fence is going to be any use at all this year!

On a sadder note, it is exactly a year since I lost my dear old Fergus. I guess leaving me on the 5th November certainly meant he won't be forgotten and I had been anticipating today with more than a little sadness but now the day is here it has been fine, mostly I think due to Henry. He is so much like Fergus when he was young that it's sometimes easy to forget which dog is making me laugh, and today Henry and Molly have both made me laugh allot which has made me forget to be so sad.

Strangley though we ended up back in the vet where we were a year ago as while driving along the road we came accross a buzzard that seemed in a bit of difficulty. It didn't appear to have broken a wing or anything but was rather dazed so Other Half wrapped one of the dog blankets around it and we whisked it to the vets, only to end up in the same room as a year ago which was slightly bizzare. The bird was incredibly scary when the vet unwrapped him and I decided it might be a good idea to hide behind Other Half as he looked rather angry with me (the bird not Other Half). Anyway the bird has gone off to the wildlife hospital so I'll post if I hear anything about him.

As for Bonfire Night, well we are far to away from anywhere to be bothered by fireworks but we may be having some at the weekend, further up the track well away from the house. I think I may well stay in the house though, just to be sure the dogs are ok, although I'm pretty confident they will be fine but it's best to be safe than sorry.

Fencing

This week we have been getting some fencing done as Henry being a Leaphound can jump very well. Despite this he decided to get some extra jumping in while it was going on.

This is all normal for Henry and usually happens at high speed and it's a very good idea to keep out of the way while he is doing it.

At one point he decided to use the fencing that was yet to be used and half way accross the grass as a hurdle which was really quite excellent to watch.

A couple of Pup photos

Here are a couple more pup photos just to show how cute he is.

New Addition

We have a new addition to our household this week, a puppy border collie who was born in the barn next door. He's very cute but quite hard work and has made me realise just why I've always had adult or young dogs!

Henry and Molly are coping with him very well, from the first hour they have let him wander around in between all their legs and have only growled when he has tried to invade their space or climb all over them.

Wee Pup might be staying forever, we'll see how it goes but for the time being everyone is enjoying having him to stay - Henry was also wondering if Mossie might want to give him a tip or two to make sure he stays here!

Wrap up warm

Today was the first day of it being cold enough for the dogs to wear their coats.

I'd like to say that my dogs have such a large selection of coats because I have had four dogs so far, but the truth is that Fergus and Bonnie the first two dogs were terribly spoilt by me, resulting in an entire canine wardrobe of coats, collars and leads. Not to mention dog toys and various other accessories.

At the last count we had seven coats, ten leads and 6 collars. All the collars came from Harrods because I used to think it was rather nice to have my dogs in posh collars with gold embossed Harrods logos inside. Now I'm too far away from Harrods to indulge. Probably a good thing for the bank balance nowdays.

When Henry came he had his own collar and coat which was really lovely of the rescue people to give him. They tried to give us a lead to but we showed them just a couple of our collection in the boot of the car and agreed we didn't need one.

So today was cold and windy and I was wearing a coat so the dogs would too and I chose their big red fleece lined coats with the lift up hoods that roll down as cosy collars. They are the only dogs in a 20 mile radius (maybe more) that wear coats round here and the farmers must think I am mad but my dogs must be warm, and someone in these parts must provide the entertainment!

After our walk (where Molly caught a mouse and ate it) we came back and I spent some time in the garden with the dogs doing the duties with the shovel.

Today whilst weilding my shovel I found a large part of the mop in one of the poos. It can only be Henry who ate it, but why?? This has to go down with the poop scooping after Henry ate the candles, that was like poop scooping poo shaped candles, no poo just wax!

Probably the best of the lot belongs to Fergus who stole approximately 30 mini chocolate bars one Christmas and scoffed them down as quickly as he could before he got caught out. After blaming other people for being greedy and eating most of the chocolates I realised who the culprit was the next morning and for a few days after as Ferg hadn't bothered to chew or take the chocolate out of the wrapper so we had lots of intact albeit melted and squishy chocolate bars still in their wrappers all over the garden!

The wind gets up their tails

The weather over the last few days here has been awful. More rain than you need to fill a bucket and seriously strong winds that blow you over.

The rivers around us all filled up and overflowed and the tiles on the roof of the house rattled constantly for three days, it wasn't very nice.

Also what wasn't very nice was having to send the dogs outside to go to the loo. There was a very good chance that Henry would see this as an opportunity to revert to pre-toilet trained days but amazingly he didn't and on Saturday joined Molly in refusing to go outside until lunch time. Both dogs curled up on the sofa and refused to move. I knew how they felt, I decided to join them and went completely deaf at Other Halfs suggestion that we go out somewhere instead of staying indoors all day.

The worst thing about the wind (apart from it completely ruining your hair) is that when it really blows Henry gets scared of it and runs indoors whether he's finished or not. He originally came from slightly warmer climes in England so the weather here was a bit of a shock to him to say the least.

The farm dogs on the other hand seem impervious to all the wind and rain and come to visit every day and have now started to bark at Henry and Molly through the front window while Henry and Molly bark back from inside. I'm not sure what's being said, it could be 'hahaha we can run around anywhere we want cos we are outside' or it could equally be ' hahaha we are inside in the warm with central heating and sofas for beds'.

The only activity on Saturday was a rather fierce game between Other Half and Henry which involved lots of barking, jumping, bouncing (all on Henry's side) and outwitting on Other Half's side. The trouble when Henry plays is that he gets so carried away that he sometimes bites your arm or hand instead of the toy that he's trying to get so I think Other Half came off worse, but Henry had a good time.

In the evening just for entertainment value I remembered the two dog balls from my last two dogs that you put treats into and the dogs are meant to roll them around to get the treats out. It makes one Schamko last about 20 minutes which is incredibly good value so I decided to try them out on Hen and Molls.

Amazingly Molly remembered what to do, even though I had only shown her once about a year ago. So she was off and away rolling her ball around the living room like a premier footballer.

Henry on the other hand had seen nothing of the sort before and took a little more instruction but it was far to hard to get him to concentrate on learning rather than trying to beat the ball up to get it to yeild the treats.

This was quite funny to watch and got even funnier when Other Half remembered that Henry's ball had a movment sensor in it where you could record a message and every now and then it would play it when the dog moved the ball.

Other Half being slightly mean decided to record his best telling off noise, the one he uses to instantly get the dogs out of the kitchen, then then set the ball and gave it back to Henry.

As soon as Henry moved the ball it made the noise. Henry stopped dead and stared at the ball. Then he prodded it with his paw and it did it again. Then he jumped at it and it shot accross the living room followed quickly by Henry who had started barking at the ball.

A dog/ball scuffle broke out and suddenly Henry was running off with something in his mouth that was telling him to get out very loudly.

Henry had somehow expertly managed to remove the noise part of the ball and was determined to chew it up to shut it up - brilliant dog, how brainy is that?

We fell about laughing and just managed to stop the noise thing from disappearing down Henry's throat.

I think we'll only get the treat balls out now and then, I don't think my nerves could stand it every day!

More relaxing

At the weekend I went to the Sea Life Center in Edinburgh and learned that sharks have no bones but cartilage instead to make them more bendy.

I'm wondering if Henry could be related to the shark family?

I also learned that sharks have five gills, I'll take a look underthe furry stripes later...

Relaxing

Henry takes relaxing very seriously. Here is a picture of him lazing on the sofa while I write this. I'm not sure that dogs should actually be able to bend like this but he is still alive so I guess it's ok.

Yorkshire Puddings

There is a sense of humour difference in our house today.

Yesterday we visited Other Half's Mum and Dad for dinner, we took the dogs with us and when we arrived Other Half went out to chat with his Dad while he finished cleaning his car and I had a cup of tea with his Mum and the dogs in the living room.

Other Half's son was there too so there were people spread out all over the house and driveway. Henry and Molly aren't the best at coming back if they get off the lead and because everyone was all over the place the dogs were continually pacing about trying to round everyone up which was causing me quite a bit of stress as those outside kept coming in and out and leaving doors ajar which could mean an escape attempt.

After about half an hour I decided to give Henry and Molly their dinner in an attempt to get them settled and stop driving me mad with the pacing. I fed them in the kitchen and had to supervise as there were various stages of a roast dinner about the worktops and of course that is much tastier than dog food.

For some reason Molly decided to raid Henry's bowl of food, Henry then moved round and I tried to get Molly back to her bowl, somewhere in the middle of this incedent Henry managed to produce a yorkshire pudding. It honestly just appeared in his mouth - ok there were a whole load of them sitting on the worktop just out of the oven but I really didn't see him jump up and take one.

I had a momentary panic, and decided to confess my dogs sins straight away as otherwise Other Half's Mum would think I was the yorkshire pudding rustler. I called her in and hoped I wouldn't get too told off for badly training my dogs and she immediately started to laugh saying that not just one yorkshire pud had gone but six! It was really funny because at no time had Henry been out of our sight, so how on earth he had managed to steal six yorkshire puddings and still continue to pace around the house we will never know but I am impressed with his tactics as I'd have thought that faced with a tray of warm yorkshire puddings straight out of the oven and for the taking he would have scoffed the lot at once but he must have been pacing about the living room, going past the kitching door and thinking 'I'll just slip in there and grab another one of those puds and they'll never notice'.

Stealth and skill, what a dog!

Other Half didn't see the funny side, but then again he is fairly new to life with a young Saluki Greyhound and there will be much more to come. Lucky he dosen't know that....

Satelite Stress

Back in April (in the middle of house-training-hell) I came downstairs to find no accidents whatsoever. But Henry was acting very guilty, looking all too cute and wagging his tail in that special way which means he has done something he shoudn't.



As I couldn't find anything I let him out and carried on with breakfast as usual and it was only when I was tidying up for the day that I saw it. A puddle on the shelf under the tv. I really didn't beleive my eyes, how can a puddle appear on a shelf? Unless it had been but there by someone with stripey fur.



On further investigation I realised that it was exactly what I thought it was, wee. Wee on the shelf, dripped off the shelf and most of all all over the satelite box. Oh dear. I didn't really know where to start apart from disconnecting the power to make it all safe.



After thinking about it for a short time I decided to go for it, clearing up wee isn't the nicest of jobs but when it's cold and on your tv shelf it's even worse so armed with a bucket of hot soapy water and a cloth I disconnected the wires going into the back of the box and carefully lifted it, trying not to disturb the puddle. For some reason it must have had some electricity still in it as the box made my fingers tingle when I touched it.



Then I carefully wiped the box down, followed by the cables and shelf and also checking for drips onto the carpet, it was like a scene from CSI.



I decided to take a look at the inside of the box, if it was just a resistor it should be fixable but once I opened it up I discovered that several parts had really corroded - never underestimate the power of wee, it's very corrosive especially on the inside of a satelite box.



The box was unfixable (I wouldn't have had the cheek to give it to a repair man) and this was a big problem as we live in the middle of the hills in the middle of nowhere and we don't get a tv signal at all so satelite it the only way we can watch tv. I decided that tv wasn't a high priority in the entertainment stakes, after all I know of several (probably slightly mad) people who claim not to watch tv and I'm sure if they could live without it then so could I. Other Half was away with his work at the time and I had a mental list of things to do in the evenings instead of watching tv.

On the first evening without tv I go on rather well. I had my little multi frequency radio which manages to pick up Radio 4 despite the hills and I got on with painting the kitchen. The evening flew by and it was great to have go on with some well over due diy. On the second evening I did some work and some clearing out of junk. Great again, getting those jobs done that had needed doing for months. Evening three was good too, I went into the garden and did some weeding, and a bit of cleaning inside.

By evening four I was exhausted.

Either people who choose not to watch tv have high energy levels or are happy to sit and read a book without moving very much. I have neither, I can't sit still for long without a job popping up in my head and I feel guilty reading a book when there is stuff to do.

I then had a brainwave. iPlayer on the BBC. Great, brilliant, lifesaver and energy re-booster. It seemed like the answer to everything, I could watch tv and even better only watch the programmes I like. Heaven.

Except that just like the tv signal being blocked by the hills, the same hills prevent us from having a super fast broadband connection. So watching a 30 minute programme took nearly two hours with lots of stops and pauses and often dying in the middle. It was somewhat frustrating but better than exhaustion.

I endured it for nearly two months until Other Half decided he could no longer stand weekends without tv and I gave in and bought a new satelite box.

The new box was proudly installed on the shelf under the tv. Henry didn't even seem to notice. For about four weeks.

Then one morning the puddle was back. Nooooo! The box was once again dead.

I decided that if I could live before with just iPlayer for entertainment then I could do it again. This decision was mostly influenced by lack of money and having none spare to buy yet another satelite box so in reality I had no choice.

I managed another three weeks of iPlayer before spotting a fabulous portable satelite system on Ebay. It was cheap. Very cheap. But worth a shot so I bid and won and waited for it to arrive.

Once it came I opened the box and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about satelite communications and this needed some knowledge albeit basic. I waited for Other Half to come home and we had a Saturday of dishes on poles, attached to fences, wind blowing the poles down, finding a signal but only getting Brazilian tv then loosing all signals while trying to find Sky. After several hours I remembered that Henry had only peed on the receiver box, not the dish and why didn't we connect the portable receiver to the original dish? I took cover and Other Half plugged the box in.

We had tv! Yey! 700+ channels of absolute tosh. More rubbish than we could cope with and to find the more intelligent channels was like finding the old needle in a haystack. We ended up with London local news, Yorkshire ITV, Wales BBC2 and a handful of other strange chanels but at least we had tv.

Throughout all this Henry acted no different. He was oblivious to the trouble he had caused and just seemed to watch the comings and goings of various satelite boxes with total disinterest.

After we could endure the news from Hull, Kendal, Looe and Maidstone no longer we eventually bought a third Sky box. This time I dug out and old chest that was hiding away in the workshop, rubbed it down, cleaned it up and put the tv on top. The satelite box is now way out of reach of a dogs back leg high up on a shelf above the tv. It actually looks better than it did before but we won't tell Henry that in case he tries to continue with his interior decoration career.

Serious Barking and Sleeping

Over the last couple of days Henry has done some serious barking.

It started on Saturday which was very rainy. For some reason he just took to barking at absolutely everything, me, Other Half, Molly (especailly Molly), the cats on the farm, the hares in the field and the dogs on the farm.

The dogs on the farm decided to come up to the front of the house and stand on the track and bark back which was quite funny to start with but then Molly joined in and we had two dogs standing on their back legs at the window barking at two more dogs through the window who were barking back. This could only go on for so long before one of the occupants of the house had a nervous breakdown.

Then the rain wouldn't stop so we were all stuck in the house together, especially as the river burst it's banks and ran over the end of the track so unless we were up for a quick (and it would have been very quick as the water was rushing by) swim there was nowhere to go anyway. Of course the dogs didn't realise this and were trying every trick in the book to get out which for Henry involved even more barking.

Eventually as the day went on the rain slowed and I decided to take the dogs to dog training club as they had the hall for Saturday evening instead of Thursday due to a mix up.

I did mean to go to the first class of the evening but due to everyone barking and jumping up and confusing everything I ended up being half an hour late so I decided to creep into the hall and watch the first hour and then join the second class. As I opened the door a perfect class was going on, no barking (bliss) and every dog was behaving perfectly, and of course because it was so quiet everyone looked as I went in.

Having been noticed I was given the job of going up to each dog to say hello and give them a treat, now I'm a real dog person and I felt all puffed up at being asked to do such an important job so off I went around the hall being all important.

Being a real dog person I didn't worry at all about the dogs, after all they were in dog training club and everyone knows everyone and all the dogs are getting socialised so I wasn't expecting to be snapped at by the first very cute fluffy white dog who was also incedentally rather small so I immediately over-reacted and jumped back half a hall length! This attempt over I moved on to the next dog, a very very lovely lurcher who I'd never seen before, she looked at me with adoring eyes, refused my treat and growled! This really wasn't good so I quickly moved round the rest of the dogs before being told to bring Molly and Henry in to join the class.

As I said, the class was lovely and controlled and quiet, until the three of us crashed through the door. Henry started barking straight away and Molly was very insistant at going up to the lovely lady who runs the classes as she knew she had a pocket full of treats. The peace was shattered for the rest of the evening.

After the first class ended the dogs for the second class started arriving. We normally go to the second class so all the dogs know each other and for 20 minutes or so the hall was full of dogs all going around saying hello to each other and bounding to the door to greet the latest arrival. As one owner said, we could remember when we had a full social lives of our own and Saturday night was the night to get dressed up and go out partying but now it's our dogs who have all the fun! Henry of course was the noisiest, barking and howling at everyone, running around the other dogs and sidling up to the owners as he knows they all have treats in their pockets.

Once everyone had settled down we had a great lesson, both Henry and Molly walked perfectly to heel, sat, stayed, stayed while I walked accross the room, did a recall and then a silent recall and looked completely well trained. Why is it that this happens in the hall with all the other dogs and then on walks at home they are like a couple of hooligans? I'm yet to get Henry to walk to heel on a walk.

Then we all went home after extracting Other Half from the pub and for once in the weekend both dogs laid on their beds and snored away, there is nothing better in life than to look upon dogs who are fast asleep and worn out, it's a sort of blissful thing that should be bottled.

Up to Date

I think at long last this blog is now just about up to date. My intentions for it were to catalogue the antics of Henry and his co-conspiritor Molly about once a week or whenever I felt like it and having spent the last few months recalling the best part of the last year I think it's safe to say that we can now start from now.

It's October 9th and the biggest part of news I can give you is that Henry seems to be completely housetrained. It's been over four weeks since he had an kind of accident in the house and he has at long last worked out that if he comes up to the bedroom in the morning I will instantly get up and let him outside for a wee - I'm not sure how he worked this out but I'm very pleased he did.

We think the biggest part in this momentous turn of events was to cut out the dogs breaksfast. Because Henry was such a skinny thing when he arrived we had to give him several meals a day. Food is Henry's biggest hobby in life and we think it was actually his stomach waking him in the morning and not his bladder (or bowels) and that once awake his system would begin to do it's stuff.

By cutting out the breakfast his stomach didn't bother waking and withing three days Henry was sleeping in until 8.00am - amazing considering he'd never managed to stay asleep much past 6.00am for the last ten months.

It wasn't easy. I began by spending a week at my parents, house training being so much easier there as the dogs slept in the room with us. I absolutely refused to feed the dogs before 8.30am. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they will always try to bring their feeding times forward by an hour and then if you give in they start trying to bring it forward by another hour and so on and so on... but it was a good start, although hard not to give in to the two of them standing at the kitchen door looking sad and hungry and trying to grind me down.

We came home from Mum and Dad's and spent a week at home before going away again in our caravan, somewhere again where the dogs sleep in close proximity to us. It was during this week that I decided to just leave out breakfast altogether. It was hard as the dogs tried every trick in the book to get some but I gave them the equivalent amount off breakfast on top of their dinner so they got the same amount of food and bingo, three days later Henry has completely forgotten about getting up at the crack of dawn and weeing everywhere. Deep joy and alleyulah!

The final test for this came this week on Monday when we had to go out at 2pm and got very delayed in coming back which meant the dogs were left in the house for 7 hours - they are never usually left at all except for a couple of hours here and there so we really expected and would have excused any accidents. But on our return we were amazed to find that neither dog had done anything. Brilliant.

As for antics and mad behaviour, Henry did try to throw himself through a stock fence yesterday after a mad hare hid quite successfully and then decided to dart out at the last minute. Other Half said that Henry would actually mince himself through the wire in the efforts to run after the hare before realising that it hurt and I think he was right. It's a bit of a nightmare round here at the moment because every few meters or so there is a hare or a couple of pheasants hiding in the hedgerows, all ready to leap out at Henry and run away. Still, it all makes for an exciting walk and also improves the muscles in my arms brilliantly.

Summertime

Through the summer Henry's progress back to normal weight, health and energy was coming along brilliantly.

His coat was almost completely grown back in, there were no bald spots at all but the feathering (or what was left of it after his starvation) had all fallen out and wasn't showing signs of coming back. Certainly the fur on the back of his front legs and back legs was slightly longer than ther rest of his coat but when he arrived there were patches that were a good 3 inches but hey ho, I didn't care all I cared about was Henry being happy and healthy.

The house training was still a big issue though. He was fine if I was around but that was probably because I could let him out as and when he wanted and as it was warmer the back door was open most of the time so the dogs could wander in and out at will. He did have a habit of getting up early, (earlier than me at 6.00am) peeing and sometimes pooing in the living room and going back to bed. I was so stuck as to a solution that I honestly didn't know what to do. I'd count the non accident days as great days and would be full of hope that we'd turned a corner, only for us to go back ten steps a week or so later.

On a postitive note, Henry was behaving much better on the lead when he was out for walks, I'd still not let him off and when we first used to go walking he would be a complete nutter at the sight of a hare, rabbit, sheep, lamb or cow. He would jump up onto his hind legs and bounce along making a horrendous screaming, howling barking noise certain to bring himself to the attention of anyone within two miles. But as we saw all these animals every single day the novelty eventually wore off. We were still doing really long walks with our neighbour and I think Henry was running out of energy to take quite so much notice!

Most of the summer Henry and Molly spent their days lazing around in the garden in the sun, getting too hot and then coming to lay on the floor of my workshop until they cooled and then going back out into the sun again, a perfect summer for dogs really.

We were making a huge amount of progress with Henry and by virtue of the fact that the pace was slowing down meant that he was doing really well - if it wasn't for the house training problem I think he would be well and truly settled.

We would get there...

Don't eat all your food at once

One day in May I was busy around the house. I'd been on the phone and doing all the usual house work type things that seem never to end.


The dogs were being well behaved, Molly lazying around and Henry was very quiet. In fact he was too quiet. This was usually not good news as it meant he was up to no good.


On further investigation I saw him in the yard sniffing about. He didn't seem to be doing anything wrong so I continued with what I was doing.


As I was washing up I looked out of the kitched window and realised he was still sniffing in the same area just outside the store where we keep the washing machine and dogs food etc. This was odd as it was unlike Henry to concentrate on the same thing for very long. Then I realised he seemed to be eating something, now this could mean anything so I decided to go out and investigate.


It took two steps across the yard for me to realised what Henry had been up to. He'd somehow broken into the store and got the sack of dog food down from above the washing machine. What I didn't realise straight away was that he had eaten about a weeks worth of food in one go. I had to measure what was left in the bag to work that one out and that was after I'd wrestled the bag from his jaws.


Well, I decided that no harm had been done and that Henry would just be rather full. Then after the vets had closed for the evening (I'm sure dogs do this on purpose) he started to swell up. Henry is a very skinny dog and now he looked like a skinny dog who had eaten a small football. He was obviously in a bit of discomfort so I decided I should consult the internet for advice.


The internet is never the best place for medical advice, you are either about the die in the next two days or there is absolutely nothing wrong with you and it appears the same for dogs too as the advice I found was that A)there was no need to worry or B) Henry would explode like a balloon full of half digested dog food.


Having had various contents of Henry's stomach all over the living room carpet on several occasions I rather wanted to avoid the second diagnosis so I looked further into what I should actually do. Thankfully there was one piece of very good advice and that was that if the dog has overeaten dry food then remove all access to water as it will make the food swell up inside the dog with the explosion more likely to happen.


Poor Henry was desperate for a drink and followed me around while I watered the plants in the garden, thinking back I realise this was a rather mean thing to do in the circumstances, he was that desperate for a drink that he took to trying to lick the peat in the tubs. Then I remembered that the toilet lid was up, for some bizzarre reason all my dogs have chosen to drink from the toilet and as I made my way to the bathroom Henry seemed to pre-empt me and rushed ahead shoving his head down the pan desperately drinking the water. It was really hard to try and drag him away from it as being a bendy dog he managed to wriggle free and go back to drinking the toilet water.



After the fight for the toilet which I won I then had a rather uncomfortable night of Henry trying to lay down but being so rotund from the amount of food inside him he couldn't actually lay on his side as he wobbled around like a weeble, (remember them?) so he would pace about trying to find a more comfortable position.



After an hour or so he made a bit of progress, he was sick, this was good as it got some of the food out of him so I was rather pleased with him, but then the daft dog decided to eat the sick before I could clear it up - why do dogs do that? The evening was then a routine of Henry being sick and me rushing to clear it awway before he could eat it, sometimes it was a physical struggle to get to the sick first. Something else which was mad and only a dog would do was Henry complained bitterly when he didn't get any dinner! Dogs!

By the morning though all was good, Henry looked much more sleek and less like a dog shaped football and it was clear that he had recovered from his overeating session which saved us from another visit to the vets.

He did demand his breakfast though.....

Living in hope of house training

After we returned from Mum and Dads I was full of hope with the house training problems we'd been having with Henry.

Other Half clearly didn't beleive that there had been no accidents having caught me out on several occasions when I'd tried to pretend that Henry had been doing better than he had.

On our return though Henry got back into his usual routine. Waking before us, wandering around and weeing somewhere downstairs. So I got back into my own routine of waking before Henry, getting him up and putting him outside so early that he probably did it all in his sleep, I know I was barely awake. For a few days it seemed that no matter what time I got up Henry had woken before me and left a message for my descent downstairs. It was truly doing my head in, I'd now started to wake at 4.30 am to pre-empt Henry's bladder and it was taking it's toll on my sanity.

In desperation I spoke to the loveley ladies at Greyhounds Galore. Just talking to someone made me feel better, Other Half was getting less and less patient with Henry and I could see his point but on one or two occasions it was mentioned that the dog had to go if he didn't make a significant improvement. This caused rather a large argument every time which probably didn't help the situation as a whole.

The lovely lady at Greyhounds Galore gave me some good hints and tips and was just generally so nice that I felt re-charged and ready to resume the battle of the bladder once again.

So it was back to the big routine. I'd not stopped the routine but I confess I had slipped. I think it was really more down to being worn out and exhausted. I was waking at 4.30am, sometimes going back to bed and sometimes doing some work. I was then waking to let Henry out at 6.00 am and again at 7.30 and again at 8.30am and despite all that Henry was still weeing in the house. I also couldnt go to bed until at the earliest 10.30 pm as if I went too early Henry would pee within an hour of my sleeping. I was truly exhausted, grumpy and at the end of my tether, over the last four years I'd cared for two ageing dogs one after the other who had me up during the night and really stressed me just by being old and frail and after thinking it was all over I was finding it to be even harder with this new dog. I dont think being tired was helping.

Somehow after my talk I felt a bit energised and decdided to take a harder line. I would get up at 6.00am and no earlier, and stick to the routine that I'd earlier devised. I realised that Henry had manipulated me into doing what he wanted and it had to stop before I lost the plot.

I also invested a huge amount of money on anti pee spray and mega impressive anti pee smell spray. Both worked, for two days.

However, I started taking the dogs on longer and longer walks with our neighbour. Both of us had managed to slow down and put on weight and generally get unfit so we stepped up our daily walk to 8 miles a day. Henry and Molly of course took it in their strides but they also became much calmer around the house. I noticed an almost immediate change in Henry and he became allot better with the house training, maybe we had turned a corner.....

A few months after this I am writing this having spent the last three and a half weeks with absolutely no accidents whatsoever. Hopefully we are finally there and Henry has finally got the idea that weeing in the house is not good. Other Half seems to have come around to him after a long period of dislike due to the peeing and life seems to be going fine - long may it continue, especially as the Vax machine is broken, probably due to overuse.

False Teeth and Tomatoes

During our stay at Mum and Dads both dogs had a great time. They had the run of the house and garden and my Mum is a real softy, giving them lots of treats and titbits which both dogs soon cottoned on to.

Henry's house training, or rather lack of it was a big worry though. I really didn't want him weeing in my parents house so I decided that the dogs would sleep in my bedroom with me. On the first night, every available floorspace in our room that wasn't covered by either furniture or dog beds was covered with big thick decorating dust sheets, just in case.

On the first night Henry got me up at 4.30am to go out for a wee. Amazing. Although it was 4.30am that was of small importance to the fact that he had actually woken me up to go out and by the end of the visit we had managed to get this wakening time to 7.30 am oh yee haa!

Also during the visit Henry didn't have one single accident, not one. Amazing. So what was so good about my parents house that wasn't in our house, I wracked my brains and came up with a big zero.

Of course food came into the picture again, this time we found out how much Henry likes salad. Whilst preparing a salad he would jump up and steal things from the work surface every time my Mum turned her back. He took a tomato here, a radish there, a couple of boiled eggs and then a whole cucumber disappeared. Mum luckily saw the funny side but ended up having to prepare food high up on top of the grill to the cooker - luckily Mum is very tall.

Then one night not long after we had gone to bed I realised I'd left the bedroom door adjar and that Henry had slunk out of the room. This was instantly followed by the realisation that there was some sort of kerrfuffle going on around the house.

I could hear Henry and also my Mum moving about and I got up to discover that Henry was running about the house with my Mum's false teeth in his mouth! Every time my Mum got near him he would spring away with the teeth parts of the false teeth on the outside of his mouth making the whole thing even more comical. It took the two of us to catch him which made it all the funnier.

The next day Henry came proudly boucing into the kitchen from the garden with a half eaten cucumber that had obviously been buried and dug up, thank goodness he didn't manage to get outside with the teeth otherwise we'd have been digging up the garden in the middle of the night to try and find them...

Holidays

During March we had to go to a wedding in Surrey. This meant finding a kennel to look after Henry and Molly so after much asking around we finally found a lovely lady called Heather who runs a kennels, cattery and also rescues animals that need a home.

It was the first time Henry and Molly had been in the kennels and I was rather worried that they would be ok but Heather assured me that everything would be ok and after I finished all the paperwork we went out to the car to fetch the dogs. Once back in the kennel compound Heather took both the dogs leads and off they went without so much as a glance back at me.

So much for my worrying, both dogs were fine and actually I think they rather liked it in the kennels as they both seemed more interested in Heather than in me when I went to pick them up. So that was one big thing off the doggie owning list, a good reliable kennel where the dogs were happy.

A few weeks later I decided to go and visit my parents in Kent. I almost always drive down as I'm often quite bad at eaking out another couple of extra days in the sunshine down there. Our neighbours sister lives in London so she came along for the ride which was good company and also a great help with the dogs on the way down.

During the afternoon before while I was packing both dogs and especially Henry were looking rather unsettled, I suppose they knew something was afoot. In order to take my attention away from packing and then going away the dogs started bouncing about the house so I let them into the garden where they embarked on some mad running. It was quite funny as they were bombing about the garden like mad things barking and springing about. But then Henry took it a bit too far and ran right into Molly while barking loudly. Molly immediately took offence and snapped back at him which resulted in a loud yelp from Henry.

Henry came straight over to me like a small child about to tell you that the bog boy did it and I noticed that he had a cut on his side. On further investigation I found that it was quite a big tear and that the skin had been pulled away from his ribs, ouch!

What was more of an ouch was that I was going to Kent in 12 hours and now I had a dog with a hole in his side. My first thought were to try a bit of first aid myself. I'd been back and forth to the vets with Henry on a regular basis and I was getting a bit embaressed by it. I had a think about how I'd fix it if it was me and then realised that I'd need some of those butterfly plaster things. My brother used to work for a ship and aircraft company and he specialised in servicing the first aid and rescue equipment so we are more than prepared for a major disaster but not if it needed butterfly plasters.

After searching through two marine and one rather cool Japanese aircraft first aid pod, getting a vast amount of iodine all over my hands and becoming rather afraid of the sissors and tweezers for more serious events I gave up on the first aid kits. I did briefly consider sticking Henry together with super-glue but having tried to do this once on myself I decided against it as the risk of getting bitten was quite high on that one.

So it was off to the vets once again. The vet was as usual really nice, and Henry seemed as pleased as ever to be in there, he must be the only dog in the world to actually wag his tail and pull on the lead to get into the vets.

In his excitement Henry refused to keep still while the vet clippered the area of the tear in his side, resulting in a much bigger and quite wonky area of shaved fur, which in turn made the whole thing look much worse. The vet then got out the dreaded staple gun. This is something to make your eyes water but it is a very efficient way of fixing cuts and tears but it is rather painfull and after the third staple Henry did a big slump and gave up, it was really sad to see him just give in to the pain but two staples later and it was all over.

The vet told me to keep Henry from bouncing. Hmmmmm, not much chance of that! We also had to put one of those big white lampshades on him which we already had at home so off we went with a stapled dog to resume packing.

Once home I tried the lamp shade on Henry but it just wouldn't stay on his head. He seemed completely adept at removing it the moment I turned away so I gave up. He didn't seem too interested in the staples so hopefully they would remain unchewed.

Wrong. The phone rang, and after about five minutes I noticed Henry licking himself out of the corner of my eye and didn't think any more about it until I finished my conversation and found that he had expertly removed one of the five staples. Problem.

The problem was solved, this time by a large winter dog coat, probably two dog sizes too big for him but it fitted right over the stapled area in his side and prevented Henry from getting at the wound. Genious.

The next morning we set off with our neighbour to Kent. The dogs were really pleased at coming with us, I think they thought they were being left behind or something. The only thing I couldn't do was get Henry to wee before we set off,I'm not sure if it was wearing the big red dog coat or not but I really didn't want him weeing in the car....

After a couple of hours Molly started to fidget so we stopped for some lunch and to let the dogs out, again Henry refused to wee, this was not good, normally on a drive to Kent I'd only stop once if at all so I knew if Henry didn't wee now I'd have to stop again and the more stops the more chance we'd get of getting caught up on the M25 during rush hour.

A couple of hours further south we stopped once more and still no wees from Henry, I was begining to get some rather funny looks from people as it was quite a warm day and Henry was still wearing his huge red coat. Molly was an angel, performing almost on command and being really well behaved in the car.

We'd arranged to drop our neighbour at Stanstead so she could get the shuttle from there into London and once more I attempted to get Henry to wee. And once more he refused. This is the dog that won't go a day without having an accident in the house yet he was travelling almost the length of Britain without a single drop leaving his bladder.

We finally arrived at Mum and Dads at 5.30pm and he finally wee'ed in their garden after being there for nearly half an hour, amazing!

Molly had been to visit Mum and Dad before and it wasn't long before she had settled right into everything but Henry had never been anywhere with me to visit before so after ten minutes he started to bounce, he bounced around the house, bounced around the garden and bounced on the walk we went on before dinner to try and tire him out. Luckily Mum and Dad are great dog people so they are very tolerant of mad dogs like Henry but somehow I don't think they expected quite so much bounce!

Pot-pourri is not food

Around late January early February Henry was settling in well. We still had major issues with the house training but apart from that he was improving every day. He was doing incredibly well at dog training and amazingly for me I was keeping it up at home too so he was turning into the best behaved dog I'd ever owned. He was also sleeping through the night but I was still having to get up at the crack of dawn to beat his bladder to the back door every morning.

The one thing Henry was still mad about was food. He was still slightly underweight and his main interest in life was finding anything that was vaguely edible, this included any type of vegetable (cooked or uncooked), anything run over and long dead on the road, raiding the compost heap and also the kitchen bin.

One thing we weren't banking on was that Henry would go on a night time scavange hunt into areas of the house that even we had forgotten about. This resulted in him managing to squeeze into the six inch wide gap that ran along the back of the sofa to retreive some long lost, non smelly (to us) pot-pourri that I'd temporarily placed there when we moved in after failing to find a home for it and promptly forgotten about.

Apparently to Henry this was a great find, it was various colours of orange and brown with some sprayed gold bits and made up of very exotic dried fruits and seed pods. It was really quite nice to look at and very decorative and most definately not edible.

So Henry ate it. Not quite all of it but about three quarters of a dinner plate full.

I was awoken by him wimpering at the bottom of the stairs followed by the unmistakeable sound of retching. I wasn't too worried, dogs are sick all the time and it seems mostly for no reason so I was instantly shocked to seem several orange patches of sick all over the living room carpet and even a couple up the cream coloured sofas. This was projectile sick in doggie form and it wasn't good.

I let Henry out into the garden and started to clean up the sick. It wasn't cleaning up very well, the sick was coming up (excuse the pun) but the orange dye wasn't. I had orange blobs all over the living room and to make matters worse Henry came in from the garden and was promptly sick once again on the carpet.

I decided the best thing was to not feed Henry for a day and let the pot-pourri work it's way through his system so I dug out one of the big dust sheets to protect what was left of the carpet and kept an eye on him.

He was fine for the rest of the day, rather listless but still interested in food which I saw as a good sign but as the evening wore on he seemed to get more and more ill. It was by now too late to call the vet so I decided to sleep on the sofa downstairs with him until it was time for the vet to open.

By the next morning poor Henry looked very sorry for himself, he was looking very skinny and downtrodden and the vet decided to take him in and keep him at the surgery. He ended up staying for three days. This was a very good lesson in getting your dog insured and I felt releived that that was one of the first things I did when I got Henry.

On the fourth day Henry came home. It looked as though all the weight he'd put on since I'd got him had been lost and we once again had a skinny ribby dog who despite everything he'd managed to put himself through was still bouncing! And eating.....

Snow Dogs

Just after Christmas it snowed! We get fairly big snow here as we are about 1000 feet above sea level so it's also very cold at times so getting lots of snow makes up for the lack of sunshine (well sort of).

Anyway, on the morning of the first day of snow I woke up and went downstairs to let the dogs out and on opening the back door they were just so funny. Neither dog seemed to have seen snow before, both of them usually go rushing out the door in a hurry to get sniffing round the garden but this time they just kept looking at the snow in the sky and watching it fall to the ground. They then tentatively stepped outside and both got snow on the end of their noses as they sniffed this strange cold white stuff that had suddenly appeared.

And then they went into snow dog mode.

Snow dog mode is a super fast accelerated version of a normal dog except this mode only happens when it snows. There is a similar mode for sandy beaches. Both dogs run madly round and round, leaping and jumping and smiling loads. It's so funny and lots of fun. For some bizarre reason Molly kept laying in the snow and rolling in it and then springing back up to belt round the garden again. And the very best thing about snow mode is that there are no muddly paws to clean before they can come back indoors.

More wee problems

At the time of writing this we have had Henry for about 9 months and I am trying to catch up with his story before writing the day to day antics of his life with us. I have decided that I'll come up to date with the wee problems though as in my desperation I have scoured every internet site, brain and book with possible solutions so just in case there is some-one out there with the same problem here is my solution of sorts.

Henry had had a bad start to life and had never been house-trained. He'd never lived in a house before and I think that limited his need to communicate with humans as probably the only contact he got was some food thrown at him every now and then. This meant he didn't really know how to communicate with us and he didn't know when we were trying to communicate with him and no matter how basic we do need to communicate with each other for him to realise that we don't want him to wee and poo in the house.

Henry had also been through a really bad time and going from that to living in a cosy warm cottage with us where we would feed him, love him and give him everything he needed seemed perfect to us but Henry's previous home and life had been nothing like that and he was having to go through a massive learning curve to adjust to his new life. Being young and somewhat mad he is also sometimes easily distracted and so letting him out for a wee is great but if a sheep walks past or the farm dogs bark he instantly forgets why he was outside and goes to investigate. If we weren't giving him 100% attention he would just wander back into the house and wee there.

So. I had a big think about all of this. Henry needed a strict routine, very strict, with no deviation whatsoever. I decided to work out a sort of daily timetable to which I would have to adhere if we were going to be successful.

Every morning I would wake and get up to let Henry out before he had had a chance to wee or poo in the house. For Henry this meant I had to get up at 4.30!!! But if it was going to work then I 'd do it. So up I got, bleary eyed and half asleep and sent him out for a wee. Amazingy he got the idea. When I came down he would still be on his bed and he had wee'd outside before he'd even thought about doing it in the living room.

Gradually I moved the time to 6.00am. this has taken many weeks. I moved the alarm 5 minutes on once every week or so. I figured that if I did it slowly Henry woudn't notice and his bladder wouldn't either as technically I suppose we were training his bladder and bowels more than his brain.

If I got impatient and moved the alarm to far or too often Henry would catch me out and have an accident and we'd have to go back a week or so.

I also changed Henrys breakfast time. I used to feed him and Molly as soon as I got up so they were associating my coming downstairs with food. I now feed them after I've eaten and no earlier than 8.30am, this has calmed the mornings down immensley and I'm wondering if Henry's stomach was waking him which in turn woke his bladder!

During the day Henry is let ouside at 8.30 after his breakfast, 10.30 for a mid morning pee, he goes for a walk around 1pm and is then let out at 4.30 after his dinner, again at 7.30pm and finally 10.30pm.

He has learned to pace if he wants to go out in between times, I think he has learned this from Molly. And he has also learned the phrase "do you want to go outside" to which he puts his ears up and kind of smiles if he needs to go to the loo.

If I stick to this routine he has absolutely no accidents. I can't relax the routine as he will then relapse but it's working really well so far and I think given time he will settle down and have no more accidents.

The only problem we are having is if I go out or we have a change to the routine of the house such as visitors, Other Half working from home, or if the dogs go into kennels when we go away. These type of things usually result in a relapse for either just one incident or could last a couple of days. But just keeping the routine going will get him back to normal very quickly.

Out of all of the distractions the hardest one right now is if we go out and leave the dogs in the house alone. We could be gone for five minutes or five hours and sometimes Henry will wee and sometimes he won't, but more than likely he will have wee'd. I think this is something that will take some time to get sorted and is probably not helped by the fact that I am around all the time usually and he is not used to being left alone. Overall we are getting there but it has been a long and unexpectedly hard slog, something I wasn't expecting to last quite so long but I'm sure eventually I will be able to completely relax and not worry about finding a wet patch on the carpet with my socks on!

Oh and the brilliant carpet wee and poo cleaner I got from the vets is an absolute godsend, it's called Total Care and costs about £5.

Big and Wee Problems

When Henry came to stay he wasn't house-trained. In fact he'd never been in a house before so we had the mamouth task of trying to house-train him.

It's not as easy training a dog that has passed the cute and cuddly puppy stage, even if technically they are still a big pup as they have learned that it dosen't matter where they go and in some cases if they wee all over the house it makes them feel more secure. But I am a patient person and was fully prepared to overcome all of Henry's problems until he became a super-dog.

During the first few days it was miracle if Henry went to the loo outside. Every night and after every meal and playtime and first thing in the morning I would put him on his lead and walk round and round the garden with him until he perfomed. This worked well when the weather was nice but most of the time during the winter here it blows about 60mph winds with sideways rain, I certainly didn't want to be out in it and I have a big winter coat to wear. For a small skinny balding dog it certainly wasn't much fun at all and he spent most of the time outside trying to get back in.

He was also scared of the wind. You can here it coming from the end of the valley 2.5 miles away and it wooooshes up into the side of the house and every time that happened Henry would croutch down and cower so that didn't make house-training any easier.

Henry also seemed to have a bit of a communication problem. Molly has learned that if she paces around the living room we know she wants to go outside. Henry wanders about, runs about, throws himself about, barks, whines, laughs, lays down, trots and bounces all the time. So you spend most of the time letting him out and he dosen't want to go and then you go into another room to find that he has been to the loo in there and that was what the last batch of energy was all about. There was no consistancy about it and we were trying to work him out while he was trying to work us out, it wasn't easy.

Then we started to turn a corner. I noticed that his 'accidents' had pretty much stopped during the day. I work from home so I'm around all the time which I had thought would be great for settling a new dog in. But as soon as I told Other Half that the accidents were getting fewer Henry would go aack 6 steps and start doing it again. I was totally stuck and didn't know what to do.

I tried every solution possible from 'Get Off' sprays to stop him from wanting to wee on things (which worked for about 4 hours and then he just wee'd on them anyway) to wee disolving solutions designed to clear up the wee and destroy the scent left by it, to making home made solutions of lemon juice and spraying that about the place and trying to cover rotten smells with all sorts of anti bacterial air fresheners. Our house was begining to smell like a kennel and I was exhausting myself trying to sort it out while Henry was exhausting himself trying to keep it smelly. If there was a house-training product or technique I had tried it. And Henry had ignored it.

Finally after five months I took him to the vets. I was trying very hard not to burst into tears as I told the vet about the problem. I wasn't being emotional, I was simply worn out by it all.

The vet listened and made nice noises about getting it sorted out which made me feel so much better. She then gave Henry a good going over, taking some samples etc just in case there was a medical problem at the bottom of this - no pun intended!

There was no medical cause. Part of me felt releived, most of me felt totally deflated that the problem couldn't be solved overnight with a couple of tablets, although actually it wouldn't be great if it was medical for Henry's sake.

On seeing my deflation, the vet then had a really long chat with me about routines and feeding and patience and actually this made me feel lots better and on leaving the surgery I felt re-energised and ready to fight the canine sewerage battle anew. I was also armed with two bottles of super dooper industrial strength wee and poo smell and scent destroyer (which were half the price of all the other stuff I 'd tried).

So off home we went, Henry sitting in the back of the car looking rather insulted by the whole experience.

Back home I got to work with the spray. It smelt of marzipan. Rather odd but I didn't care. Once I'd gone around on my hands and knees sniffing the entire carpet for smelly bits and exterminated the smell I felt so muhc happier. I gave it a night and asked my neighbour to come down the track for a smell test. When she walked in she announced that it didn't smell of wee in our house any more yippeeee! It did smell of marzipan but who cared, it didn't smell of wee.

Strangely Henry hadn't had an accident that night either so I had a blissful morning of no clearing up before my breakfast, oh what joy!

Bouncing Furry Legs

It was on my cousins return visit from Durness that we realised Henry had begun to turn a corner with his body.

My cousin noticed that he was ever so slightly less skinny and there was the beginings of fur appearing on his legs. I suppose that being with him every day I hadn't noticed this but it was a major turning point for Henry and his recovery from near starvation. These pictures of him a short while later as for the first few weeks of his life with us my camera wasn't working and so the only really bald pictures we have are on a mobile phone but you should be able to see that his back legs are still very sparse and the lower parts of his front legs are the same.

In fact he was so skinny and so cold because of his lack of fur that he had to wear his lovely thick fleece coat all the time even when he was indoors and he had to wear another one on top when he went outside. Every evening he would curl up next to me, really close and I'd hold his poor skinny bald legs to keep them warm, he was a total heart breaker and all I could do was love him loads.

It was around this time that he started to become bouncy. And I mean really bouncy. He seemed to love having my cousin and family to stay, perhaps it was an extended pack thing but he really started to come out of himself, chasing balls, socks, anything really and it was about this time that he started to perfect his 'wind you in the stomach' leap. This involved (and still does) running at you full pelt, jumping into the air and poking you in the stomach with his front legs. It' a bit hard to describe how he does it exactly as he does a sort of extra jump on his back legs just as he does it, but it just about knocks you out! It seems to be his 'special' way of saying hello and over the last few months I've learned to very skillfully avoid it!

He also learnt to leap onto the windowsill with the skill and grace of a mountain goat. (In fact some neighbours have got goats and the way they move is very similar to Henry) he leaps with all four paws onto the arm of the sofa and then stretches his front legs accross the gap onto the windowsill to look outside. It's quite amazing to watch and rather funny when someone is sitting at that end of the sofa as a rather big dog springs onto the arm.

The main problem with this is having to constantly clean the dog art from the window, left there by Henry's nose and also being ready to clear up spilt tea from suprised visitors.

I suppose he shouldn't really be allowed to do it at all but it is rather funny to watch.

So, Henry the Leaphound was christened.