Animal Insting

Here are some fun and interesting ways to think about my doggy family:

• Three of us are boys, and one is a girl.  (That's me!)
• Three of us have curly tails, and one has a straight tail.  (That's Mel!)
• Three of us are mostly black, and one is mostly brown.  (That's Gabe!)
• Three of us are rescues, and one is registered.  (That's also Gabe!)
• Three of us like to go for walks, and one doesn't.  (That's me!)
• Three of us have ears that stand up, and one doesn't.  (That's Mel!)
• Three of us love Mom, but one is a total velcro mama's boy.  (That's Barry!)

Okay, that's all I can come up with right now.  There are some ways to divide up our family by two's instead, but maybe I'll save that for another day.  Right now I will just talk about some stuff that's been going on around here lately.

First of all, the weather got sort of warmer, and a bunch of the snow melted, so Mom has been making us go for walks.  Mostly we go for walks in the afternoons now because it's still pretty cold in the mornings, and also Mom is busy doing other stuff then.  So we go walking in the afternoons, when it's warmer, and Mom tries to make us walk a little farther than we used to because she says we all need exercise.

Last Thursday, Gabe and I went to physical therapy, and Gabe went swimming again and got a massage and stuff, and he didn't bite anybody, but he was wearing his muzzle, just in case.  Then I had physical therapy while Gabe and Mom went to see Dr. Keil, the eye doctor, because Gabe still has some eye goopy.  And Dr. Keil looked at Gabe's eyes and measured his tears and did a lot of things that she did when he was there the last time.  And then she said Mom should use the drops again in Gabe's eyes, so Mom started doing that.  Oh, and Dr. Keil said that Gabe's eye goopy was probably because he has allergies.

Anyway, we don't have to go back to physical therapy until Friday this week, so that makes us happy.  Mom is trying to be good about giving Gabe his massages and making me do my exercises.  And she is trying to make us go walking every day, except that yesterday we didn't go because Mom was really busy all day.

On Saturday, Mom went shopping at an antique mall place that is pretty close to where we live, and she bought a dog book called Real Tales of Real Dogs.  The author of this book, Mr. Albert Payson Terhune, wrote a whole lot of books about dogs.  One that you might have heard of is Lad: A Dog.  Mom thinks she probably read this book when she was a kid, but she doesn't remember much about it.

The new book that she bought on Saturday is actually a very old book, and you can tell it's old because it's kind of beat-up looking and dog-eared!  Get it?  "Dog-eared"?  And another way you can tell it is old is that it was published in MCMXXXV, which Mom says is the way the ancient Romans wrote numbers, and it means 1935.  Which was a long time ago, before Mom was even born.

Mom said we can read the stories in this book, and maybe I can tell you about some of them in my blog. We already read a couple of the stories, and they were very interesting.  The book also has these pictures that are called etchings, and they are all by a lady named Diana Thorne.  She made really nice etchings of dogs, and you can see one of these on the cover of the book.  There are lots more inside the book.  There are no basenjis, though, because in 1935 the basenjis were mostly all still in Africa.

Another thing Mom bought was this funny-looking dog that was made in Japan a long time ago.  It's really a box, and you can lift up the top half of the dog and put things inside it.  Anyway, you can tell that even though Mom went out shopping and left us all alone on Saturday, she was still thinking about us because she bought a bunch of dog stuff.

Oh, and here's one other news thing I have to tell you.  We have a man in our area who is called a serial rapist, which means he is a bad guy, so we have to do our job as dogs and protect Mom.  This bad man likes to sneak into houses at night where a woman lives alone, and then he hurts the woman.  But Mom is not too worried because she knows that Barry and Mel will bark a lot and they will bite anybody who tries to get in our house in the night!