Notes on dog-sitting Photon while PL&J were in Florida
1> She would sit, silently pining, on the deck, staring at the back gate where they take Jon in and out in his wheelchair.
2> One night, she woke me up twice by dropping her hard toy down the stairs into the basement (where I was sleeping in the guest bed).
3> Twice more the same night she woke me up by jumping up on the bed and licking my face until I woke up.
4> Around 4:00 or 4:30am that same night, I found myself in the back yard in my jammies and Peter’s Crocs playing keep-away with Photon in the snow, wondering just how the heck she tricked me into doing it.
5> Dang all, she’s cute.
6> Cobalt, her same-litter sister lives somewhere near the park but, while I’ve seen her before, I didn’t see her that week.
7> She has a sister-friend relationship with another, unrelated, Mini Aussie named Ruckus, who lives on the same street. They’ll chase each other around and wrestle for twenty minutes or a half an hour at a time, pretty much ignoring all the other dogs. And me.
8> On two different nights I woke up when she was trying to get under the covers with me. When I was a kid my dog slept with me, often under the covers at the bottom of the bed, so no problem. The first night I woke up later to find her laying right beside me. The second night she ended up on top of the covers at the bottom of the bed.
9> She has a crazy relationship with a park dog named Knowledge (yes, Knowledge), a frisbee catcher. Photon runs after her and constantly barks (which she hardly ever does, really…) but Knowledge pretty much just ignores her, running and leaping to catch the frisbee.
10> I didn’t know P&L were teaching her to fetch. I’d never seen her do it either. For the first couple of days I saw no evidence she even cared to try it. Suddenly on New Year’s Day in the park she started bringing the frisbee to me, dropping it at my feet, sitting and staring at me expectantly. At first I didn’t get it, being untrained. Suddenly I realized what she was doing, treated her, tossed the frisbee again, and thereby began to run out of treats. I’m not sure that it was just treats she wanted because if I moved away from her without throwing the frisbee, she’d pick it up, bring it to my feet again and maybe yelp. After a day or two she had me trained. “Barker to Barker; <i>throw</i> it!”
11> The Homecoming. Laura was the first one in the front door when they finally got home very early Sunday morning, after a grueling day. Photon came to the door to see who it was, stopped, stared, recognized Laura and went delightfully, ecstatically, crazy, as only a happy dog can do. (Cats have no equivalent reaction.) A few minutes later, at the back door, Jon and Peter got the same treatment.
Afterwards, an afterword:
12> While falling asleep in my own bed at home, I have hypnogogic hallucinations of a dog jumping on the bed, including the jingling of the tags. (It used to be a cat jumping on the bed, and before that it was a door slamming, but I had a psychotic landlord at the time so the door slam might have been real.)