Tag: dogs

Groom

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

He went to the groomers yesterday, for the first time. I think he’s feeling cute.

He went in looking a bit shaggy, and he came out looking like a giant bundle of fluff. She’s trimmed the hair on his face but left the length the same on the top of his head, so combined with the blow dry he ended up looking very 80s for a while. She also trimmed the fur around his paws so he looks kind of like he’s trotting around on tip toes. It’s not exactly what I was expecting… But he does look cute!

I don’t think I ever posted an update on my standing desk. I’ve been trying to keep a routine in my work day, which starts off with a run and then shower and breakfast, then a few hours standing at my desk. I like to stand first thing because I’m trying not to let things seize up after running. Then I try to stand again for a while after lunch and for the last part of the day. The non standing periods are sitting in the living room with my laptop to keep an eye on Monty, sat at the desk, or lying on my bed with my laptop depending on how tired I am.

The main things I found are:

  1. It didn’t really help my hip at all, but I worked out that my hip feels a lot better if I stretch my hamstrings. If I feel that annoying ache in my hip then usually a few minutes of hamstring stretching sorts it out. This seems slightly bizarre since the hamstrings are at the back and the ache was at the front and almost into my stomach, but anyway, that’s how it is.
  2. Standing is really tiring! At least to start with, I was feeling a lot more tired and hungry.
  3. Standing makes your bowels more active 😳

Life updates

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I haven’t written here for too long. It’s the usual update – dog takes up all my time and energy, when he’s asleep I go to sleep too. Well, sometimes.

I’ve had the week off this week and have been spending a lot of time with him. He is amazing and I love him. He’s also a total pain who wants to run around and jump at me all the time, and my hands are covered in little scratches and tooth marks, but that’s OK and we’re working on it. He’s such a lovely little dog when he’s just padding around the house. He looks like a little bear.

He hasn’t enjoyed the fireworks. He’s OK with them when he’s inside, but getting him outside is difficult, which interferes with his toileting (as he’s very reluctant to go inside the house now – shouldn’t complain, but it’s not ideal for him to hold it). We’ve had fireworks every night for four nights in a row now, which I think is quite ridiculous and I really wish we could ban firework sales to individuals.

In other news… I have a stomach upset 🤔 Again! I think it might be spaghetti carbonara. I stopped eating spaghetti bolognese because the sauce is too much for my stomach (all the acid from the tomatoes, probably) and switched to carbonara thinking it would be better, but this is the second time I’ve had an upset stomach after eating it, so maybe not. It’s not as bad as last time, but I saw the signs and switched to an extremely boring chicken + rice diet (like my dog!) so that may have softened the blow.

So I’m back at work next week. Work annoyed me last week. My manager asked me to create some fake data in the system to display some charts for a demo. So I did. Then on Thursday morning the managing director called me into a meeting to complain that it wasn’t what he’d asked for. The problem was that he had created this data with no thought to how it would actually look when plugged into our charting system. What he actually wanted were completely different charts, but that is not what I was asked to do, nor was it realistic for the timeframe. He didn’t even tell my manager that he’d called me. I don’t deal with the managing director much, but when I do I always come away with a bad impression of him. So in some ways I’m not looking forward to work again tomorrow, but in other ways I feel like I have more important things (dog) in my life to worry about instead. It’s just a job.

Doggies

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I never realised that having a puppy would be so much work. You see well behaved dogs out for walks, trotting alongside their owners with perfect behaviour. You don’t see all the training that goes into making a dog walk on a lead without attacking it. Or when they decide that what they really want to do is flip their water bowl upside down, while still full of water. Or the hours spent walking in circles around the garden while he searches for the perfect place to poo, because apparently it’s extremely important that you sniff the entire garden four times before deciding, except you also have a really short attention span so you might get distracted by a really tasty looking piece of grass along the way and then have to start over.

He always looks so calm and well behaved in photos. Trust me, he’s not.

He had his second round of vaccinations on Friday, so next weekend we can start taking him out. Chunky boy here now weighs 4.6kg, which is up from 3.9 only a couple of weeks ago. The vet didn’t seem concerned anyway, but I’m not sure if we’re overfeeding him… The breeder (or more likely, her young daughter) nicknamed him “Mr Chonk” because he was the biggest of the litter. But once we can take him out for walks he’ll be burning off more calories.

I don’t know how you tell if a dog is fat. For one thing he’s a crossbreed, so there’s a lot of randomness as to exactly what his genetics are so he doesn’t have a known ideal ‘shape’, and for another, most of what you see is fur.

We gave him the second dose of a ‘deworming’ tablet today. We did the first dose two weeks ago, and it made him completely crazy. He took it at about 11 in the morning and spent all afternoon totally hyperactive, barking, growling and generally worrying us because he seemed agitated and wouldn’t settle. We googled it and apparently it’s not a medically recognised side effect but plenty of people on forums talk about it. Others say it can’t possibly be the tablet because it’s not a known side effect. After having the second dose today, he was exactly the same again. So, yep, it’s the tablet. He’s supposed to have it done again in two weeks but we’ll have to ask to use a different medicine.

Day 4

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Is it only day 4? All the days merge together now.

I think I’ve just accepted that I’m not going to sleep past 5AM for a while. We tried leaving the little pupper alone last night, for the first time, and he started howling at 5. We agreed that we would leave him til 6 in an effort to get his schedule a bit more aligned to ours, but by then he was really distressed and his stomach was gurgling loudly. He seemed a lot happier after we took him out for a toilet break, so I think really we just need to do that when he starts howling. Even if he’s just howling because he’s scared being on his own in the dark, letting him stay scared is just going to upset his stomach. At least, that’s how mine works! It’s a weird world for him. He’s entirely dependent on people who go through a door and disappear for hours. He hasn’t seen upstairs yet. He doesn’t know we’re only a few metres away.

He’s doing better with the toileting. He’s still peeing inside a lot but he hasn’t pooed inside since the first day. He’s a clever little dog. I’m amazed how quickly he learns things. I’ve taught him to “Sit”, and I’ve also taught him to stop howling and sit by the door of his pen before we let him out. He’s also learnt that when I hold my fist in front of him, he should boop it with his nose. I’m currently trying to teach him “Drop”, which seems important given that he puts everything in his mouth. On day two he ate a piece of gravel from the garden, which I hadn’t expected at all. Apparently puppies eating stones is not uncommon and usually they just pass them, but obviously it’s potentially dangerous so you don’t want them doing it. They also eat grass… In fact he seems to want to eat grass more than his actual meals.

The other problem at the moment is that he gets the zoomies. Which means that he’s playing quite happily with his toys one minute, then the next he’s rushing full speed up and down the room jumping up and down. It’s hilarious actually, but the problem is that this is when he starts getting bity and aggressive. His bites haven’t actually hurt yet but that’s something we need to stop. All puppies bite a little because their mouth is primarily how they interact with the world, they just learn not to do it by the reactions they get from their victims. He’s like two dogs in one. When he’s calm he’s lovely, but when he’s got the zoomies he’s like a possessed shark. It seems to happen when you think he should be tired… I guess he gets tired and grumpy and doesn’t really understand that when he feels like that he should go to sleep. He’s only a baby really.

Today we took him out for the first time in a carrier. Puppies need two rounds of vaccinations before it’s safe to let them walk around on the ground in public, and they tend to be 12-13 weeks old at that stage. Until then you need to both protect them from the outside world, but also introduce them to it as it’s an important part of their development. He seemed completely unfazed by being taken out, which was surprising. He just sat in the carrier quite contentedly (trying to chew the strap). This is the same dog who yesterday got scared and refused to go to the toilet because it was raining… and then got even more scared when I put an umbrella up.

Pupper

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This is Monty. He’s an 8 week old cockapoo.

We picked him up this morning. He’s still quite upset but hopefully he’ll settle in a few days. He cries a lot when we leave him alone but he seems comfortable with us. This afternoon we were playing with him while I was sat cross legged on the floor, and he went to sleep nestling his face into the back of my knee (probably because I’m warm?).

So far his favourite trick is to pretend he doesn’t need the toilet when we take him into the garden, then go on the carpet 30 seconds after we take him back inside. Some of that might be stress though. He’s been twice outside and 4 or 5 times inside 🤦 But he also seems scared of the garden and much more comfortable inside, which probably doesn’t help. I’m frantically reading up on training.

Allergies seem OK. Or at least, no worse than they have been over the past few weeks. I think if there was going to be a problem I’d know about it by now. Last winter we had problems with dust on the radiators which got circulated when we switched them on, and 30 minutes of that was enough to make me feel like I had a heavy cold. I think it was just a bad hayfever day the other week.

Doggos

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So we went to see the lady about the cockapoo puppies and we have put down a deposit on a little puppy who is black with three white paws.

Unexpectedly, I feel very nervous and unsettled about it now. The problem is that I had a lot of allergies in the evening after we visited. So naturally my brain decided that I’m allergic to dogs, even though this was hours later and I was fine while I was there. Actually I’m allergic to something in the air around this time of year, possibly mold spores. It happens every single year. It’s been bad all week. I’ve been taking anti histamines most days this week to try to keep it under control. My parents are complaining about it too, so it’s not just me. Even my mum, who usually isn’t very affected by this kind of thing. I don’t think I’m allergic to dogs, but I’ve never lived with one, so as it’s suddenly popped into my head I am worrying about it. My dad’s aunt used to have a dog when I was a child. Unfortunately we never used to visit her often, because she lived hundreds of miles away, but I definitely spent some time with her dog and in her house and I didn’t have any problems. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

We have been busy trying to get everything ready. We have a little pen set up in the corner of the living room now, we just have a few more things we need to get before we go and collect him next weekend.

I hope he will be happy here, but he’ll be scared and confused at first. A little 8 week old puppy separated from his litter mates and his mother… it’s going to be tough for the little guy to start with. I think I’ll be sleeping in the living room next to his pen for a few nights so that he’s not completely alone… I thought about having him sleep in my room to begin with, but it’s probably too confusing for him. We want him to feel that space in the living room is his little area, so we don’t really want to be moving him around. I think we need to keep things simple and consistent for him, at least until he gets used to us.

Assuming everything is ready, we’re going to pick him up next Sunday…

Excitement

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The first big thing is that my sister and I are going to see a lady about a puppy tomorrow. We have been thinking about getting one for a while. This lady (or, more accurately, her dog) has had a litter and there are two still available. They are cockapoos – the little teddy bear like dogs that you see a lot. They’ll be available to leave in about two weeks, which would be perfect because I’m off work that week, but also not perfect because ohmygodthat’ssosoon.

In other news, I did parkrun today, for the first time since March 2020. I ran it in 22:12. With my foot injury I haven’t done many long runs recently, so the half marathon I did a few weeks ago was a bit of a disaster (1:53 – some people would be ecstatic with that, but for me it felt slow and it was a real slog), and I had a weird turn a few hours afterwards where I suddenly felt sick and hot and felt like I was going to faint.

That knocked my confidence a lot for doing anything intense, so I paced it cautiously to begin with and then sped up on the second lap (it’s a two lap course). I haven’t really done any speed workouts for a long time, so overall I was very pleased. When I used to do parkrun regularly before lockdown, I got a lot faster just from treating it as a speed workout every week. It’s a lot easier both psychologically and physiologically to keep a strong tempo going when you’re in a pack of faster runners than it is on your own during the week when you feel like you should still be in bed.

I’m looking forward to next week’s now.