Tansy Updates, Great and Small, Part III

Last Updated on: 1st September 2013, 11:13 pm

This list looks endless. Must…conquer…pile. How about some of her smaller quirks.

God Tansy loves her kisses…sometimes to extremes. Steve jokes that he’s a big salt lick. Plus, sometimes when she gets going, it feels like she has a cat’s tongue. It gets all rough and sandpaper feeling. Sometimes it slaps her lips as it goes back in her mouth. It makes me think of a frog tongue flicking.

When she’s playing, and other times too, you can *really* feel her heart beating. With Trix I could feel it, but it took some effort. Not with Tansy, she’s got a strong strong heart!

When she’s relieving, if she takes too long at an area, she’s not sniffing, she’s eating grass! One morning, a guy came by me and said “You didn’t get a dog, you got a cow!” Now every time I think she’s nibbling, I hear him in my head.

When a door is one of those doors that she has to swing to my other side so we can go through, she gets ready to swing waaaay too soon. Sometimes I have to convince her that yes she can walk forward a few steps. I wonder if she’ll end up signalling to me which way a door swings.

She, like Trix, also likes to guess at which elevator will open.

Unlike Trix, she likes to carry her bones everywhere. Sometimes she picks one up, walks over when I call her, and drops it at my feet. This hurts when a. it’s a biiig bone, and b. she drops it on my feet not at my feet. I’m waiting for the day she tries to walk out the door with a bone in her mouth.

Incidentally, what the hell are the GDB-sized Nyla Bones called? I can never order the right size or find them in stores.

Tans doesn’t like to get seated between my legs quickly on the bus. She does it, it just takes a bit longer than I’d like. I’m trying to treat her when she gets in there so she’d be like oo hurry, treat treat, but it’s not speeding up the process. Have to figure out something. it’s not horribly long…I’m just used to the way Trix used to do it. Maybe she can’t help it, the way I have two booties attached to the handle of her harness. I’ll have to test that theory.

I’m also trying to figure out how to get her to bring me her collapsible bowl when she’s done eating at work. She has this habbit of pushing it who knows where around her little area, which leads to me searching. Sometimes I’m lucky and she leaves it relatively close to where I put it, other times, not so much. It would be cool if she would either bring it to me, or leave it in a spot. I’m sure there must be a way, but sometimes I feel a bit fog-brained these days.

I sometimes joke that Tansy has a touch of OCD. Even if she’s gone pee not too long before bed, if it’s in another place, she insists she has to go outside at 10 when we get back home. Then she stands around and sniffs, decides she doesn’t have to go, and we go back in. But she gets so desperate, you’d think she was going to explode. Silly girl.

She also tends to go insane just before she has to pee, for real. It’s the oddest thing. She’ll start playing really crazy, then start pacing. Like dude, aren’t you tempting fate? She’s never had an accident, but it’s definitely strange. The closest Trix used to do was drink her face off when she had to pee. Somehow this seems weirder.

Also quirky, but kind of cool. when she’s playing outside, she often won’t relieve! This kind of makes the idea of letting her off leash in fensed in areas easier to do. Now I just need to find a safe fensed in area!

You know how I call her my wind-up doggie when she’s playing? Sometimes I feel like she’s like that when she’s working. I never know how much work will leave her completely sacked out forever. When she is moving, she feels like she is the energizer bunny, but when I get home, if I’ve been out for a long long time, she will keel over and be out for hours. I’m sure I’m not overworking her, but it’s just such a surprise considering how boundless her energy seems, and how sudden the change comes.

I had to laugh. Somebody saw her booties while they were attached to her harness, and were trying to figure out what they were. I guess she only saw them from a distance and saw little yellow buttons, so thought they looked like walky talkies! She was trying to figure out why on earth I would a. have walky talkies on my dog, and b. why I’d need two! She finally asked, and when she heard they were booties, she laughed her head off. “That makes a lot more sense,” she said. Now I wonder how many people wonder why my dog is walking around with walky talkies.

In other news, I think I persuaded Tans’s raisers to raise again. When Tansy graduated, they said they didn’t want to do it right away. Well, I’ve been sending them stories, and a couple months later, they were picking up another furry bundle of joy from the puppy truck! I hope that little pupster gives them as much joy as Tansy did.

I think that’s everything…for now. I still have even more stuff, but I think the pile is looking slightly more manageable. Hopefully I’ll get them all done this century.