Tansy Updates, Great And Small, Part V

Is anybody bored yet? *hopes not* I’ve amassed an insane pile of observations, but maybe this stuff is only fun for me.

About that, it seems with Tansy, I have this need to try and capture everything. I have tried to record her labby loops around the living room. I have tried to observe everything about her and write it down. It’s a little bit over the top, but maybe it’s because with Trixie, things that I felt were parts of her personality that were set in stone totally morphed before my eyes as she aged, and I couldn’t say when the change happened. Logically I know the same will probably happen with Tansy, but it’s like I need to catch everything so I can remember what our new days were like. I think the whole retirement thing came way sooner than I expected, and a small crazy part of me is still in shock, or disbelief or something. Yes, I admit I have issues.

It’s weird. I know we’re a young team, and I know we both have lots of learning to do, but since Tansy slipped into my life so smoothly, sometimes I make assumptions or mistakes that reflect I think we’ve been together for longer than we have. Then I get a wake-up call.

For example, I started letting Tansy sleep without the tie-down. When we were in the room with her, she didn’t need it. She would lay there all night and wait for us to get up. Then one night, Steve didn’t make it to bed, and I again didn’t tie Tansy down. At 4 in the morning, she woke up, saw Steve wasn’t there, and went to find him. She thought it was playtime, and rudely woke poor Steve from a deep and peaceful sleep with a cold nose to the bare shoulder. Steve thought maybe she was trying to signal that something was wrong with me, so got up to check. Nope, she just wanted to play! Ok, tie-down it is.

Also, Tans doesn’t know the phrase “Do you have to pee?” I forget that it took a long time before Trix drew that connection, and I don’t really even know how I did it. It just happened, but man do I miss it. Trix was over and started pacing, and it was so nice to ask her if she had to pee, and get a definite affirmative!

Man it’s nice to have a young dog who loves adventure. When we go somewhere new, holy crap does she pick up the pace. I’m still getting used to that again, because at the end, Trix would slow to a crawl and resist finding new places to go. With Tansy, she gets bored with too many of the same routes, and you can tell by the bounce in her step when you pick a different one. There are even different ways to work that she likes more than others.

On the other side of the coin, I’m still trying to shed baggage from Trix and retirement and things. If Tansy looks too tired, or dead like Trix used to look at the end, a small part of me gets a little nervous, even though the logical part of me knows that this is a different dog, and Trix got tired after long routes too. If Tansy shakes off, even a couple times, a part of me goes on alert for half a second until I can tell it to screw off. I find myself wondering how Tansy will communicate to me that she doesn’t want to do this anymore. Will she start ducking from the harness a ton more? Will she run from the harness, playing an epic game of keep-away? Will she just not want to move? Or will she be one of those work until she drops type dogs? Part of me scolds myself for even thinking these things so soon, but again, I guess retirement snuck up on me and said “boo!” last time, so maybe a crazy part of me wants to be able to see it coming, even though again, I know it rarely makes its presence known well in advance allowing you to slowly prepare. I probably did a lot more of that thinking about baggage last month because that was the anniversary of when Trix’s career ended, but every now and then, it has reappeared in my head across the months.

Ok, gotta stop here…again. There’s a little bit more. Not very much, just a little bit more.