Birds in the Basement and Doggy Mayhem

                       Birds in the Basement and Doggy Mayhem


As some of you may remember, our old dog Barney joined the alleluia chorus a few weeks ago.  He was an old dog, 14 plus years on this earth, and had been suffering for quite a while with diabetes and blindness.  He’d toughed out the last half-decade and we’d grown quite fond of him, but we knew his days were numbered. Finally he called it quits and shucked off this mortal coil.  We were saddened, of course, and mourned his passing, each of us in our own way, but after a week or so without the patter of doggy feet in our house, it was time to find a new pal to help keep us warm at night and to liven our days. 

Our search started on the Internet where I poked around a bit and located a number of rescue sites.  We’d decided that we didn’t want a puppy and also didn’t want a purebred as a lot of them were subject to some pretty nasty diseases and we’d just come off being the “parents” of a special-needs dog. 

It was time for a mutt.

I ended up looking at hundreds of pictures of dogs online – big ones and little ones, shaggies and smooths, fidgety part-Jack Russells and sluggish Basset-mixes.  And, of course, LOTS of whatjamacallits and fuzzy whothehellknows.  I soon picked a likely black-and-white fellow from a group called Paws and Prayers and put in an application for adopting him, but I was too late.  He’d already been shuffled off to his new home.  I plugged onward, looking again and came across another rescue group called One-of-a-Kind in Akron which had about 150 animals pictured on their web-site.  A lot of them were cats, nice enough I guess, but we were interesting in a dog, so I paid more attention to the canines they had available.  I wrote down the names of eight likely looking dogs on a scrap of paper and that Friday my wife and I took a drive to Akron for a look/see.  The two dogs in particular I wanted to see were available, but when we did a meet-and-greet with them, neither one seemed too interested in my wife.  That was a deal breaker, of course as the new mutt needed be accepting of both of us from the get go.  We asked to see a few more and one of them seemed immediately friendly to both of us.  We played with her for a few minutes and decided that she was the one for us.  After we signed some papers and wrote a check, the dog was now ours!  We were booked solid with activities for the upcoming weekend, so we decided to pick her up on Monday. 

The dog was named Trick as she had been rescued sometime in October and they were apparently commemorating Halloween with the name.  We changed it to Trixi to recognize she was a girl and to keep it similar in case the dog had grown used to the name Trick.  She is a 40-pound mix of Shepherd/Terrier/Boxer, a brindle-brown color with a white blaze on her face with white throat and chest and white paws.  And she had the biggest ears you ever saw!  One usually was sticking straight up and the other one lying sideways on her head.

A real cutie!

Since my wife was at work, my son and I picked her up on Monday and brought her home.  She rode in the car beautifully and took to the house like she was born there.  She was totally happy with the three of us and everything looked fine. 

Of course, there was a LOT of learning to do on both of our sides – hers and ours.

Trixi is an active 4-year-old and the old dog was a sedentary 14.  Two totally different kinds of animals with two totally different lifestyles.  Barney, the old dog, slept 20-22 hours a day and was slow, set in his ways and, other than giving him his insulin shots each day, quite easy to take care of.  Trix was bigger, stronger and way, way faster!  We all were hustling just to be able to keep up with her.  She was luckily crate-trained, so when we put the crate in our bedroom she took to it quickly.  She ate the first kind of dog food I’d picked just fine and was settling in well.

Of course, we realized later, she was just toying with us…

Two days ago, about 7 a.m., I heard a noise coming from our attic – a kind of scratching, ticking sound.  We’d had, what I thought were squirrels up there a year or two ago and I shuddered thinking they might have come back.  I surely hoped not…  A little later my wife noticed our new dog being super attentive to the back wall of her closet.  There seemed to be noises coming from inside the back wall.  Trix was VERY inquisitive about that.  A short time later, while I was doing some cleaning upstairs, I heard a screech coming from the basement.  My wife had gone down there to take a shower.  I wondered at the sound, as my wife does NOT screech! 

Ever.

I apprehensively descended to the first floor where I could hear her screeching more clearly.  She yammered something about mmmfwggled yachitnakerlak.  Well, at least that's what it sounded like.  When I finally arrived at the basement I saw my poor wife, naked, dripping water with a towel wrapped around her head.  I said, “what???”

She replied that there was a bird in the basement. 

Sure enough there was!  A full-grown starling was making swoops and barrel rolls and Immelman loops in our basement!  And the wife was still squawking every time it headed her way.

So now, what to do? 

I had no butterfly net and nothing else came to mind quickly.  The dog was going bananas about that time racing from one end of the basement to the other, barking and leaping for the intruder in HER house.  I suddenly remembered I did have a big landing net for fishing hanging just around the corner in my workshop – hell, that might work.  I grabbed it and started swinging it wildly around for the birdie as it was still doing its swooping and diving, the dog was still racing around like a nut-job and the wife was still screeching. 

I missed it totally, but eventually got it moving the right direction and it finally headed upstairs.  The dog and I followed the avian menace at a gallop and I soon saw it had become stuck behind the curtains on the kitchen window, flapping around and trying to escape. I lunged around a bit, poking my net into the space between the curtains and the window and finally trapped the bird in the landing net. 

Quite a lunker!

The dog had passed the point of exuberance by then and was approaching full-on basket case jumping for the bird and trying to crawl up my back to reach it.  When I opened the door and flung the poor thing outside, Trix squirmed her way out with the bird and began to chase it.  Uh-oh!  Not a good thing.  I immediately hollered for her and, to my utter surprise, the dog stopped and returned to me!  I grabbed her collar and soon she was back inside. 

I knew I was lucky that day.

So you might think that was enough excitement for a while, wouldn’t you?  Well partner, you’d be wrong.

So you see, the very next day…

I had driven to a doctor’s appointment early that afternoon at another town and had been gone from the house about an hour and a half.

You first should probably know that this is the time of year when my wife bakes her Christmas cookies and makes her Christmas candy, so there was baking and candy making “stuff” here and there in the kitchen and dining room.  Unfortunately the chocolate bars that were destined to be melted and transformed into yummy candies were lying on the dining room table, surely unreachable by canines.

Surely.

When I returned to the house from my appointment I could immediately see several things.  Number one was that my wife had left. She’d mentioned that she needed some more ingredients and was planning on a run to the store.  That had apparently occurred.  The second thing I noticed was torn paper on the dining room floor – torn Baker’s chocolate wrapper. 

I thought to myself, OH SHIT!

I looked into the living room and there was good ol’ Trix tearing the wrapper off of her SECOND Baker’s chocolate bar.  The first one had been devoured already!

I grabbed the second bar out of her mouth and thought OH SHIT again.  MY DOG, OF WHICH I’VE HAD FOR ONE WHOLE WEEK IS GONNA CROAK FROM EATING CHOCOLATE!

I immediately called my vet, expecting a command to race her up to the office for emergency whatever.  She was calm, though, and told me I would have to make the dog puke. 

Fun, I thought, “and how,” I asked, “was that to be accomplished?”

Put about 1-½ tablespoons of table salt down her throat was her answer.  Do it outside.  It’ll make her puke.

Oh boy, I thought.  I have to take this big ol’ beast that I’ve only met last week, grab its mouth (beware of the razor-sharp teeth!), yank it open and shove salt down there. 

Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure…

So I did.  The first big load of salt went in OK, as she was unaware of what was happening at that point and what was heading down her gullet.  The rest of the salt that I wanted to get in there was mostly delivered onto her face, her flapping big ears and the ground.  But I got enough in her, apparently, as about two minutes later she was garking and hacking up about what looked like a gallon of glutinous brown gunk – it looked like mostly chocolate.  A few more hacks and smaller regurgitated glops came out and then she was fine.  She even seemed to forgive me for pouring that nasty salt down her throat.

She was fine the next day and all seems well at this point in time.

So far…

So after all this excitement of the past several days I’m beginning to wonder what other diabolical pleasures await us in the upcoming days?  The only thing I can say is that life will be INTERESTING with our Trixi around.