Ultimate Pi Day!

Ultimate Pi Day is coming!  This once per century celebration is observed in the USA and other countries that still write their dates backwards.  Ha, the joke is on those other countries!  Who doesn't want a holiday that revolves around eating tasty pastries?

While you are pigging out  getting your recommended servings of fruit, have a few laughs with the Rat Dog Pack.  On Pi Day, the first 3,141,592,653 people to visit Amazon.com can get a free download of Hilbert's Mathematical Day (Pacific Daylight Savings Time).

Corny Dogs!

Normal Cornfest time and the rat dogs were out in style.

 

Here is Shoebert in his "I'm so Corny" shirt.

 

 

 

Here is Minibert dressed like an ear of corn.
Mini, your tongue is as long as your ears!

 

And just in time for the Normal Zombie Walk, Hilbert's Zombie Day is on sale at Amazon for the Kindle and Kindle reading apps.

 

And while you are out on Amazon, please buy How Not to Kiss Your Dog, and learn if dogs' mouths are really cleaner than humans.  More books bought equals more kibble for the rat terriers.

 

 



That crazy old lady with the rat terries

I was walking the dogs this morning.  It is cicada season and the storm last night knocked several from the trees and down onto the ground. 

Shoebert loves cicadas.  Every walk is like an Easter egg hunt this time of year.  Cicadas live most of their lives underground – seven years or more!  When they finally craw to the surface they have developed a shell covering a winged body.  They then hatch out of these shells, unroll their wings and mate.   Then they die.

Once the cicada is dead, it starts to give off an odor that Shoebert can smell from several feet away.  The fresh or dying ones, however, he often doesn’t notice, even when he walks right past one on the sidewalk.  Today there were several fresh cicadas on the sidewalk.

We were only a few houses down when he went right past a cicada that was lying on the edge of the sidewalk.  I stopped, tapped my foot next to it and said to Shoebert, “here’s one!”  He turned around, put his nose to the ground and started searching.  Depending on where he was I would say “you’re getting colder.  Warmer.  Warmer. Hot.”  The closer he got to the cicada the more excitement I put in my voice.  Finally, I was nearly yelling, “Hot.  Very HOT.  SPONTANIOUS CONBUSTION.  YOU GOT IT!”

I looked up to see a neighbor across the road who was loading lumber into his pickup.  He was standing still, his mouth slightly opened staring at me.  I smiled sheepishly and gave him a weak way from my wrist.  He closed his mouth and raised his eyebrows while nodding.  Then he quickly went back to loading the truck.

On the way back home at the end of the walk the neighbor was returning.  This time I gave him a full wave.  He smiled and waved back.  He may think I’m crazy, but harmless.  Just like Shoebert.

Q: What’s worse than a coprophagic dog?

Q: What’s worse than a coprophagic dog?

A: A coprophagic dog that burps in your face! 

Thank you, Miss Mini.

Q: What’s worse than a coprophagic dog that burps in your face?

A: A coprophagic dog that burps in your face and then uses her tongue to give you a big wet kiss on the mouth!

Thank you, Miss Mini.

 

FREE BOOK FREE BOOK FREE BOOK FREE BOOK FREE BOOK FREE BOOK

Don’t forget – January 23 is Hilbert’s Happy Wednesday!  Hilbert’s new book, Hilbert’sStory Tail Day is free for Kindle!

In this book Hilbert, the rat terrier, decides to try different tails, because he doesn’t like his little short stubby one.

Why did the terrier cross the yard?

Last year at this time I was nursing Hilbert as he got sicker from liver failure.  I'd like to share some (in retrospect) fun times.

 

Mankind may never know why the chicken crossed the road, but I learned why Hilbert crossed the yard.

I grew hostas in the shady area near the hedge in the backyard. In the spring, they would be attacked by snails and slugs. One environmentally friendly way that I dealt with these pests was to place bowls of beer in the area. The pests crawled in, but didn’t come out. I assumed that they died happy or at least felt no pain.

One spring day after Hilbert came to live with us, I opened the backdoor and Hilbert ran straight to the back corner of the yard. From where I stood, he was hidden from view behind the bushes.

“Here, Hilbert,” I called. “Time to come in.”

Nothing. No dog, no movement.

“Here, boy”

Still nothing.

I put on my shoes and walked over to where I had last seen Hilbert headed.

There he was drinking/eating the snail/slug infused beer. Lap, lap, lap, crunch. Lap, lap, lap, crunch.

I grabbed him under his belly and carried him inside. I called the vet to see if I needed to bring him in for treatment.

“Uh, my dog was drinking beer. Is that okay?” I explained the situation.

After being scolded for letting him near the beer and being sternly warned to keep him from driving until he was completely sober, it was determined that Hilbert had not had enough to drink to harm him.  And the slugs were probably a good source of protein.

After this happened, I ordered the beer slug traps with the snap on lids that let the snails and slugs in and keep the dogs out.  They worked well and both the hostas and the dogs have done well since!

Mini gets another rabbit

A few weeks after the rabbit leg incident, I was home sick (see below) resting in the living room.  The dogs were out in the yard for quite a while, giving me some peace.  Mini came strutting in holding the body of a rabbit.  And I mean body; the head and one of the front legs were gone.  There was no blood, but it still looked pretty fresh.  I gathered it up, wrapped it in some plastic bags and disposed of it as I have others in the past.  Read How (Not) to Kiss Your Dog for the details.

Mini and the rabbit

I was taking a break, eating pizza (focahia bread topped with pizza sauce and melted Ropp Dairy tomato, basil, garlic cheese curds – Yum, yum) and watching TV, when Mini came in with something nasty in her mouth.  I thought at first it was a small intestine (long and gray, like an overboiled footlong hotdog with one end open and half the stuffing fallen out).  Since she has so few teeth, she had to drop it on the floor and I swooped over and grabbed it up.  Luckily for me, I had a napkin in my hand at the time!   It turned out to be a rabbit’s foot and leg that had been taken over by maggots then chewed by Mini.

Since I was curious, I went out in the backyard to find the rest of the rabbit.  I finally found it in the vegetable garden, between the tomato plants.  It had been there for a few days.  Its guts were gone, probably sucked out and eaten by the dogs, parts were here and there, and there was a coating of tiny, rice like maggots wriggling over them.  There was no way that I was going to touch that writhing mass, so I left it to Mother Nature.

Later that evening, I went up to the guestroom to read a book (The Pirates: In an Adventure with Ahab) and smelt something musky and pungent.  I found a bone on the bed – the same bed that Mini and Shoebert spend their days on.  It appeared to be a pelvis.  It was picked clean and didn’t smell.  Then I noticed the spot on the bed.  Someone had either barfed or had nasty diarrhea that oozed all the way down to the mattress cover.   At the time I bought the mattress, I thought I had fallen for the hard sell at the mattress store when Henry, the salesman, talked me into getting the overpriced and WATERPROOF covers, but now I’m feeling much better about the decision!

More Crap Eating

I was walking Mini and Shoebee when Shoebee squatted to pooh.  Because of his food (ZD Ultra) his poo is often soft.  The pooh came out of his butt in one long soft string, like brown toothpaste being squeezed from the tube.  As he squatted, Mini came over and started sniffing his anus.  After telling her that her behavior was disgusting, she took a bite out of the pooh!

I did a little research and found a suggestion to cure her of this behavior – feed her pineapple.   I’m trying that now, so stay tuned to find out the results.  I also spoke to the vet who performed her last surgery (more on that perhaps in a later post).   He informed me that the clinical name for pooeating is coprophagy.  His advice was to put a little MSG on her food.  So far, the pineapple seems to be working.  Or else she is pooing so much that she can’t keep up with it all.

Why (not) kiss your dog?

Mini’s bladder control

Mini had lived at CISAR for over 18 months and then at Paradise for nearly 6 months.  She was seven years old when she was dropped off at CISAR, and, according to her adoption papers, she is seven years old now!  At CISAR, she did not have to worry about housetraining.

When she arrived home Mini-bert had a problem with peeing and poohing in the house.  It took a couple of days to teach her how to use the doggie door, but once she learned, she was in and out. 

That did not stop her from continuing to mess in the house. 

I caught her eating her pooh.  At least she is not a kisser like Shoebert, who loves whipping his tongue around inside the mouth of anyone unlucky or foolish enough to have their face close enough to his and their lips not tightly sealed.

This may have its bright side.  So long as she eats it, I don’t have to clean it off the carpet. 

 

Attack of the Cicadas

It is now cicada season.  These little critters, which in Texas we called locusts, live as grubs for seven years then come out to mate, lay eggs and die.  They are out in mass.  Go out just after sunset, stand under any tree and the sound is deafening.

My dogs love cicadas.  It’s like an Easter egg hunt the way they go after the dead ones.  Hilbert was an expert at finding them.

 

We were out walking one late summer morning when Hilbert was just over a year old.  A cicada landed on the ground near Hilbert.  He quickly grabbed it up in his mouth.  Suddenly, it started buzzing.  He spat it out, jumped back, barked at it for a while -as if to scold it for startling him- and then grabbed it up again. After one crunch, the buzzing stopped and Hilbert swallowed it.  After that the fresh ones became his favorites. 

The vet says that cicadas are a cheap and healthy source of protein for dogs.  Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?