Houdini Dog

Levi should be renamed Houdini. He managed to escape between the four-inches-apart slates on the white, plastic fencing while Mom sat reading the paper only eight feet away. She thought he'd gained too much weight to fit through them so he was in the dog yard without his retractable leash on. Surprise! All that hair of his is deceptive.

He was gone five-six minutes after Mom noticed him missing and she went into a full panic attack. She did manage to grab the dog whistle and she alternated calling his name and blowing the whistle, forgetting to yell "come" as she'd been practicing with him in their mini training sessions. On her second pass through the back yard she found him chasing one of the robins he's been barking at since they came north. That boy is going to a sissified ornithologist when he grows up. He loves birds so much he even barks at the life-size polyresin owl who watches the house from the pine trees. Anyway, Levi came right to her and it was a good thing, too, because he was about to go up a hill too steep for Mom trail after him without having a heart attack in the process.

That afternoon Mom spent several hours putting plastic lattice work around the outside of her beloved white picket fence. Mom can fix anything with duck tape, bungee cords or electrical plastic ties. This job called for the ties and the left over material that was used to enclose the bottom of the deck, keeping out the wild animals---well, sort of. The rabbits have chewed themselves many access points of entry and departure. But I digress. Mom only had a cheap hand saw for cutting plastic so it took her forever to accomplish the job. Mom told Dad she'll probably have to put bricks at the bottom of the fence when Levi figures out that he could dig his way to the backyard bird sanctuary.

Speaking of digging, Mom got the patio stones down over my grave but my baby brother likes to dig in the soft dirt around the edges, so mom is going buy more of them to stop his chances of getting to my bones. But what if he keeps digging around the edges of the new row of stones and she keeps buying more stones? By the end of summer the dog yard will become a patio! And all because my grave is taking up a couple of feet near the garage wall.

Mom read something in a book about setting up a kid's sandbox for puppies to dig in. In theory you bury toys in the sand to get the puppies started digging in their only approved digging area. I'll have to ask around and find out if any of my new pals up here ever had their own sandbox. I'd hate for Mom to buy one and have Levi dig all around the outside of it instead of inside. She could fall over dead hauling bags of sand to the back of the house. Unfortunately, my dog-to-human telepathy doesn't seem to work from up here so I'm going to have to find another way to let her know what I find out. ©
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