Curlychaos SoapDragon

to teach Cora. She´s a very intelligent dog, and she needs more mental stimulation I think. Cora is very active on walks, the rest of the day, she sleeps. Which means she sleeps 21-22 hours a day. Of course, dogs sleep a lot. But many dogs, like Agatha, generally sleep with one eye open, ready to get up if anything exciting happens, like if anyone gets up and might be willing to play with them. Agatha would always be around me, often sleeping, but always ready to play on a seconds notice and always curious to find out what I was up to, regularly getting up to check on things and find out what I was doing. So she does get quite alot of mental stimulation during the day, just from interacting with humans, and often making them play with her.
Cora doesn´t do any of that. She just sleeps.

So, a bit more brainwork would be good for her. It´s a challenge for my creativity though. I just looked through a dog activity book. Cora knows probably two thirds of the tricks in there already. The rest of them is hard to make her do. She refuses to hold on to anything, and never picks things up, so that rules out quite a few tricks. And she doesn´t like me invading her space. I tried to teach her “Where´s your tail?” for instance, the dog is supposed to turn her head and point towards her tail when you ask that. But the training involved holding a treat by her tail, which, in Cora´s opinion, meant invading her space, she found that rude and walked away. So things like roll over is no good, I would have to get to close to her in the training.

Hmm. There was one trick about pushing a ball with her nose that I think I might try. Maybe I´ll have to get another book for more ideas.

Edit: just tried a training session with the push the ball-thing. She caught on immediately. She really is a clever pup! A few more sessions with that, and we´ll have that down perfectly. And then her less clever mum needs to come up with more things for her to learn. ;)

as my mother is visiting tomorrow. Sigh. She is the most organized person in the universe, there is not even the tiniest bit of dust anywhere in my parents apartment. Whereas I am of course living in a constant state of chaos.
A couple of months ago, my parents were visiting, and I decided that the whole panic cleaning thing is just a bit silly, I´m not as organized as her, and that is the way it is. So I just cleaned a little bit and left some of the mess around. She did manage to hold her tounge about it. But then a week or two later, she was coming by to pick something up, and said “Hey, here´s an idea, how about I come in the morning and spend the day cleaning your apartment while you´re at work?”. Clearly, looking at the mess, which wasn´t even that bad that day, had been torture for her, and she couldn´t deal with her daughter living like that. So, back to panic cleaning. I really wish I could manage to keep my place a bit nicer on a regular basis though, so it wouldn´t be so much work when someone´s coming over!

from the first of my planned walks with Agatha and Cora, to make sure Agatha gets some proper excercise at least every now and then. I just told T that we´re doing it because Cora and I miss Agatha, not that she needs more exercise, so she´s fine with it. (And we do miss Agatha, so that part is of course true). It was lovely to watch Agatha take off once I let her off leash, and spin like crazy around the forest. And we met some old canine friends, as we walked in the forest near where we used to live a few years ago, which was fun.

It´s quite stressful for Cora and me though. Cora first had to come along to my pianolesson and wait in the car for 40 minutes. And then, letting them off leash together doesn´t really work well. Cora wants to play, but her way of doing that is to run like crazy and bump into Agatha at full speed, or jump on her from the side. Agatha is not at all strong enough to deal with that now, she usually loses her balance and falls, and it can be a serious problem because of her back issues. So I can either keep Cora on leash, which she finds seriously frustrating, she pulls on her leash like crazy then, and I have to use all my strenght to stay on my feet. Or I can let them off leash and yell No! to Cora each time she goes for Agatha. I have to seriously yell, otherwise she doesn´t hear it, she´s to into the game. So, in the end, there´s a lot of yelling at poor Cora.

She´s now restlessly walking around the apartment, which is not like her, she generally sleeps like a log 99% of the time when she´s indoors. I think it´s the stress of Agatha suddenly showing up, the walk with too much yelling, and then Agatha disappearing again as we drove her back home. Sigh.

But at least Agatha got an hour and a half of running, plus I fed her as many treats as I could, things like cheeze with lots of fat in it, to help her gain a bit of weight.