TJ, Maya, and Jackie

With Rugger's arrival we are back to 12 dogs around here. They are all indoors at night so that's a lot of dogs to move out in the morning. They all want to eat at once, but that's not possible. I go at it methodically but as expeditiously as possible. Still, it would be noticeably easier even being down to 10, so I've been pushing to get some adopted.

Sometimes I feel like our own dogs are being neglected, but honestly, they don't let that happen for very long. Friday I got Maya and TJ out for a hike at Pleasant Grove again.

I saw this along a trail in the woods. I'm guessing
that someone was engaged in model rocketry and
they weren't able to find this one when it came down.

The dogs had their noses in the ground so I
dropped the leashes and walked on. I never get
very far before Maya realizes what has happened.
She then gets TJ moving and they catch up.

At this point in the hike it pretty much turned into a TJ model photo shoot. The damn chain link fence in the background is unfortunate, but otherwise the sky and the light were perfect. This dog is very photogenic.

I haven't mentioned Jackie much lately. She's doing great, she's happy, she's fun to have around, and I think she's really enjoying herself around here. She likes to play ball and she will run for it short distances, but she doesn't bring it back. Instead she carries it off somewhere and tries to hide it, although she ends up just dropping it somewhere. She and Vince go out and poke about the yard on their own. Jackie never goes far and she has learned to stand and bark at the door when she wants in. I wish she would do the same when she wants out, but she hasn't seemed to learn that.

She's still afraid of anyone but me, however, and that's going to present a problem for when we go away. The urination problem is minimal anymore. Sometimes she pees on the kitchen floor at night, but most nights she doesn't. The security cameras have shown me that most of the pissing in the kitchen that happens during the day when I'm gone is Vince. Her weight is good, her appetite is good, and she gets around fine at a plodding pace. She goes up the stairs one foot at a time but with strong determination to get where she's going.

I stopped feeding Jackie the special food for urinary problems because it made her drink excessive amounts of water which is what was making her pee all the time. The increased fluid intake is what would prevent the formation of crystals in her urine, I guess, but it was making her impossible to live with. I'm working on the theory that the quantity of bladder stones that she had probably took many years to develop. Given her age, I'm guessing that she probably doesn't have enough years left for that problem to develop again, at least not to the extent that it had. I need to run that theory by a vet.