Gone to the dogs

I'd like you to meet a couple of friends of mine. That's Hilda on the left, and Tigger on the right. Hilda lives at my new house, up in the little apartment over the garage. Carriage house, whatever you want to call it. A car won't actually fit into it, so it's not really a garage, technically. But Hilda and her human companion live there together; he leaves for work very early some mornings, and she is an enterprising dog who has figured out how to use the dog door to get into the basement and then trots right up the stairs and jiggles the door until the latch opens, whereupon she climbs into bed with me for another couple of hours of quality sleep.

Tigger is Julie's dog. More pictures of Tigger can be found here. Julie has a special section on her blog just for dog photos. Julie is at a super-secret librarian convention this week so Tigger has been hanging out with Hilda and me for a few days. He is a hoot! I have a total crush on him! And watching him and Hilda together is endlessly entertaining. The two of them wrassle and chase each other constantly, although Tigger cheerfully submits to Hilda's alphabitch vibe almost every time. It's just easier. Although she does get on his nerves from time to time, as you can see if you click here.

And they both sleep with me. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the other hand, it's only a couple more days.

As I said, Hilda is an enterprising sort, and she figured out right away that the gate between the patio and back yard was hers to open. I've been trying to photograph her just emerging from the gate, but she's very fast and there's this delay on the digital camera, and I'm kind of slow anyway. But you can see her dogged determination, I think, in the photo at left.

And you can see her delight in the activity: running back and forth from one part of the yard to the other, in this case, but she's pretty happy doing almost anything. One morning I found her trying to dig under the fence a few feet to the left of the gate, and I was afraid she'd be disappointed to have dug her way to freedom only to find that she was someplace she was already allowed to be. But she's smarter than that. She was digging to find the furry rodents that had some tunnels in the vicinity.

Tigger, on the other hand, didn't figure out the gate right away. He can open it easily enough, but he walks through it slowly, sort of like he's afraid he's breaking a rule that nobody's told him about. And when he goes the other way, he looks at me first, as if for permission.

He also followed Hilda through the dog door and up the basement steps, but he had a little trouble going back out the dog door. Part of the problem is that the door is only just barely large enough to let him through, and when you go out you are in a steep narrow stairwell. So he took an approach rather typical of your bigger, burlier types: he busted the door down. Well, OK, he broke the latch on the basement door, which (the latch, not the door) was revealed on closer inspection have consisted of a small wooden peg (on a string, even) stuck into a hole bored into a rotted piece of wood. Largely useless, in other words, and so I reinforced the door frame and installed a new latch thingy.

Then I got all butch and handy after that, and went around the house fixing little loose things and I musta removed about ooty pazillion useless nails from the walls (including 32 of them!!! in several sizes, stuck at random in the wall of my big closet where I get dressed in the morning and have been just waiting to accidentally snag a sweater or dress or something on). And I unpacked two more boxes of random stuff (do NOT let your friends pack your stuff when you move, have I mentioned that already? not if you want to find anything any time soon) and also made some of my nearly famous tater tot hotdish.