More About Carly

This morning when I went out to walk Carly, I looked up the street and the rising sun on the yellow building against a dark blue-gray sky made the building look like it had been gilded with gold. I didn't have the camera with me but as soon as Carly finished her business, I got the camera and took a picture.

Several readers have asked me about Carly. Carly has clearly decided she is going to stay. She has the household routine down. She flies up and down the stairs. She has picked out her napping places in each room. She is definitely a Mexican dog who can ignore all the fireworks. And she thinks we are wonderful. Isn't it nice to have a dog just love you and they welcome you everytime you walk in the house like you have been away for a week.

I think she is pretty smart and definitely intuitive. The other day I had arranged for the groomer to pick her up and take her to get a bath. Ned and I were talking about it that morning. She started sitting right by Ned's leg and she would not follow me downstairs even when I called her. You could tell she was worried. When the groomer came she did not go bounding to the door and she just crept along the floor when we called her. How did she know that she was going to get a bath?

There are a few things she needs to work on though. First of all she needs to be crate trained because when we travel and are visiting with friends or in a motel, that is the best place for her if we have to leave for a while. Then I know that she isn't going to damage anything. From the first we put her food and water in the crate so she would get use to going inside it. Since she has settled in, I decided it was time to work on the crate training. I sat for about 15 minutes with a few delicious little bits of meat that I held inside the crate. She sat down in front of the crate with her tail wagging. She would look at the meat and then at me but she would not go into the crate. She seemed to be saying, I'd like to have that meat but you aren't fooling me. I'm not going in the crate for it. Never once during the whole 15 minutes did she put more than one foot in the crate. This could take a while.

She seems to be pretty well house trained but she doesn't recognize the patio as the house. I don't know, maybe it is the plants and sky that give her the idea it is okay to go on the patio especially if we have gone off and left her. But that seems to be getting better.

Carly was on the street for a while and she must have learned how to tear into garbage bags to survive. On garbage days we sit the garbage bags by the door to wait for the clang, clang announcing the garbage truck's arrival on the street. We can't do that anymore. All of a sudden you will realize that she has left your side and you will find her attacking the garbage bag. Now we have to leave them in a garbage can until we take them outside to the truck. So we are adjusting too.

Another problem has cropped up in the last day or two. She wants to sleep with us on our bed. We don't want a third party in the bed. She is sneaky about it. She goes to her bed and then waits until she thinks we are asleep then she jumps up on the end of the bed and curls up. She is so light weight that she can jump up on the bed without shaking the bed at all. Last night I was on my side but not yet asleep. She got out of her bed and came over and looked at me. She must have thought that I was asleep. She immediately went to the end of the bed and jumped up and laid down in one swift movement.

Ned fusses when she misbehaves and threatens to send her back to Queretaro but she knows she has him wrapped around her paw. The other day I found them snoozing on the couch. she was between him and the back of the couch and she was laying on her back. She looked quite comfortable.....and so did Ned.