Thursday, August 24, 2006

 

Mark vs. Fozzie - Fozzie wins!

Last night Fozzie woke me up. Not an entirely odd thing except that Fozzie doesn't sleep in the house any more. Perhaps I'll write an entry about my history with dogs sometime soon, but suffice it to say that he got banished outside because he's aggressive towards me for some reason and it's not nice to fear for your skin when you have to get up to visit the potty in the middle of the night.

Well he wasn't being aggressive (it is completely random) he was just saying hello by slobbering all over my legs. Mark is responsible for getting up in the middle of the night for anything quick-ish because he has far less trouble getting back to sleep after doing stuff. So I nudged Mark, suggested that Fozzie might have pushed the door open between the backyard and the garage, and asked him to put him back outside.

I drifted back asleep until Mark crawled back into bed and said that the door was not in fact pushed open. This made me wake up a bit because it was puzzling. The dog has escaped once or twice before, but even if he had gotten out of the fence, how did he get into the house?? I don't think he knows the code to get to the key in our key-safe. Mark explained that the garage door was cracked a bit because a cat was outside. (Crack for a cat, crack for a 100lb dog are almost the same)

Well I was in danger of waking up entirely so I grunted and tried to get back to sleep, but I had this nagging worry that the Fozzie problem wasn't as solved as it could ideally be.

Sure enough, when I wake up the next morning, Fozzie is lying on the front porch. (I'm glad he doesn't feel the need to flee or terrorize the neighborhood when he escapes.) I asked Mark what his solution to the problem was, and as I feared it was to "close the garage door." I guess his theory was that Fozzie would be thwarted in his attempts to get into the house and slobber on us, give up, and go back into the backyard, but alas, no.

In fact what had happened was the ninja-yard-guys forgot to close the fence. Everything is back to normal, hooray!

Comments:
The garage door doesn't like to be cracked. If you stop it on the way down, it starts to go back up. Have to be fast on the button. It was a little more cracked than was ideal, but I didn't want to start the process all over again. And it wasn't that large an opening - I'm impressed that Fozzie managed to squeeze through.

As to my lack of solution - hey, it was late and I was practically asleep. I may not have been at my thinking best. Otherwise, I'm sure I could have come up with a better temporary solution than counting on Fozzie's goodwill - say, locking him in his crate for the night. But the real solution wasn't as simple as just closing the gate; I had to shovel an impressively large quantity of mulched pinestraw out of the way first.
 
So, let me get this straight - dog slobber is something to be feared and avoided at all costs, but baby slobber and 2-year old general messiness brings joy to your life? I'll never understand parents :).
 
Well the kids don't slobber on me so much while I'm trying to sleep, is the main thing. The secondary thing is that my kids are much less likely to have eaten long-dead rodents in the recent past. Makes a difference! =)
 
Maybe you should install a kitty door in the garage door so that you don't have to try to keep it cracked any longer. Keeps the drafts & bugs (and dogs! :D) out much better too. What a clever dog. :)

Bobbi
 
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