Why We’ll Never Invite Cesar Over for Tea

When it comes to dog training, it’s hard to top the masters: Barbara Woodhouse, Cesar Millan, and the Monks of New Skete. But when we got Xander, we hadn’t heard of these guys, and really, for Xander, we didn’t need them.

We had friends who used the methods, kept their puppies strapped to them with a leash for weeks on end until the dog learned to follow their every move and accept them as alpha. I thought they were a little nuts. After all, these were domesticated dogs, not some cub right out of the wolf pack. Don’t they have a natural inclination to please humans?

Uh no. I take it all back now. I was wrong. Get lazy with the dog training and this is what you get:

Sure, this looks cute, until you sit on one of these chairs while wearing black pants.

Yes, that's our (unmade) bed. Clearly dog training isn't the only area of laziness around here.

Why sneak around and eat those slippers when everyone's asleep when you can start chewing on the strings right now?



Husband sometimes teaches classes at the local university. That is actually someone's homework. Fortunately in the digital age there are always electronic backups.

Maggie Discovers She's Magic

A few days ago, I decided to pick up a bottle of wine on the way home from work. I called Husband to see what he was in the mood for.

“Something’s wrong with Maggie. You need to get home,” he says.

“What? Is she sick again?”

“I don’t know. Just come home.”

So I raced home and flew through the door—to be met by happy, bouncy, perfectly normal looking Maggie.

“What’s wrong with her? She seems fine,” I asked Husband.

“Just look in her crate.”

It took a few moments, but then I realized, I was staring at the tags and hardware from Maggie’s collar.

Let’s break this down.

At some point during the day, Maggie gets her tags caught on the crate. There’s probably a minute or two of panic and she eventually pulls her collar over her head. Then she stares at it for a minute and thinks: “Hooray! I made food!”

And then she eats the collar. The plushy, eco-friendly, hemp collar I had bought her about 18 mos. ago in a fit of yuppie weakness.

It took a few days, but eventually it came out. In big chunky pieces.

I’ll spare you a photo of that.

Why My Next Dog Won’t Be a Hound

Well, it’s happened again. We slipped away for a few happy days of vacation, leaving Maggie in my parents’ capable hands. Everything was going swimmingly, until we went to pick her up.

“She was sick yesterday,” said my mother. “She threw up a few times overnight, but she seems fine today, so I fed her.”

Uh-oh. Rookie mistake. Because Maggie can, and often does eat anything, she has semi-regular bouts of gastric distress. You’ll wake up at 2 a.m. to the sounds of retching and then it’s a race to drag her down the stairs and out into the yard before the inevitable happens. And then it’s time to play forensic examiner, squinting at the disgusting pile of goo and trying to figure just what the hell she ate that came up. “Oh, that’s just some carpet padding,” I am frequently heard saying to my husband, who’s far too squeamish to look too closely.

Actually, when the object can be identified, we’re overjoyed. Thing ingested, thing purged. Problem over. But when it’s just a meal that’s being expelled, that signals trouble. That means there’s a virus or something chemical that’s been ingested that portends a day or two of fits of vomiting and other ejaculations more vile. That means carpet cleaning and swearing and arguing about who’s going to clean that up and restless nights, as you lie there, listening for the particular gagging sound known in our house as “horking.”

Best case scenario, Maggie fasts for a few days (unwillingly) and then goes on the chicken and rice diet (ravenously) for a few days more. But frequently she refuses even to drink, gets dehydrated, and then has to go to the vet, where we spend a small fortune nursing her back to health.

Over the years, we’ve gotten a bit savvier, keeping the visits to about once per year; a quick examination, a blood test, a shot of subcutaneous fluids, some antibiotics and prescription bland food and we're done. But this time, Maggie surpassed her record. After bloodwork and exam, the vet put Maggie on an IV—a state from which vets are reluctant to release your dog, we soon discovered, until any chance of relapse is long past.

So, 36 hours, a night at the emergency vet clinic, and about $900 later (yes, you read that correctly—and our vet is one of the more reasonably priced ones in the area), we finally brought Maggie home. Who, after crashing for one day, tried to eat the straps off my purse. (She failed.)

Crashing hard after the ordeal.