Hey there! It's been a while!

I know it's been ages since there's been a new post here.  Life has been insane for the past nearly two years and now things are starting to get back to normal.  This is the second summer I've been home with the dogs and, while they enjoy having me home, they also tend to be a bit bored.  At least this year I can do a bit more with them!

The dogs are both in good health and spirits. Noodle gave us a teensy scare a few months ago, had us thinking that she had a UTI or bladder infection, but really she was just being a brat.  She was peeing on the floor to protest being shut out of the bedroom at night. Since we let the dogs back into the bedroom (and trained them to sleep on the floor!), we've had no issues since.

Now here's a bunch of pictures!

Noodle is Insane

It's been a while since I've written about the Noodle antics.  Around here, it's generally same stuff, different day.  But Noodle is always a fountain of entertainment, often times causing hours of laughter for her daddy and I.
This morning I have decided that Noodle is a bit insane.  There's that saying - The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - and that's where Noodle is lately.
A little backstory first... Noodle's brother Rommel, after Christmas, had decided that being crated at night was NO BUENO, which was keeping us up.  We also didn't want the dogs in bed with us as they somehow manage to hog half the bed.  Our solution was to leave them in the living room, shutting all the doors and baby-gating them out of our bedroom and the kitchen.  This has worked extremely well and all parties are pretty happy with this arrangement.

Some mornings, when I get up, I decide to let David have some peace and keep the gate to the bedroom up, keeping the dogs out.  On days like today, when I am not rushing off to work, this arrangement makes Noodle quite unhappy.  And she lets me know it.
Once I come out to the living room, and after the dogs have had their morning potty, Noodle starts checking to see if the gate is down.  She will walk to the hallway, look, and practically sigh like a teenager in her disappointment (or maybe disgust?) that the gate is still up.  She'll come huffing over to the couch and hop up for a few minutes, shooting me a dirty look or three, before hopping back down to check again.  Some days, she is so adamant about getting in to sleep with her daddy that she will just do laps around the living room.  Or just stand in the hallway looking demanding.

Noodle loves her daddy very much, probably more then me, the one who rescued her.  I'm perfectly ok with that, as Noodle has essentially saved his life and he loves her just as much (though he assures me not more than he loves me).  Their connections is quite sweet, really, and she is his heart dog.

It's currently 8:30 am here in Texas, and if daddy is in bed much longer, I'll let her have some snuggle time and stop the stink-eye from coming my way.

I'm sorry to tell you, but your dog has... poopie ADD

Noodle is special, nobody can deny that.  And with her brand of special, well, it makes life interesting.

One little quirk of Noodle's has really come to light since we've lived in the city, made even worse by not going to daycare every day like she used to do.  And this quirk is what I like to call Poopie ADD.

Noodle makes it very clear when she needs to go.  There is no doubt what she wants.  Then we get outside.

Once we get out the door, Noodle looks for things to be distracted by.  Noodle immediately walks to the edge of the top step and does this look-out thing, chest all puffed out, scanning the street. Then she runs down the steps out to the sidewalk, and does the same thing. And then poopie is forgotten.

It could be someone walking, whether they are on our street or going down the other street.  She could hear a dog bark a block away, or kids playing, or see a big truck drive down the street.  God forbid we see a squirrel.

Due to Noodle's easily distracted nature, some days it can take 3 or 4 trips outside for her to do her thing.  Which gets very frustrating.


But when it finally happens, I dance.

The Trials and Tribulations of Bath Time.

Last week was bath time around here for the dogs.  Thank goodness I work at fancy pet resort so that I have access to great facilities to take care of these things.  That makes stuff like baths and haircuts SO much easier for me to deal with.  And of course the mess stays there.

On Monday, Rommel was bathed.  Monday is his day to go to fancy pet resort and he had a vet appointment that afternoon.  While Rommel is pretty good for grooming, he is quite pitiful for the bath.

For a dog that, based on what I've seen of his brother, got groomed pretty much every 6 weeks, he's pitiful.  He'd had a full haircut about 3 weeks prior, so I only freshened up his feet and face.

He did well at the vet and EVERYONE loved him, as always.


On Tuesday, it was Noodle's turn.  Now, we all know that Noodle loves the water.

However, she only loves it on HER terms.  Bath time is a whole different story.

Noodle is also pitiful in the tub, somehow even more pitiful than Rommel.  And she is trying throughout the whole bath to get out of the bath.

Notice the tucked tail?  She acts as if she is being just tortured!  And then there's the blowdryer...

When she was all done, Noodle was so pretty and fluffy and smelled so good!  She hadn't had a bath in months and was long overdue.  But the bath didn't last very long.

Each weekend, we try to do one activity with the dogs.  This past Saturday, we decided to take the dogs to the dog park.  It was a new park for us and we didn't know what to expect.  It was a great park, though a bit dusty.  Noodle and Rommel had a great time and Noodle was fairly well worn out after about 30 minutes, thanks to her bad hips.

We stopped for one last water break before leaving, and that's when Noodle decided to plop down on the flagstone, which was wet from the drinking fountain and had been covered in the dirt from the park.  And she was filthy!  This resulted in a shower once we got home.  Which she was even more pitiful for than a bath at work.  And since we don't have a handheld shower head, and Noodle wanted nothing more than to get out of the tub, I had to get in.  And then I needed a shower. 

Thankfully Noodle is a fairly low-maintenance girl and doesn't require baths very often.  If only she had any clue what I put Rommel through....

Princess Noodle of Short Bus

Noodle is the princess here.  David started that.  Funny thing is, Noodle wanted to eat his face at first.

Noodle is generally pretty weary of strangers, especially men.  She had only been home with me for a few hours when she met David.  He walked in the door and she backed up, tucked her tail, and barked and growled at him.  It took half a dozen Cheez-Its just so he could pet her.  By the end of the evening, she was coming up to him for pets and scratches, and begging for more Cheez-Its.

Before long, David was babying her.  He picked her up and cradled her like a baby, which she fought the first time.  He started talking baby talk to her, telling her what a pretty little blonde princess she is, which was hilarious because David appears to be a gruff kinda guy at first glance.

David talks often about how much he loves Noodle.  He also talks about how much Noodle has changed his life.  He was in a pretty dark and lonely place in his life when we met, and we hadn't been dating very long when I brought Noodle home.  I honestly think our relationship may have been a bit different without her.

Noodle is definitely a Daddy's girl.  She loves him, she loves to play with him, she loves to bite him.

He loves to wrestle with her, he loves to baby talk her, he loves to tell her how she's daddy's little blonde inbred princess.  He loves to sleep with her.

He just loves her. 

I love how much he loves her.  I love hearing how he talks about her and how much she means to him.

How a man treats a dog shows the true character of the man.

The Story of Noodle

As with any rescue, Noodle has some baggage.  We were fortunate that Noodle only came a carry-on.  It is also very fortunate that I know her entire history, unlike most rescues.

Noodle was purchased as a gift for an older couple.  ALWAYS a bad idea.  She was handed to these people without any discussion.  Surprise!  Here's a crazy-ass puppy!  Enjoy!

They never really wanted Noodle.  The staff at the vet clinic told me it was pretty obvious from the beginning.  Around 9 months of age, it was discovered that Noodle has severe hip dysplasia.  Severe enough to need a full hip replacement, probably around the age of 5-7 years.  If you hold her foot, you can feel the creaking from her hips travel all the way down her legs.  The surgery she needs requires a minimum of 6 weeks crate rest, probably some physical therapy and cost $7000 last time I looked into it.

The solution?  Euthanasia.  At least that's the solution these people chose.

Dr. McBroom, the vet treating her, told them, essentially, to bugger off and that they better never come back with a new dog.  And then Stella (her name at the time, which totally does NOT suit her) lived at the clinic.

Around the same time, my cousin Kate was doing some work with the vet on a pet resort they were building and, on Easter Sunday of 2010, Dr. Turner guilted Kate into taking Noodle home because, "It's Easter and she'll be here allllllll alone."  Kate agreed to take Noodle home on a foster basis and, a month later, I moved in.

Now, in Kate's house, Noodle was a bit of a monster.  Towards the end of her tenure there, Kate added up the dollar amount in damages caused by the little blonde doggy, and it totaled into the thousands.  Noodle's last big hurrah at Kate's house was to eat a pair of her glasses.  The lenses weren't too damaged, so she was able to get them repaired.  Within a couple days of the repaired glasses coming home, she ate them again.  Then Noodle went to live at Pet Resort in the Gardens, which had recently opened for business.

(And, for the record, Noodle's wasn't kicked out of Kate's house.  There was also a much bigger problem brewing of some disagreements between Noodle and Weezie, one of her dogs.)

Anyway, Noodle went to live at Pet Resort, where she got to play in daycare every day, made tons of friends, and had lots of fun.  She also went kennel crazy.  It's not unusual for a dog that spends lots of time in a kennel.  It was becoming more and more evident that she needed a HOME, but ho wants to adopt a dog that will need very expensive surgery a few years down the line?

Well, that would be me.

But there was this pesky pet deposit that I couldn't afford.  And finding out that that was the only thing keeping me from taking Noodle home, Dr. Turner paid it.  And on that day, October 16, Noodle was mine.  And she became Noodle.

So, here we are, a year and a half later, and Noodle is part of our little family.

Of course this family also includes Rommel, but we don't have any pictures of that yet.  : )

And, for the record, that man right there, Noodle's daddy (as he calls himself), is the one that insists that everything Noodle owns is PINK.  And he makes sure everyone knows that she's the princess.

Noodle Rides the Short Bus

While I've had many different positions in a handful of different places over the last ten years, there is one thing I've always done, and that's train dogs.  Looking at Noodle, you'd never guess that I am a trainer of canines.  Noodle is, well... special.  Let's take her swimming habits, for example.

Anyway, I've had Noodle for about a year and a half and she still has a handful of bad habits at which she excels.  Thankfully my clients don't hold it against me.

My greatest training accomplishment was my previous pooch, Ash.  He was a hellion husky pup that grew to be an amazing dog, and had even managed to become a service dog for me for a bit.  Since I ran the apprenticeship program for new trainers, Ash was learning new useless things constantly as a part of their training.  His crowning glory, however, was this

This trick was done at a pet event in Redford, MI where there were several hundred people and several hundred dogs in attendance.  There are 100 treats in this picture.  This was repeated later in the day with 150 treats.  We could do this trick with anything.

 Ham.

 Duplo.  Whatever.

Anyway, Ash was a very well-trained dog and a shining example of my training prowess.  And then there was Noodle...

I suppose I have the excuse that bad habits are hard to break, and this girl had over a year of bad habits built up.  I can also attest to the fact that, in other homes, Noodle was MUCH worse than she is here, and a lot of those bad habits immediately went out the window.  But she still jumps up, though almost exclusively on me.  And she walks kind of badly on a leash.  And she's really impatient.  Then there's the window licking....

Noodle's a pretty good dog.  She listens fairly well for a dog that's been moved around as much as she has before she landed with me.  She has talents, like punching you in the face and smashing your balls if you have them.  But she's also a class A snuggler and she knows how to wait at the door.  And really, we wouldn't have it any other way.