What the well-dressed puppy is wearing these days

Let’s talk puppy clothes. I find it becoming sort of an addiction. I think deep down I must be really perverted to be dressing a little dog like a doll in tiny clothes. It started in El Paso when we were driving back to Denver, and I knew it would be cold there and in Taos. We bought Lupita a cute little pink cable knit sweater since we thought she might get cold. After we got back to Denver and she had the surgery for her abscess, the vet wanted her to wear a t-shirt to cover the sutures. I thought the protruding ends of the suture material might catch on the sweater and be irritating. Esperando offered up the cut-off ends of a long sleeve gun-metal gray t-shirt. It was a humble homemade article although the neck had a nice finished look, with the cuff turned back at her neckline. I must admit the gray color didn't do much for her complexion. She wore that for a week until someone at the Landrover dealer commented on her “grunge look” when I went to pick up my car for servicing. Hmmm? My dog looking grungy?! That was not to be! Off I went to Petsmart to peruse the doggie clothing and found some really hot little numbers. Now my dog is better dressed than I am.

She seems to like wearing clothes. That is, she obliging pokes her nose into the neck hole and stands still while I feed her little paws into the sleeves. She seems to actually prefer some clothes over others and is consistently more cooperative in putting those on. As I child, I used to dress my cat up in my doll’s clothes, so it’s almost like returning to some familiar state of mind. I got a bad enough time in Vancouver when I bought a doggie raincoat for Sweet Pickle. Since he is large and has lots of hair it saved me from using up multiple towels to dry him off everyday when we came in from walking in the rain and snow. A street reporter doing a special on doggie clothes snagged me on a corner and wanted to me to explain why a big dog like Dash needed to wear a jacket? So I had to tell him about the facts of life which caused Dash to be propelled onto public TV in a newscast. How embarrassing!

Lupita is more fortunate than some dogs in that she has the money to work on her fashionista collection. So far she has three sweater vests, a gray and pink hoody with Canine All-Star written across the back, a small doggie Harley Davidison t-shirt, a really cute Rock Star t-shirt with a sequined guitar on it, and a fuzzy purple fleece jacket that has the words Princess emblazoned across the back. Unfortunately she considers the jacket be more of a chew toy. I am afraid it won’t hold up well to that kind of treatment.

I have seen some street dogs in Santa Rosalia wearing clothes. We are talking about dogs much bigger than Lupita who live in a hot climate. Unfortunately they do not have a change of clothes, and what with lying around on the street, their clothes could often use a good wash. What a silly world!

Puppy power

I just put Esperando on the airplane to Korea where he will be working for the rest of the week. I was so happy when he was here this past weekend to catch up and have some help taking care of the new doglet. We keep wondering how the rest of our menagerie will adapt to Lupita, we are sure Sweet Pickle will be jealous, at least at first, but what will the cats do? We have been told that Chihuahuas want to be the dominant dog. As for the cats, Sour Pickle is not intimidated by much and is a pretty curious guy. I see photos of this but--do Chihuahuas and cats really get along well? I guess we will find out in a couple of weeks when we head back to Mexico.

After I dropped Esperando off at the airport, I went to physical therapy, and then ran a few errands before coming home. Lupita rode in her travel carrier in the car with me and basked in the sunshine when I went into therapy, and then again when I went into the store for a brief jaunt. It didn’t look as though she slept after I left her because every time I returned she was gnawing on the chewy toy that I left in the carrier with her. When I got home to take a nap she did her little snapping-turtle-under-the-covers routine, spinning around on her back and biting at various parts of my anatomy and clothing. She got more hyper and more hyper and kept trying to climb off the bed. I finally had to crate her in our bedroom to try and take my own nap. I laid there for the next 30 minutes wondering what she was doing. In the end I couldn’t sleep: I got up and released her. She had peed and pooped in the crate and then curled up on some bedding at the other end and was sleeping. I don’t know when this fouling up of her crate will end, at least this time she didn’t make much of a protest being put in there other than the physical evidence she deposited. I keep thinking this is either an anger thing or an anxiety thing and I don’t know how to deal with it.

After the aborted nap attempt, I decided it was time to take her for a walk around the park. Yesterday Esperando and I had a nice time walking with her. It took her about 10 minutes to seemingly understand wearing a harness and leash. One of us would walk in front and she would follow while the other held the leash. The walk we took is about a mile long and she must have walked almost half of it. We were pretty amazed such a little one could go so far. She seemed fairly tuckered out when we were done.

Today I did the same walk, but there was no Esperando to lead her while I walked in front. We had some difficulty moving forward and not fighting or dragging on the leash. A bicycle zoomed by and that freaked her out so badly I had to pick her up and carry her a good ways; more bicycles passed us, several in a row, and even though I was holding her she was terrified trying to climb up into the sleeve of my jacket. Once they passed by I put her down again and she walked fairly responsively for awhile, but she didn’t do as much walking as she had done the previous day. When we finally got near home she seemed to know where she was and had a conniption fit when I wouldn’t let her go up my neighbor's steps. I think she thought they were ours.

Finally she ran through our front door. She began to zoom around in circles and spent the next 3 hours literally racing around the house at 90 mph, upstairs, downstairs, through the living room, dining room and kitchen in circles, every once in a while, concerned she might need to pee I would open the back door and she would race around the backyard in circles. I don’t think I have ever seen so much continuous energy expended in my entire life by such a tiny creature except by hummingbirds. I was exhausted watching her. After she stopped doing circles, I threw the Trash Man doll, which is twice her size, and she must have retrieved him 50 times. If puppy energy could be stored we could solve all our electricity problems better than with oil, gas, wind farms, or hydroelectric power. Of course that would be a lot of puppies!

Why can't our credit cards take better care of us?

Mastercard: Elephant | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

With our frenetic travel lifestyle, Esperando and I have a real issue managing to keep our credit card accounts from being frozen by the bank. I am sure it is confusing to fraud divisions worldwide, as we, especially Esperando, travel so much. Our cards get charged in each new location. We are constantly calling up credit card companies to verify charges we have made.

We keep telling them, “We travel constantly, couldn’t you make a note our file that we travel all the time?”

“No, no, never, we could never do that,” they say.

But, when we say, “Oh, he is in Mexico now, next week he will be in Korea, and the week after that he will be in the U.S.”

They say “Oh, we will make a note of that in the file.”

I can’t fault the card companies, although lately they are getting much worse about freezing our account to the tune of every 4 or 5 days. The other day it was two of them in a row. It was sort of embarrassing. I was at the pharmacy trying to pick up a prescription. The first card I tried wouldn’t go through, and then the other wouldn’t work either. I am sure the girl at the drive-up window thought that I had stolen them or that I hadn’t paid my bills. I was amazed to have two cards rejected in a row. “You’re kidding!” I said.

When I got home I called the first card. Esperando had been charging airplane tickets for Korea. It was a pricey item and the card company declined to pay it as fraudulent, so the airplane tickets were hanging in limbo. In their favor they had both called and emailed him; unfortunately at the time he was on an airplane so he couldn’t respond either communication. After I got that straightened out, I called the second card company and I couldn’t remember my social security number properly. I gave her two variations before I could remembered the right one. (Travelling erodes your brain.) That really set the alarm buttons off. I had to answer five more security questions and I was very hopeful I could manage those. Luckily for me they were things I could answer, not some esoteric question such as ‘if you could meet anyone living or dead, who would that be?’ (Yes, we did have question just like that on a recent credit questionnaire. I was going to enter Cleopatra because I had been reading about her at the time, but realized that probably wouldn’t stick in my mind so I went with Jesus Christ instead.)



It’s the little things like this that really screw up the flow of life. You know that TV ad where everyone is using their ATM card, a long line of people buying things and the flow just keeps humming along? Then some jerk wants to pay cash and puts a big wrench in the flow of operations. That ad implies that credit cards make life move along smoothly. I wish I could say that was true but it just doesn’t work for me.