Building

Well here’s a huge shout-out and thank you to my mom and sister for being so willing to take me and Prada places to walk. Karen’s been amazing, driving us out to the mall area to work, and yay for mom’s love of walking in neighborhoods. That’s done a tremendous amount for rebuilding Prada’s and my habits with street corners, distractions, and such. I’ve been fighting the new guilt trip of “oh, I haven’t’ been correcting for this, so I shouldn’t’ start now.” The problem with this is it wouldn’t’ be “starting,’ it would be “restarting.” So I’m learning to get over it, and Prada doesn’t seem to be suffering at all, psychologically. In fact, she seems happier working when I’m paying more attention. Time to cut back on the daydreaming, I guess. Last night Mom and I walked through an older neighborhood in Salem where a lot of people hadn’t yet removed their Christmas lights. It never ceases to amaze me, how much I enjoy working with Prada at night. I’ve said this before, but I need to find more night activities to walk to. Thursday nights we’ll be at Bible Study, but that’s not much of a long walk. Maybe when it gets warmer she and I will just work around campus for the heck of it, although my roommates tend to frown on this. I can understand, I don’t’ like it when they’re out late at night alone, either, and we all generally try to avoid this. But somehow it seems slightly different. I mean, I’ve got a German shepherd with me. I guess we’ll see what happens; it won’t be warm enough for me to walk at night for at least another month or two. In the meantime we’ll just borrow the MPR for fetch and hide-and-seek.

Prada’s latest trick is burying her bone in furniture. My grandmother brought her an edible, chicken-flavored chewy bone and she went nuts over it. She carried it all through the house without eating it, and then started shoving it between couch cushions or under pillows. She even tried to bury it under the Christmas tree! Eventually I convinced her it was for chewing on. New it is no more.