Saturday, February 28, 2015

Adventures in Winter Recall

Our -12 degree potty routine, our three feet of snow potty routine, is send Elka out back, call her back when she's done. And she gets done pretty quickly, and with good efficiency, as I've mentioned. Lately, though, some of that distractibility has crept back. God knows why, it's still -12 some mornings, and there's still three feet of snow out there.

But, I've begun to utilize the three count. I'll tell her to go potty, I'll say hurry up, and then I start to count. If I reach 3, I call her back and we go inside. Mostly, she gets busy at 2, if I even need to count.






Monday, February 23, 2015

It's been awhile....another chewed library book

It's been awhile since I've had a thoroughly chewed library book come across the counter. But last week, somebody came in with one. Their dog is about a year old, and they're making gestures at leaving the dog out of the crate when they're not home.

The dog really showed some ingenuity, actually. The patron said the book was in the middle of an otherwise empty table, and it was the only thing dog chewed. Also, the cover isn't chewed, and the book is chewed in sections. I try to take these things in good stride, obviously. Elka never chewed any books, thank God, but she did chew things. So I understand. What I said was "That was some good problem solving! Give that dog a job."


Friday, February 20, 2015

Today is Love your Pet day!

Well, we're hanging on here in frigid central New York. Persistent single digits, lots of snow, wind chill....it's been a brutal winter. Lots of laziness, lots of huddling on the couch in hoodies and under blankets. To add insult to injury, even sunny days aren't warm ones. Quite the opposite!

But evidently today is Love Your Pet Day.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Some flash fiction

At work, I'm running a writing workshop from now (started 2-7) through the end of May. I've done it in 6 week increments twice now, using NaNoWriMo as the leaping off point, and those were successful enough that we're doing it "for real" now, from under the NaNoWriMo umbrella.

In the the previous workshops, and it looks like this one too, we did a lot of writing prompts. Basically, I give a sentence, or an idea, or "include five words", and then set a timer and we all see what we can come up with.

Dogs frequently sneak into my writing, and did at least once yesterday, so I thought I'd share my little bit of "flash fiction" with you guys.

The prompt was "In the pile of leaves, I found...." to be used either as an intact phrase, or a situation to keep in mind, whatever. As I said to my writers, make the prompt work for you. If you're not into it, do something else.




Wednesday, February 4, 2015

So we had a bit of weather....

Sunday night into Monday, it SNOWED here. Quite a lot. I have Mondays off now anyway, but the library even got a snow day.