Baby pictures

At least some good has come from the staff's recent push to clean up the house.
They found some baby pictures of us!


Here's Maggie in the back yard for the first time.
Then, it's a picture from her first bath, courtesy Staffer Dad.
And next, it's Bandit as a great-looking youngster.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We've had a great day!
The staff was home with us all day (except they did leave for breakfast -- where do they go? can't they just eat out of their bowls like we do?) and we got to go outside a lot and we had a T-bone steak bone each. Maggie left hers outside, and Bandit buried his. We'll pull them out later when they've marinated well in the dirt. We hope they are still there when we go back out -- somehow the staff seems to always confiscate them. (They say it's because they care. Sure seems mean to us.)

We also got to help the staff clean up the back room where they pile boxes and stuff they can't figure out what to do with or stuff they just don't want to fool with. They say a lot of people have one of those rooms, but we don't understand why. Humans seem to have a lot of stuff.

And that brings us to a couple other things: Since it's Thanksgiving, we wanted to say we're thankful for our blankies, staffers, grandma, our aunts, uncles and buddies and our blog friends.
Thank you all!

Aunt Allison turns 6+

Here's something really cool: Aunt Allison turns 6ish this weekend. We think. The staff tells us that dog years and human years are really different and it takes about 7 dog years to equal 1 human year. So if we did our math right, she's not really very old. Or, if we didn't, she'd be really, really old like a dinosaur or something.
We think we must be right on this because she doesn't look really, really old.
Now we're confused.

Cold weather is here, and so are the deer

This week, it turned winter around here. Staffer Mom pulled out the blankets for the staff, and we got an extra blankie, too. All that thoughtfulness is nice, but we still had to go outside to do our business -- and it was below freezing.
Staffer Dad insists we go out and walk and stuff. Bandit doesn't like it, but he remembers when it was worse. When he lived in Kentucky and had to go out in the snow and dig a hole. He thought it was pretty neat since his poo would steam when it was really cold. He keeps trying to make it happen here in this yard. Maggie just keeps crawling up on Staffer Dad to snuggle.

The other big thing this week is that we have a pet deer. Staffer Mom doesn't like him at all because he ate all her new pansy plants, but we think he's cool. The staff couldn't figure out why we won't chase him out of the yard or even acknowledge his presence. It's probably a good thing they don't realize how long he's been living here. We see and smell him all the time. We roll in his pee a lot. We think he's now peeing exclusively in our yard just because we appreciate it so much.
He was here all weekend, and that's why Staffer Dad made us take a bath today.
Anyway, we like the deer and we're going to try to keep him.
Staffer Mom's not going to be happy about this. She'll have to deal: We've named it Willis.

While we were out

We got to thinking. We should probably give you some idea of what we did during our timeout. We weren't in trouble the whole time. We did regular stuff like get baths and go visit the spa while the staff took a weekend off. We also looked out the window at squirrels a lot when we couldn't get outside to chase them off.


We also got to watch some TV. Dog shows are pretty boring unless you're in them, we guess. We're not really sure we'd want to see this scene all day, either.

And then there was Halloween. The staff wouldn't let us out, but we saw enough horrors on the Internet to serve us for some time to come. It's bad enough seeing people stick fake hotdog buns on wieners like us all the time, but bananas? Please.

We are back (OK, out of timeout)

First of all: We're sorry.
Second: We are making a public apology to Ernie. We didn't really mean to knock over the cat food tower (right), and we're pretty sure we weren't the ones who put cat food all over the den and dining room. If we didn't, it was truly an accident because we truly believe in immediately picking up any food we drop. (Sometimes we even fight to see who gets to snarf it up!)
Here's what happened: Staffer Mom filled up the self-feeding cat food tower, and we got a little excited and at some point it went flying across the kitchen and food went everywhere.
We admit mouthing off a bit about Ernie even needing a self-feeder and if she didn't want us to taste it it shouldn't be on the floor...yadda, yadda.
Basically, she told us we couldn't blog again until she quit finding food in the rugs and floorboards across three different rooms and until we figured out how to share our toys and when we quit digging up her new bed of pansies.
And then she wouldn't let us try to help by sniffing out the strewn food -- one of our more refined skills, she had to pull out the sucking vacuum cleaner thing and it never works right....anyway...more than you wanted to know.

But we're back.
Staffer Mom says that the first day of Tar Heel basketball season is special one and all household shenanigans are forgiven for another year. We are really glad every year when that day comes.
Go Heels!