Luka's Adventures in Laundry and Dog Torture

Poor doggy. It's shocky-collar retraining time, and that is not a good time to be a Captain.

The last time I made him wear the collar was in the fall because I noticed him starting to dare the borders of the kitchen and found a few scattered wrappers around the trash can after leaving him alone. After that, the UFO unit that sends the signal to beep the collar stopped working properly.

He's been getting more and more bold regarding the no-fly zone for about a month, and today he got into the kitchen and cleaned out the cat food twice. That was that--I took the UFO apart with a screwdriver and messed with the connections until I got it to work again. He heard the faint test-beeps from out in the hallway, and I could hear him bolting for the stairs. So much for the element of surprise.

Unfortunately, dogs are fairly skilled at pattern recognition, so he has figured out that the collar is involved with the terrible torment that befalls him when he trespasses. It takes a while to de-condition himself, but I don't want him to figure out that taking the collar off means party time. Two ways around this: make sure there is a beep of punishment when he's not wearing the collar at certain points, and leave the collar on but turn off the power so that it doesn't warn him. Either way he'll stop associating the beep with the collar, resulting in a win condition for me.

The prongs shouldn't be in constant contact with his skin because it could cause pressure sores, so to take the latter approach I'll need to wrap the collar with something soft and comfortable. The former approach will require me to catch him in the act while I'm holding the collar (or a tape player with the collar noise recorded onto it).

In the end, it's worth it. The kitchen border keeps Maya-cat safe in her basement domain (she is bitterly racist against all Captain-dogs) and the Captain can't choke on anything he scavenges from the counters or the trash with his ever-so-industrious nose for mischief.

It's a work in progress, this cohabitation with other life forms. At least he's being really nice to Molly-cat. She has no fear of him whatsoever. I've seen her taunt the poor fellow into a barking frenzy from her comfy perch just over the blue do-not-cross line. Today I was petting her with one hand and feeding the Captain snacks with the other, and she was actually purring in between those tiny little grunts that mean Molly is being shown affection. Strange girl, that one.

In non-dog news, the dryer was not working the other day, so I had three loads of wet laundry to deal with. I found a roll of twine and made a quickie clothesline all over the basement by crisscrossing all the support beams. The towels ended up really stiff and still had pet hair on them, but my clothes are plenty soft enough to wear and hanging it all up wasn't all that difficult. I decided to try and make a habit of it.

So I bought 60 feet of clothesline for $2 at Walgreens, cut it into several lengths, and did the thing properly. On laundry day it's going to be like hiking through the jungle down there, only instead of bats and biter-snakes, you'll get attacked by soggy skivvies. The basement is so arid that things dry fast. I'll still need to tumble the towels a bit to remove the pet hair and soften them up a bit, but that's no problem.

(Blame Netflix for sending me An Inconvenient Truth when I was feeling particularly hippy-minded. I couldn't even finish it so I just swore to be less wasteful and sent the DVD back.)

Last thing I'll need to do is make sure I strung the lines high enough to avoid beheading anyone in the dark. Seebs is the tallest one here so I'll test it out on him first.