Trying not to fall behind again, so I don’t forget things! Here’s an overview of the last week. Tech I have cameras at long last! Got the first one fully set up on Friday; Jak climbed up and installed the overhead one Saturday evening, and I finished the setup yesterday (Sunday). The Kasa “smart” app is kind of a clusterfuck…
Collecting some interesting dog interactions from text messages and other notes all in one place: Saturday November 4 (Jak’s first full day in CDMX): [read screenshot from bottom up, remembering that EXCITED means “energetic”] I was at the table eating dinner when this happened, all nine presses in well under a minute. That’s more words than he usually uses in…
No flight cancellations this time: hooray, Jak is home! I survived just over 153 hours this round, 50% longer; I’m not as much of an emotional mess, but I’m more physically exhausted. However, I think I made another mini-breakthrough on Tashi’s biting behavior while Jak was gone. Giving him time outs when he becomes unmanageable is not a new idea…
A lot of other things have happened so far in November besides the whole CATNIP escapade, and I will attempt (emphasis on attempt) to catch up to the present here. That’s more than two weeks, so this is likely to be long, but like I said: this is as much a record for myself as anything, and if it interests…
So, because Rikki was super interested in the buttons and acting like he wanted to communicate, I decided to help him figure out how to actually press them. Starting in the third week of October, I began trying to target-train him, similar to this video. I started with a little glass container through which he could see the treat, so…
You know, for most of my life I thought my tendency to go ‘all in’ on whatever (or whoever) caught my interest was just a random personality trait, but like many other things about me, it turns out to be a feature of autism! For those of you who don’t experience it yourselves, this is what it looks like when…
Well, it’s been just over two weeks; I’m still not quite done with the aforementioned Nine Lives essay (almost! almost!), and meanwhile things have moved so fast with me and the pets that it’s going to take me three entries here just to catch up to the present, including the crazy thing that happened just this morning. (Edit: essay now…
I have a new all-consuming hobby: teaching my pets to talk. I’m nearly finished writing a Nine Lives that puts this statement in a larger context — the tragic history of research into animal cognition and communication, and how one speech-language pathologist, video-based social media, pandemic lockdowns, and a few thousand pet owners combined to not only give the scientific…
Part two of three on “What the hell happened to June?” (It’s not so much that I think even the five people reading this blog will care that much about my garden, but that I guess I’ve reached the point where I want to write things down as much for my future self as for anyone else, my memory being…