So naturally windstorms are now also scary. Good lord. What’s next, dinnertime?

At least he’s not scared of shadows like Snickers (some friends’ dog) used to be!

Hoo boy, full-on ninety-pound dog sitting on my lap while I sit at the computer attempting to type. Don’t eat the doorframe this time, buster.

He demolished the door to his kennel last time this was happening. Since then we bought a huge cage which he recognizes and does not like (presumably from his shelter days) but which does not suffer from the design flaws that allowed him to break out of the kennel. The AIRLINE APPROVED kennel. Good thing we didn’t ever try to fly him anywhere.

We have these tranqs that work OK but they take an hour or two to metabolize. And there’s controversy about what they do, exactly – it’s acepromazine, and although it’s been used as an anti-anxiety treatment in animals and humans, it actually effects only the physical expressions of anxiety. So it’s thought that there may be a potential to increase anxiety trauma by actually increasing negative conditioning in association with anxiety-producing stimuli.

So I try to avoid it unless it seems clear he’s going to hurt himself, like by trying to eat lumber, or for example if we have to cage him or leave him alone in the house and he’s really fighting it. When he broke out of the kennel he bent the doorframe by pulling on it with his teeth and managed to hurt himself to the point he was bleeding from his mouth and paws.

I bundled him into his thunder shirt but of course he’s still freaked out.

Looking out at my yard, I notice part of my neighbor’s fence has blown down. Naturally, this fence is technically on my land, which means, I suppose, it’s actually mine and my maintenance responsibility. I foolishly gave my former neighbor Josh permission to site his posts on our side of the property line, and he quite reasonably set up the fence with the facing to his side of the line. After he sold the house shortly afterward I realized what he’d done – he installed and paid for a fence that is actually now in part my maintenance responsibility, although the finished side faces his yard.

I actually helped him build the retaining wall that made it most practical to put the fenceposts on my side of the line, too. Grr.