Thank you...I am a little better now, but everything is reminding me she isn't here anymore; just like every time I lose one.
And when I see Yogi (or the new one) laying there, I have to stare, or check to make sure he's breathing, or just get down there and hold him until he gets so tired of it that he pulls away and runs off. Everytime he puppydreams I have to check to be sure it's not a seizure (he doesnt' get them...but after the last several days...watching Teddy go thru that has made me see it in everything). I wake up with no dog in the bed or the room and have to go find him...
But there is now a new member of the family, whose name was originally "Bernice", though she doesn't respond to it at all. She doesn't yet respond to her new name of Autumn, and it is not very appropriate either--she's more like Spring...or more accurately, Sproing. :lol:
She's a little crazy:
We haven't found her "real name" yet, but I keep making sounds to her and seeing which she responds to. (sometimes I do that with a new dog that doesn't know their name yet, rather than teaching them the one they were given cuz it just doesn't fit). Presently one contender is Dorkothy, (because she's too big to be Toto, by quite a bit).
She isn't as big as she will be, or rather, not as heavy, because even though she is taller than Yogi, she only weighs just under 80lbs; she's practically skin and bones--and she has *put on* weight since she came to the rescue!
Her spine sticks out as much as her hair does; about an inch of it forward of her hips, for instance.
We'll fix that, though...got lots of noms here.
As soon as I can upload it to YT, I've got a video of her eating dinner near Yogi, where she kept looking up at me like "is this really all mine?" "are you sure?" "I get to eat this much?" and when I brought the camera over, she had to check it out, too.
She may not get as big as Yogi, build-wise, because she might be a mix with something skinnier by nature, but I expect she will be at least 120lbs. Yogi is around 140lbs, or a bit more; Teddy was 120lbs; Tiny was only 100lbs at the most, less sometimes.
She is the most active dog I've had in years, though--she's even more active than Nana and Hachi; more like Bonnie the border collie when we first got her before Mom fed her so much she couldn't stand up on her own. :/
She reminds me intensely of another dog, but for some reason I cannot remember which one. This bothers me more than I know how to express, because I am nearly certain it's one of my own.
Someone has trained her a fair bit of basic stuff, like sit, down, come, though not stay. And she doesn't always do it right away, but she's smart, and it won't take long to fix it.
Yogi didn't act like he was going to like her bounciness and nippiness, so before we went into the yard (we were introducing them outisde the yard where it isn't "his" place), I put the Adaptil/Comfortzone pheromone collar on him, and we waited a few minutes, talking with each other and them, and letting them see and semi-interact wth us and each other, then we led them into the backyard thru the carport gate, each on a leash just in case.
At first we kept them on the leashes, but shortly afterward we were able to let them both roam off leash, while Yogi followed her around sniffing the spots she peed on and where she walked (so he was kinda far behind), as she explored the yard with a kind of "wow, is this really all mine?" kind of body language. :lol:
It didnt take too long for Yogi to decide she was ok, so we tried out going inside the house, which is where he had a big problem with Teddy at first (before the pheremone collar was tried back then). This worked out well; he seemed a bit unsure at irst, but ended up with a kind of "oh, what the heck; she's already here" kinda look and accepted her.
He's not like he was with Tiny (totally in love at first sight), nor even as close as with Teddy (whcih wasn't very), but it's a start.
She's kinda jumpy sometimes, like if I ruffle her butt fur, or she wasn't expecting a touch and I pet her, but she'll hop right up on the bed when I call her, and plop down on top of me. Good thing she doesn't weigh much yet (compared to what she will). She's sleeping now right where Teddy died, (it's both impossibly painful and wonderful that she is there) across the middle of my bed; she was laying on my legs and everytime I had to move a bit to relieve the aches or pins/needles, she'd start to jump up and run off; then she stops and lays back down and goes back to sleep. I don't know that she's ever slept in a bed with her peepulz, but she wants to be here.
She barks like Hachi, a BAAaaAAaaaAArrrk instead of a bark bark bark. But she'll stop when I tell her to, and come right to me; something Yogi took quite a while to learn (though he'll do it now in most cases).
Unfortunately she's even worse than Teddy about wanting to take Mouse (the cat) on a lunch date. :/ So I might have to go ahead and build the gate-door for Raine's room, rather than just the wire-gate presently used to slide across his door, so Mouse can still have a view but there'd be no chance of her getting into the room and hurting Mouse (or Mouse getting out and getting chased or hurt).
That's gonna take a lot more training to work around, and she might not ever get past it; I don't know that I'll ever trust her without a divider between her and a cat.
People she loves them all, though, like Teddy did, though she is overly exuberant about it.
