vel's journaly thing

I forgot, sapphie_lp wanted to see pictures of my dogs, so I took some the other day of Sequoia playing in the hose water. You can see the little pool before she chewed holes all through it :p

( Labradors )

And here's Ooishi and Kikumaru for the heck of it =D

( ducks )

YARGH!! Well, I *was* going to go to class today, but Sequoia decided to ruin that plan. Somehow she's figured out how to escape from the dogs' section of the yard through a narrow opening between the shed and where the fence ends. Today it's raining, and somehow when she does this she manages to get covered in water and mud. Of course I didn't know any of this, so when I went outside to feed the dogs breakfast, I was met by a mud rocket barreling toward me. I'm surprised no one called the police from the way I screamed! *l* I locked the dogs up inside to eat while I tried to fix the fence, so of course I got covered in mud and water as well. By the time I had finally managed to block the opening, there was no way I could have gotten to class in time. So instead I just stayed outside since I was wet already and took some pictures of Simba sitting on the fence. Argh. DOGS. I am SO completely a cat person!

Okay, the puppy's name is officially Sequoia because we're sick of trying to come up with anything better. She's getting much better about sleeping quietly through the night, but she still yipes and whines horribly when she's awake during the day and no one is around to play with her. She also has even more toys now since any one toy only seems to keep her interested for a day or two.

I dropped my Tuesday night class, so now I'm down to only two night classes on Mondays and Thursdays. Yay! That class was SO lame; it was called Communication & Culture and most of the people in there were kids majoring in Communications. I had zero interest in it and it involved a lot of annoying reading, not to mention having to stay at school at night for yet another 3 hours in a row. Anyway, I've dropped it and instead I signed up for a class at the community college I'll be working at. The class? Japanese Animation *g* Three hours of watching anime every Monday; I think I can handle that... ^_~

Yesterday was bowling and I did quite well for me. For the last few weeks I've been sucking; my ball won't go where I want it to and I haven't been able to figure out why. It's like the way I bowled changed completely over the space of a week or two. Then last night my thumbnail broke off on my first practice ball, and suddenly I could bowl normally again! For three weeks I've been bowling like crap all because of one stupid nail. Well now I know I have to keep them cut short.

Tonight the fire alarm went off during my night class. I wonder if it was a prank or something, because the alarm went off in the same building on Monday night as well. That thing is freaking LOUD. At least it was kind of nice to get out of that boring class for a few minutes; I keep almost falling asleep in there. Then when I was walking to the parking structure, I saw something rustling under a bush. I figured it was a cat (there's an orange tabby I've seen a few times around campus) and stopped to look at it. Well what should scurry out from under the bush but a huge possom! In the middle of downtown San Jose! It ran over to a building and sniffed around, looking for a way in, then it crawled through this little opening near the bottom of the wall. Weird.

I think I'm more or less over my bought of depression. Can't just live in the past, so here we are moving forward with a new dog. We picked her out this morning; she seemed to have the most people-oriented personality of the females, and she seems fairly intelligent and eager to please, so I hope she'll work out well. We still can't decide on a name for her, though. Anyway, here are a few pictures of her:

( car ride home and in her pen )

So, we're going to be picking out a puppy and bringing her home on Saturday. Right now the name I'm leaning toward most is Sequoia, but I don't know about the rest of my family. I'm kind of worried about bringing a new puppy into the household, mostly because I don't know what kind of influence Yukon might have on her. He was never properly trained and now he's more wrecking ball than dog. I don't want her to learn any destructive habits from him, so I'm not sure what to do about it. I've been working on obedience with him, but he's just so stubborn and dumb as a brick that it's very frustrating. I can't make progress very quickly with him and he's utterly, totally food motivated; he doesn't care what you think of him and won't work simply to please you, he'll only pay any attention to you if you have a treat for him. Well at least I'll be around to work with the new dog; when we got Yukon I was off to college and since no one else is around to do anything with the dogs, he never got any real training. Bah. I'm a cat person.

So tonight we went to look at some labrador puppies, and it looks like we'll be getting one of the females. There are nine puppies total, 6 females and 3 males, all of them light yellow (my dad's favorite lab color). They're all very good looking and friendly with very nice parents, so I think any of them will make a good pet. Right now they're four weeks old, so we'll go get one at about 8 weeks. We're third on the list for females, so we'll choose one of them from the four females left after the first two people pick theirs.

I kind of have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I still miss Sierra terribly, and I don't know how ready I am for a new dog. Puppies are certainly cute and sweet and fun, but they also require an enormous amount of work and attention and training. Most of that will be left up to me since I'll be at home a lot due to my night classes, plus I'm the resident "animal expert" and trainer.

Anyway...we're trying to come up with appropriate names for a yellow female lab. Two that I like a lot so far are Willow and Summer. Feel free to leave suggestions :)