When your body is about 100 lbs of furred meat, any hole in the floor that emits semi cool air is something to be cozied up to, and as you can see, those gangly legs are just in the way of the goodness. Similarly, the mat that normally lives in front of the door can be handily pushed away to reveal the cool tile underneath.
Happiness.
I mentioned a few days ago that Lloyd had lost a round with a pair of socks, and I said the score was 1-0 for the socks. I had no idea at the time I would need to ever mention it again. Now it seems I need to change the score from that first post to the more correct Socks 2, Lloyd 0.
As I had mentioned, Lloyd’s nocturnal ramblings included snacking at the delectable, and ever-present laundry baskets in the hallway. It seems he has developed a taste for socks, and when he stumbled onto the (rather glum) basket of widowed socks (some of these sock tragedies are no doubt due to him in the first place) he ate his fill. So that’s what he greeted us with on Saturday morning, the unmistakable sound of socks winning the battle, despite Lloyd’s mighty efforts to keep them in his belly, they returned to us. Three in one shot this time. So, I cleaned that up while Lloyd watched mournfully (not much of an effort, he does almost everything mournfully). Then Sunday morning the battle began anew. I watched blearily from bed (there’s no use jumping out of bed to help him, he does just fine by now by himself) as he fought and lost again. I went to clean those up and noticed he is taking things up a notch. This time it was three whole socks, and the toe chewed off another one. I will give him credit, he aims high, although I’m not sure he has thought the whole thing through, because in the event he “wins” and successfully attempts to deliver a sock onto the front lawn, I’m thinking he won’t be calling that a victory….
So, if we take an accounting of the tally, I believe it’s Socks: 8.25, Lloyd: 0
Needless to say, we are now taking steps (ha!) to eliminate socks from Lloyd’s diet altogether.
A Lloyd update, for those of you who care to read such things.
His horrendous weight gain up to this point has thankfully leveled out somewhat. He’s at (only) 84 pounds at the moment, but that’s mostly due to the incredible increase in his height. If he hadn’t been adding inches to his height, he would weigh a lot more now. It hasn’t been even growth however, as his back legs have until only recently grown far faster than his front legs, leaving him with a strange downhill aspect wherever he went. That is now starting to level out, literally, so he’s just uniformly huge.
We have very recently started to leave him out of his crate when we leave the house, and at night. This has been fairly successful, once past the initial learning curves. The very first night he decided it was a great idea to leap onto the bed while we were sleeping, right onto Nikki’s head. Not a popular move, which I was able to convince him of with several sleepy whacks about the ears and head.
The main problem is not Lloyd’s fault, but actually Jordy’s fault. Early on she and Lloyd developed a game where he would go into her room and steal something, usually a sock, and she would chase him for it. It was adorable to watch, since Jordy would be giggling so hard she could barely catch him. It’s cute in the daytime, anyway. Lloyd isn’t so good with telling time, so needless to say the same behaviour doesn’t go over nearly as well at 2am as it did at 4pm. He was justifiably perplexed by our insistence that nighttime isn’t playtime. It came to head recently when he was surprised by being unceremoniously hauled by the scruff of the neck and tossed into his crate with the door locked at 3am after raiding Quinn’s closet for a sock. He has been rather better behaved since then.
Lloyd’s unsupervised nighttime hours also had other consequences. He would regularly visit each kid’s room and steal something in the hopes that someone would notice and chase him. Mostly we were asleep so he was left with a mouthful of whatever it was he stole. So it was that at about 5:15am one morning, perversely 15 minutes before my alarm was set to go off, he started heaving. Something was coming up, that much was clear. I jumped out of bed in an effort to haul him off the carpet and into the bathroom where cleanup is much easier. No matter, Lloyd thoughtfully gave one last heave onto Harvey’s pillow where Harv was seconds before sleeping. I grabbed some paper towel and turned the light on for cleanup duty, and saw that Lloyd had somehow produced a pair of socks, matched, and not even folded together. The socks were almost dry, even. I made a judgment call and decided that no-one would wear these particular socks again, despite their victory against Lloyd they were disposed of.
Lloyd wonders if that juicy piece of steak is for him. It's not.
Last night we were quite busy with the usual pre-first day of school preparations, getting kids showered, clothes and outfits agonized over, lunches made, etc. Lloyd and Harvey were settling into the evening’s long doze wherever they fell, or so we thought. Lloyd was left alone in the kitchen for a period of time that apparently exceeded his limit on self-control. We came back into the kitchen at the same time and were greeted by the sight of Lloyd lying next to Harvey’s water dish, in the middle of a huge puddle. The water was so widespread that we were unsure what had happened, thinking initially that something had fallen off the counter and landed into Harvey’s full dish with a huge splash. Lloyd is usually very good about Harvey’s dishes and not touching them, despite his longing sighs and laying with his nose touching them. Anyway, we thought he was completely innocent until I got him to sit up so I could dry him off with a towel (the water was actually beaded on his head) and he emitted a deafening burp in my direction that blew my hair back.
Busted.
The jackass didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed about it, and now I know why Harvey wouldn’t leave me alone before this discovery, he was trying to tell on Lloyd and I was too stupid to get it. In hindsight the mess Lloyd made was so great, he must have actually been playing in the dish with his paw, a la backyard splashy time.
On another note, the Globe and Mail has an article about the cost of pet ownership today. I estimate it’s costing me about $90/month (his food costs about exactly $2/pound) just to feed Lloyd right now, not to mention the 8 pills/day he takes at the moment to fight off a cold he picked up at the kennel. It’s a good thing he’s adorable. It might save his life.