Doggie drama

Henry and Annie had a little tiff yesterday.  I was looking the other direction and didn't see how it happened--may have been too close quarters with Henry still excited about his chicken baby food incentivized toenail dremeling.  Annie was the one yelping and running away with a little ding on her nose, but Henry was the one who was afraid to walk very close to her for the rest of the day, so who knows how it started.  In any case they seem completely over it now, as you can see.

General updates:

House training is progressing with no further accidents, and since Annie has so far never eliminated within 4 hours of the last event, I've relaxed her non crate/or direct eyes on supervision for the first 2-3 hours after she goes.  It would be nice if she would go during walks, but I'm not willing to crate her all the rest of the time to make walks her only opportunities, so I'll just see if this works itself out.

She's so comfortable in the car now that she just curls up and goes to sleep, even if left alone for a few minutes--yippee!

And inside the house has become such a safe zone that it only took 3 warm-ups with the vacuum cleaner for her to decide it was completely ho-hum.  The shredder motor she positively loves.  She comes running in from the next room when she hears it.

On what was supposed to be our quiet, non-stressful walk at the marina this morning, there was a maintenance guy rolling 2 huge, very noisy trash barrels around, seemingly following or just preceding us everywhere we went.  She tried to flee one time when the big noise first started behind us, but was able to take treats from just a few feet off the sidewalk as the guy dragged his barrels by and after about 6 encounters, started to look toward my treat pouch when she heard the barrel noise start up.  This is the first time I've seen an indication that a scary noise is beginning to predict a treat for her.  Breakthrough.

One kitchen counter transgression that I didn't anticipate in time to give the "off" warning in the last couple of days, but she immediately got down when I did give it.

Am continuing to add goodies to her food bowl and do exchanges with toys, but haven't seen any further evidence of guarding.

Which leads me to today's fun discovery--little Annie is crazy for tennis balls and other fetch objects.  I believe I can easily make her into a frisbee dog, but more important, this is a powerful new motivator to use for all sorts of things.  She found a tennis ball in the yard and was thrilled to chase it.  She also wanted to take it back to her bed and chew on it, but I gave her a toy substitute for this, as I don't want her to ruin her teeth.  And I have an old toy called a "Giggly wiggly" ball that has never interested any of my other dogs much.  It's a large (maybe 1/2.basketball sized) thing that makes all kinds of varied squeaky/squawky/gurgly noises when it's rolled or thrown.  That's it in the picture.  She's over the moon for this.  I'm pretty sure I can use it to teach her to sit in a couple of days.  I just withhold it for a bit until she gives up and goes to a bed, then as she sits (but before she can get all the way into a down), I say, "yes!" and roll it for her.  She thinks this is tremendous.  I do too.

We are definitely having fun.