Today is June 8 and it is the birthday of famed American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright is said to have deisgned over 1,000 buildings in his career and he was even named the “the greatest American architect of all time” by the American Insitute of Architects.  His Prairie style architecture with low-pitched roofs and open floorplans became a hallmark of his work – but he was also know for incorporating the surrounding environment into his designs.  If you Google Frank Lloyd Wright and Fallingwater, you will see excatly what I mean.

Anyway, Wright was famous across the US – but you may not know about the smallest strucure that Wright ever designed.  A doghouse.  I never knew about this story, but found it and felt it was worth sharing.  It seems Wright answered the request of a 12 year old boy to design a special house for his Labrador retriever, Eddie, who as he described in his letter to Wright as being “four years old or in dog life 28 years.”  He went on to include Eddie’s measurements – so Wright would know what size house to build.  Here’s a little movie about Eddie’s home…

https://youtu.be/dee19eel0TE
After all that,  Eddie didn’t like his house.   Go figure.  In this house,  someone is in the doghouse all the time.   The proverbial doghouse.  And that one we build ourselves!

Life is just so interesting.  Something can happen that is both happy and sad at the same time.  Take for example a video that was released that just went viral.  It involves a family who has been “raising” a caterpillar for weeks – until it turned into a beautiful butterfly.  The family all gather around to release the butterfly into the wild – where it will be free and can fly and can spread pollen and joy and live a carefree life.  Oh happy day!  EXCEPT – less than 2 seconds after said butterfly is released, the butterfly is promptly eaten by the family Boxer.  So sad…  But SO hysterically funny!!!!!!!!!!!

https://radio951.iheart.com/content/2018-06-05-viral-video-family-releases-pet-butterfly-dog-eats-it/

In the same vein, my human had a posting placed on her Facebook page by one of our wonderful neighbors.  It was a sign that you can buy which reads:

June 6.  And it’s Russian Language Day.  I don’t know any Russian.  I know English but often pretend I don’t.  My human has attempted to teach me “sit” in Polish – but besides that and a few choice vocabulary words, her Polish is limited.

But since it IS a Russian day – time to look at some Russian dogs.  When I think of Russian dogs, the first two that come to my mind are the Borzoi (or Russian wolfhound) and the Black Russian Terrier.  I forgot about the Siberian Husky and the Samoyed.  OK.  I must confess I didn’t even realize the Samoyed came from Russia.

Here’s a QUICK video of some of the Russian breeds just mentioned and a few others that are less common – at least in North America:

https://youtu.be/r0eovqJMgAE

And then I also found the South Russian Ovcharka.  Check out these bad boys.   They look like PONs on steriods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX8q7Kim_P4&feature=youtu.be

My human saw this an immediately started looking to see where she could get one.  JUST KIDDING!!!!!!!!   CAN you IMAGINE one of these guys in our house?  They look to be a BIT stubborn.  Like us PONs (and somewhat like the FG at times).  But THESE guys would be a LOT more dog to handle.  No. Thank. You.  We have QUITE enough stubbornness in this household already.  If anyone out there actually is owned by one of these dogs, feel free to comment about them.  They DO look cool (because, as I said,  they look like giant PONs)….

 Anyway, I was going to type something in Russian by changing the font on my keyboard, but my human explained that with our luck, we wouldn’t be able to change it back again.  Then imagine my human trying to explain to the people at Apple that we were having trouble getting out of Russian don’t because  her dog wrote some phrase in his blog.  THAT would go over well.  So intsead, we cut and pasted this from a website.  HOPEFULLY it says “Have a nice day.” 

If it doesn’t, we’ll just claim there was Russian meddling on my blog….

Have a good one.  Peace and paws up!

Seizure free days:  19

So remember the story of the missing box from the post office?  The one that had people searching. The one that I needed – so because it was missing my human drove in torrential rain over an hour to get a replacement for the contents of that box. You remember- the missing box that REALLY wasn’t missing after all.  Anyway, as you may also recall, when my human went to the Valley to pick up my stuff- she ended up buying grooming supplies, too.  Oh happy day…

One would think that if one was owned by an 8 year old dog, a six year old dog and a two year old dog, that one would not find that said dogs would engage in childish, make that puppyish, pranks.  Not so much in this house…

So here is a new interesting study.  Do you want to know how to keep the attention of a dog?  Speak to us using DDS.  That stands for dog directed speech.  What is it?  It’s the annoying higher pitch speech that humans use with babies.  Basically baby talk.  It seems that some researchers in the UK wanted to see if puppies and adult dogs would respond with more attention to DDS rather than a typical, standard tone of voice.  Seems puppies responded to anything the researchers said using DDS.  Adult dogs also responded to it, but only if the vocabulary used was familiar- like “walk “ or “treats.”  So they concluded that we dogs like the sound of it.  My human doesn’t tend to use DDS with us.  Probably because half the time she is shouting at us.  Truth be told, we rarely listen UNLESS she has a treat in hand.  Then she can talk to us in any manner she wants, and we will definitely be more responsive.  Hence the treat crumbs in the pockets of every outfit she owns. 

June 1.  And according to the crazy calendar it is Heimlich Maneuver Day.   I was going to write about using the technique with dogs – but I found this video that sums up what you need to know:

https://www.petmd.com/dog/emergency/common-emergencies/e_dg_choking

Thankfully my human hasn’t had to use this on any of her dogs – but it IS good to know. 

Today is also  New Year’s Resolution Recommitment Day.  So I decided to look back to see what I had promised I would do.  And low and behold…I didn’t promise anything!    I see that for 2018, I just reviewed the most common resolutions that humans make.  I reviewed them with my human today and so far the ONLY one that she has met is to quit smoking.  Mind you she never has smoked.  But she needed to feel like she was successful with at least one.  I’m not commenting about more exercise, better diet or more sleep for her.  Look – we TRY to give her more exercise.  And we really can’t do anything about what she eats.  OK.  OK.  We COULD help out more with the sleep part by not waking her up in the middle of the night for no reason.  And as for the cutting-down-on-stress resolution, I thought research said that just owning a dog reduces stress.  OK.  Perhaps not if it is two PONs and a Picard. Not to mention the stress about worrying about my health….