Musings on Sleeping CircusK9

I'm spending the weekend studying biochem and animal genetics, with a bit of French thrown in. I'm pretty much caught up with animal nutrition at the moment. When I add up the hours I spend in class and the hours I spend studying each day, it comes out to far more than I spent going to work these past few years.

The dogs are not happy about this new arrangement.

Harry has been nursing a soft-tissue injury in his left shoulder for a couple of weeks so our normal walking and play schedule have been even further restricted. But he's been showing signs of improvement the past few days so this morning I decided we needed to make our regular trip to the Bald Mountain recreation area for our trail hike.

I've talked about our walks there before. We cover around 3 miles, a little over half of that on single-track dirt trails. The trails are moderate in difficulty (tree roots, embedded rocks, erosion barriers, sections that are rather steep, etc.) but they are well maintained, marked, and used by a lot of people. The dogs love their weekend trail walk--so many more smells and sounds than the usual neighborhood outing. All three of them come back nice and tired.

Here is a picture I took of them this morning as they settled in for their post-walk nap. Azza methodically gathered all of the loose toys into/around the tiny dog bed then curled up in it. She prefers the little bed, which is quite amusing--she barely fits into it. Once he was comfortable, I covered Harry with a blanket because he's old and deserves a little extra TLC.




A tired dog is a happy dog! A tired dog is a good dog who will let me study uninterrupted for the next three hours.

And here's a pic of HellBeast's new puffy bed. I may not be that fond of him but there's no reason he shouldn't have a warm napping place too.




On the bright side, I at last managed to train HB to stay near my feet at night so he can sleep on the bed with the rest of CircusK9 (Mimi and Harry are NOT at all interested in sharing their bed space with an annoying cat). As you may know, cats triple their mass when they sleep so not only did I have to train him to stay at the foot but I had to train him to stay to one side so I wouldn't have to continually shove him aside to make room for me. I think we've achieved mutually acceptable compromises all around (he sleeps near Azza so she had to be willing to put up with that). He likes to crawl under the topmost blanket so he stays warm, Azza can snug up to him if she chooses, and I can put my cold feet near him when I need to. Certainly worth a nice, puffy cat bed for his perch.