:: The One-Month Gap

I have not posted anything for roughly a month for a very good reason. Her name is Coco, the Foster Dog.

Coco entered my life about 45 days ago, fresh from the Baltimore dog pound. She is a lovely beast and a classic bull terrier. She is perfect in every way save one: incredibly bad manners.

Coco is not yet spayed, is a bit of a biter, and likes to play rough. Not being spayed precludes her from doggy daycare, and being a menace precludes her from dog parks and sidewalk interactions. As a result, she bays to go out and get at her peers as though she has the rabies. Keeping her settled down, especially when Dr. Boyfriend, Scientist-at-Large is not home, is near impossible. And the biting... the biting. She loves to play bite. A play-biting bull terrier is a major hazard. Also she has eaten $300 worth of Camper shoes. (Dr. Boyfriend’s butt-ugly sandals she leaves alone. Too ugly to eat, I presume).

Being home with her is like taking care of a fanged, hairy three year old with a talent for the high jump. She needs constant supervision. But she is a good dog and I have high (almost desperate) hopes that she’ll find, in the parlance of Rescue organizations, her “forever home” soon.

Today, though, Coco and I have worked out an arrangement that is allowing me to write. The arrangement is enforced by means of a rolled-up copy of the latest New Yorker. Don’t judge, ladies, until you yourself have experienced a bull terrier springing over the back of your chair on to the top of your head in order to bite your hair. I mean it.

While I don’t know why her original owners surrendered her to the pound, I believe this sort of behavior might have had something to do with it.