Stella Goes There and Back Again

Last week, Stella went out to New Jersey to pay a visit to the rescue vet, who relieved her of some lady parts, stitched her back up, and sent her home real high on drugs.

Anesthesia did not agree with her. Stella made many merry messes on that white towel (...and the condo foyer downstairs, so that the good people of Starbucks got to watch me mop dog pee on the other side of their giant window for 10 minutes...), then made a big ol' puddle on the living room rug when I took her out of the box for a few seconds to change it.

This, THIS is the face of smugness. Or real good pain meds. Whichever.

But she recovered, and last Saturday she went to the prospective adopters' for a trial sleepover. Alas, they returned her the next day with many regrets. The couple had nothing but nice things to say about what a good and gentle dog Stella was (and she didn't even poop in their house! much!), but they discovered that they just weren't up for handling two young, playful dogs in a small house with no yard. For which I can hardly blame them, seeing as how the chaos drives me temporarily crazy too every time a new foster mutt arrives. I genuinely do not know how people with more dogs handle it.

Anyway, that means Stella is back on the market. I'm not pushing her hard yet -- I have a hard time doing that in good conscience right now, given how iffy her potty training is -- but once she stops crapping up my house every chance she gets, it'll be time to go all-out on advertising the little monster for adoption.

In the meantime, we continue to work on Fun Games!!, aka "training." So far she has Sit, Down, Come, and Spin, as demonstrated in this clip of her doing mixed drills:

...and it's time to start working on something new.

MEANWHILE, Pongu and I have an appointment for a behavioral consultation with Leslie McDevitt, author of Control Unleashed, in a couple of weeks. I am grateful to my freestyle instructor for making the suggestion and hopeful that it will help us get Nervous McNerdypants a little farther along the road to competition. Because the Prozac doesn't seem to be doing much of anything anymore, and Xanax, while super helpful in keeping Pongu functional in class, makes him too wobbly to dance well.