For those so inclined, the first bout of destruction can be found here.

The dog is nearly nine months old now and she is looking very much like a dog, which is good I suppose since she is a dog. What I mean to say is that she doesn’t really look like a puppy anymore. Now she looks like this:

I suppose I could find a better picture of her.

That’s not really much better, is it? Let’s see if I can find one where she isn’t lying down on the job.

Hm. It seems I don’t have any recent pictures of her standing or walking or something. It’s probably because she’s a pain in the ass who refuses to sit still for pictures.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, which is more things my dog has destroyed:

The thing that covers something child-related in my car.

I noticed this morning that there was something sticking up in the back shelf of my automobile. When I got out, I looked through the rear window, and unbeknownst to me, there’s some child paraphernalia back there. I never noticed it before, mainly because I don’t have a child, but partly because I’ve never spent any time investigating the rear shelf of my car. I don’t think I’ve ever sat in the backseat before. It’s nice that there’s child stuff back there I guess, in case I should ever need to strap anything to the backseat, but since the car manufacturer realizes that not everyone has the need or desire to strap things, the child apparatus is nicely covered by a piece of plastic. Well, not anymore.

I don’t know when she could have destroyed it since the destruction would have played out front and center in my rear view mirror. I would have noticed. She must have destroyed it one of the very few times that I’ve left her in the car while I ran in somewhere. She rarely gets left unattended in the car since I hate doing that and I don’t trust her not to destroy my car (obviously, with good reason).

Pretty much all of my jewelry.

In part one, I described how she had destroyed all of my piercing jewelry. Well, the dog seems to have a deep hatred for all jewelry since I went from wearing four bracelets (one of them was a watch) to one. I’m not the type to change my jewelry. If I wear something, it stays worn… until it meets dog. She ripped off and irreparably broke two bracelets. They need fixing by a professional as they are beyond my meager MacGyvering skills.

One morning, I woke up without a watch when I had very much gone to sleep wearing one. I was afraid that she had straight-up swallowed it since I couldn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t until weeks later, when she got stuck under the bed and I had to rearrange my whole bedroom to rescue her, that I found my watch under the bed. It was mainly intact and still functional, although there are teeth marks on the glass now.

In case you missed that, the dog got stuck under the bed. I couldn’t get her out by conventional means so I had to move all of the furniture in my room to retrieve her. Now I have under-the-bed storage boxes, which are mostly empty, jammed under there just so that she can’t get under the bed for she would surely try. And she would surely get stuck again.

The floor under the bed.

The house I live in has hardwood floors, except for my bedroom. For some reason, my room has cheap wood-flavored linoleum. It’s fine with me since it is easier to clean and I don’t really care what substrate I have on my bedroom floor since I have rugs anyway. Well, the dog cares. She has shown her distaste for the linoleum by chewing holes in it under the bed. At some point, most likely when she was still small enough not to get stuck under there, she scurried under the bed, and while there, decided to chew holes in the floor. The floor.

The pomegranate tree.

As I described in part one, I had to erect a series of fences to keep the dog out of certain crops in the yard. My roommate planted a bunch of dwarf fruit trees in the yard inside the inner sanctum of the fences. One morning, I let the dog out to do her business per usual, and when I came to collect her, she didn’t come. That’s odd, I thought. She always comes in the morning with her tail wiggling and her butt wagging. I ventured out into the yard and found her inside the fenced area unable to get out. Great. Now, the fences serve to keep her in, not to keep her out, which kind of defeats the entire purpose. Every time she gets in there, I have to lift her out like a goddamn MedEvac since she won’t come out on her own. Apparently, it’s a one-way fence.

It took me a while to figure out how she was getting in there. I had to catch her in the act. At first, I thought maybe she was jumping over it, but no. She shimmies under the fence like a goddamn prison escapee. Why it is that she feels that she can crawl in that way, but not out remains a mystery. While she was in there, she discovered that there’s a whole new world of digging to be done. She dug under the pomegranate tree right down to the roots. I’m not sure that it will make it. It’s touch and go.

Her collar.

Not that it was a great collar or anything, but it was the one she’s had since the first day I got her. I always figured that when she was done growing, since I didn’t know how big she’d get, I’d get her a nice collar. I had to push that plan forward a little bit. She was tied up on a long leash at a friend’s house chasing my friend’s dog around until she wedged the leash under the tires of a car. The collar/leash combination stayed put and she went scampering around the neighborhood. Fortunately, she didn’t go far and I was able to collect her rather quickly, but that could have been bad. I had to run up to the pet store and buy her another collar on the quick. It wasn’t the fancy one I would have chosen had I had time to shop, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Halloween.

I wasn’t sure how she would react to all the little children coming to the door on Halloween. She’s very territorial. She will bark her fool head off at people outside the fence in the backyard. She sounds pretty mean, too. Normally, she’s pretty good at the front door though. Either she doesn’t realize she’s supposed to protect the front door or it could just be that most of the people coming through the front door are people she knows and loves.

The first batch of kids that came to the door were greeted with a wagging tail and playful excitement. The second kids were greeted with ferocious snarling and growling. I have no idea what changed between the first set and the second set, but she decided that enough was enough I guess. She had to be removed to the backyard where she would pop off with a territorial bark every now and again. So, while I was in the living room handing out candy, she had to sit in the backyard, spiteful and alone.

Three pairs of slippers, six total.

As I said, we have hardwood floors in the house. I love the ease of cleaning hardwood floors, but I hate everything else about them. They’re cold. You can feel the slightest little bit of dirt under your feet and your feet get dirty even on a freshly mopped floor. I also hate shoes, so that doesn’t leave me many options. I compromise and wear slippers. If I’m at home, I am in slippers. I had two pairs of slippers; one for summery weather like these flip-floppy things:

And another pair with slightly more covering for cooler weather:

The flip flop ones were the first to go. First one, then the other. I started wearing the leopard print ones since it was fall and I wouldn’t need the flip floppy ones again til next summer. Then she destroyed the leopard print slippers. First one, then the other. I limped around in them until they were thoroughly shot with holes in the bottom and no foam. It was warmer to just wear socks. I replaced them:

Pair number two of leopard print slippers. Brand new with comfy foam that hadn’t even gone flat yet. Mmmmm. Two days later… destroyed. Now I have no slippers at all. Instead, I wear a pair of ugly ass Ugg boots around the house since they seem to be more durable. They’re too ugly to wear outside anyway. I bought these boots for the sole purpose of visiting Michigan in the dead of winter where function takes precedence over form. They served their function and went in the back of the closet where they were only dug out again to serve as my slippers.

A remote control.

Typically, remote controls, being sensitive electronic items, aren’t amenable to chewing or liquid, such as comes from a dog mouth. Strangely, mine is. Even though the dog chewed on it to the point where the two halves barely fit together, it still works somehow. Go remote control! Until we meet next time, says the dog.

An “indestructible” dog toy.

In one day. Since the dog destroys every toy she gets, I’m always on the lookout for toys that will last longer than a day. This toy was described as “tough.” This is the information on the package:

This toy is made with 4 layers: 1 core layer of plastic covered by 2 layers of industrial grade luggage material covered with another layer of soft fleece on the outside. All of these layers are sewn together to make one super strong layer of material. Each toy is sewn together with 2 layers of cross stitching and then 2 layers of linear stitching. After the toy is sewn together an additional piece of black trim is added to cover the four rows of stitching. This extra piece of black trim is sewn with 3 linear stitches to give the product a total of 7 seams.

Yeah. Fat lot of good all that layering and stitching did. One day. It took her one day to chew its face off and pull out the stuffing. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the manufacturer’s fault that this toy only lasted a day, since that’s how long they typically last. I just wish they hadn’t made it sound so durable. Plus, it was $15. For $15, I could have bought six other toys that she would have destroyed in one day too, but at least there would have been six of them.  I should have known.

More destruction here.