A Short List of Shenanigans My Parent’s Dog Has Engaged In:

gallusrostromegalus:

the-muse-of-many-more:

snarkasaurus:

gallusrostromegalus:

symphonyofmars:

gallusrostromegalus:

gallusrostromegalus:

This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:

• “I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her.  She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground.
  “Oh.”  Says dad. “Shit.”
  
  Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.
  
  
• I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts.  
  I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water.   I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there.  Fiance notices my absence and does the same.  
  Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!”
  We got her a circulating water bowl after that.
  
  
• My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges.  Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us.
  …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly.
   “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen.
   “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back.  Don’t eat anything.”
  She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.
  
  
• Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content.  She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen.
  
  Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it.   She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look!  I found Snacks!”
  
  I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock.  The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away.  I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail- 
  
  -And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse.
  
  I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day.  Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.
  
  
• One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time.  I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her.  It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that 
  1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and 
  2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight
  3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here.
  
  Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.
  
  
• My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery.  Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw.  So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it. 
  
  My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this.
  
  One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board.  Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed.
  
  She still doesn’t let him sit in it.

I love her so much.

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(If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Tip Jar or Paypal to get Arwen (and Charlie!) nice treats)

Evening reblog with an additional Shenanigan I just remembered:

One of the regulars at the dog park was an unfixed basset hound with an obnoxiously indifferent owner.  “Brad” shows up pretty much to smoke weed and let “Bojangles” harass the other dogs, in spite of regular complaints about Bo starting fights and trying to mount every dog, leg, and toddler in sight. 

One evening, Bo was particularly interested in Arwen, aggressively following her, nipping her heels and trying to mount her, even after her usual wolverine-like Snap’n’Snarl, which has tended to discourage unwanted suitors before.  Brad was Too Damn High to notice, as usual, but mom knew that if Arwen actually bit Bo, Arwen would be the one in trouble and was trying to call her when Bo made yet another attempt and Arwen finally had it.

Instead of rightfully tearing his face off, Arwen instead did what Mom described as “A Judo-style front-flip” that pulled Bo clean off the ground and threw him on his back, Arwen landing on her feet like a cat.  Bo’s stubby little legs didn’t allow him to right himself before Arwen  jumped on him, front paws slamming into his saggy basset balls, squatted over his face, and peed on him.

“ARWEN NO!!” howled my mother as nearly everyone else present laughed, but having made her point, Arwen daintily got off Bo, and trotted to the gate, ready to go home. Bo yelped but got up and skulked away, only moderately bruised, cowering under the bench by Brad, who finally noticed something might be amiss.

Mom remembers hearing “Dude, why is my dog all wet?” right as they were leaving.  Apparently nobody told him what happened, becuase Brad still brings Bo to the park, but Bo has much better manners now.

I read this whole thing to my mom and upon reading the end part she was like “OH MY GOD! Our dog Lady once flipped another dog and I didn’t know it was a thing dogs could do!!” 

So there’s that.

Update: Arwen was at the vet’s office for a check-up and daycare, and decided partway through the afternoon that the other two kelpies were annoying her, but she didn’t want to go inside to be kenneled for a nap, so she instead…

…ninja’d her way onto the vet’s roof despite there being three people in the yard watching the dogs and no clear way up there. She had a pleasant hour of watching the vet staff try to figure out how she did that and how they were going to get her down before mom came to pick her up.

“Arwen, get your furry butt down here!”

At which point Arwen obidently got down by jumping into a nearby tree that’s technically inside a neighboring house’s yard, shimmied down that like a bear, then walked out of their side yard and back around the block to come sit at Mom’s feet, putting her paws up like she expected a treat.

That tree is not accessible from the daycare yard. We still have no idea how she got up there.

Shine on you beautiful bitch.

This just gets better and better every time i see it

I…

I have fostered doggos for a good majority of my life and my brain simply cannot process half of the bullshit in this post…

What the actual fuck?

Arwen was trained as an Autism Service Dog by inmates as part of a prison rehab/service dog charity program.  So like, 90% of her Bullshittery comes down to:

1. She’s a mix of two extremely smart breeds
2. She’s a mix of two extremely energetic breeds
3. The inmates trained her to do lots of “Extracirriculars” like veritcal leaps, how to climb chain-link fence, agility courses, physical-comedy type tricks becuase they finished teaching her the regular Service Dog Cirriculum and wanted to keep working with her.  
4. Due to said Extrcirriculars, she doesn’t have any fear of heights, strangers, animals, or the nonsense of other dogs.

She does do the Professional Service Animal thing when we put her vest on, but then she’s working and has things to do like teaching social skills to people or being a living stress ball to someone having a bad time, so all that brains, energy and training can be put towards a productive end, but if she hasn’t got an active job, Shenanigans Ensue.

Arwen Shenanigans: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

gallusrostromegalus:

gallusrostromegalus:

So I was just home for a bit to visit my parents/help them move a bunch of stuff into storage while they finally Install AC into thier house, which means I got to see Arwen, and Arwen got to see my dog, Charleston Chew.

Arwen is a Husky/Kelpie mix that was trained in prison as an Autism Service Dog and when she’s not wroking she gets up to All Kinds Of Bullshit. She’s eight years old now and still a little asshole, but beginning to slow down, and as such has decided to take Charlie on as an Apprentice Asshole.

[Image Description: Two dogs on leashes standing on a boardwalk with thier butts toward the photographer, who is holding the leashes with one hand and taking the picture with the other, like a moron.  Arwen, the dog on the left, Is fat and very fluffy, and looking for rabbits to eat.  Charlie, the dog on the right is skinny with noth much hair, and also looking for a bunny dinner.  They are both a simmilar black-and-tan pattern that makes people ask if they’re rottweilers or dobermans, despite being neither.

This picture is taken about 2.68 seconds before the dogs locate a bunny and pull the photographer of thier feet as they launch themselves after it like short, hairy rockets.  The Photographer suffers minor injuries, and the rabbit is unharmed.]

Some of the nonsense Arwen taught Charlie this time around:

• Arwen recognizes herself in mirrors, and likes to check her own ass out in the full-length mirror in my parent’s bathroom.  Charlie has, after a year and a half of glaring suspiciously at the glass door of my oven, figured out that there is not another dog in there, but hadn’t quite grokked that it’s HIS reflection.  
  I came upstairs a few times to find them sitting in front of the mirror, where Arwen would carefully paw at the glass a few times until Charlie did the same, then, when he was watching the reflections, bop him on the nose.  The last day we were there, Charlie was sitting in front of the mirror, bopping it, then, with the most intense look of concentration I’ve ever seen, carefully pawed his own face.
  
  
• Back in March, my parents took Arwen down to the lake and to the end of the boat dock to watch the sunset because it was warm enough to do that, but Dogs can’t see enough colors to really appreciate sunsets, so Arwen was  looking into the water instead and there happened to be some carp hanging out around the dock and to quote my mother:
  “I knew the exact second she spotted them because it’s the same face she makes when she realizes you have a treat for her.  Thank goodness i let go of the leash in time.”
  Arwen is sometimes affectionately called “Short Bear” for her wierd style of climbing trees, but given the way she forcibly launched herself into the water and stayed under for a good minute before tirumphantly re-surfacing with a carp in her mouth and a gleeful expression of “HOLY SHIT THE LAKE IS FULL OF SNACKS!!” we’re probably going to have to add ‘seal’ to the list of probable creature’s she’s related to.
  
  
• What this translated to in the most recent visit is that she’s now team-fishing with Charlie.  Charlie is from Arizona and is extremely distrustful of any body of water deeper thhan his ankles but he’s a good sprinter and was taught how to hunt by cats so he pounces on things.
  So we go down to the off-leash section of the lake with is a sort of small inlet with a short-but-steep cliff around the beach and a set of gated stairs. Arwen jumps from the stairs to the top of the cliff, then walks out until she’s at the mouth of the inlet, while charlie stands at the shore, complaining about this bullshit plan.  
  When she gets to the mouth of the inlet, she belly-flops in, taking a sandy section of cliff in with her, then dives and swims as fast as she can towards the shore.  This flushed all the fish that had been sunning themselves in the inlet towards the shallow water at the shore, whereupon Charlie takes an spectacular leap and pounces on another carp, trying to grapple it with his paws until Arwen got there to actually bite the thing.
  This also resulted in me, a dumbass human shrieking “NO DAMMIT, DON’T EAT FUCKING CARP IT’S GARBAGE FISH” and running out into the lake to seperate them from the fish, which meant pulling it out of Arwen’s mouth and throwing it back into the lake-
  -Almost hitting my poor neighbor Dottie as her grandchildren paddle her by in the canoe.  This woman hates me, and rightly so.
  
  
• When we got her, the adoption agency warned us that Arwen was “Chatty” which is a polite way of saying “This dog likes to yell a lot, especially if the humans are also being loud”.  It took a while, but Mom eventually trained Arwen to stop yelling by bending over so Arwen makes eye contact, holding a finger up to her mouth and going “SHHhhhh…” which is her signal to take it downa  few notches.  Sometimes dogs need you to be quiet to realize they should be quiet.
  So Arwen’s at Youth Correctioanl Serivces, doing therapy work with one of the Kids there, and he’s having a bad day and yelling angrily about absolutely everything.  Being upset is ok, and expressing emotions is OK but rasing your voice and swearing isn’t an effective means of communication so the therapist is trying to get him to slow down.  The Kid doesn’t want to listen to him, and keeps yelling, so Arwen jumps up to stand in his lap and put her face in his and exhales very loudly, which makes a sort of “ HHHHHHhhhh..!” sound.
  Kid stops, confused, and Arwen gives him a kiss for it.  They repeat this a few more times in the session, where Kid starts raising his voice and Arwen goes “HHHHHHhhhh!” at him until he slows down and lowers his voice again.
  “What is she doin’?” he eventually asks, becuase this is new behavior.
  “OH.” Mom goes, suddenly realizing.  She explain’s Arwen’s SHH! command “-since her mouth won’t make a shush sound, she’s trying her best.”
  “You Shushin’ me dog? You shushin’ Me!?”  He asks her.
  Arwen: WAAAAAARRR-!
  Kid: SHH!
  Arwen: HHHH!
  Kid: “… Alright.”
  
  
• When I leash up the dogs for a walk, they have to be sitting and quiet or I won’t leash them to go outside.  Arwen has got this down, but Charlie’s still working on it, and managed to Sit, but was yelling in excitement.
  Charlie: AAAA!  AAAYAAAA!  AAAA!!
  Arwen, kicking him in the face so he’ll look at her: HHHHHH!
  Charlie: “..?”
  She proceded to do this Every. Single. Time. charlie made noise in her vicinity because even though he’s her favorite dog, she’s also still a shithead that likes to boss him around and play games like “I’m gonna sit right next to the toy basket but not actually look at it and mock-charge charlie every time he tries to get a toy, ebcuase making him sneak up on me is HILARIOUS.” so he eventually gets the idea that “HHH!”  means “SHUT UP!”
  …We get home to Durango and My Fiance is playing games online with headphones and getting excited and yelling, so Charlie jumps on the couch, paws him in the face and goes “HHHH!  HHHH!” and I fall out of my chair laughing.
  
  
• We’re walking on one of the trails and there’s a super-family of geese, where six adults have shoved thier broods into one large horde of fluff that’s easier to herd and protect as a group.  Charlie is already backing up at the preliminary warning honks, becuase he knows from cats and that things that puff up and hiss at you also tend to be Sharp And Mean, but Arwen looks at this as decides that this is really Six Entrees and roughly 20 desserts, and I have half a second to lock her leash before she completely launches herself mouth-first at Goose Dinner. 
  
  The geese, Unfortunately, falter in thier defense and minutely shuffle away from her.
  
  I have the dogs on harnesses for long hikes, and manage to haul her back, as the dogs share the following telepathic conversation:
  Charlie: They…Scatter? Not sharp? Maybe.. Eatable?
  Arwen: TOTALLY EATABLE.
  Charlie: HOLY SHIT! EATABLE!
  Arwen: HELL YEAH!!!
  Geese: Aw piss, they smell fear, we gotta fuck them up now.
  
  So I ended up slogging up the trail, holding a 55-lb dog in each ahnd  by the harness, trying to keep them from gobbling up goslings while no less than six geese tried to beat the shit out of me because I am Tallest, even though I’m the only one not trying to eat thier children.  It looked very dramatic from my perspective- time slows down during adrenaline rushes and it’s all rain and mud and feathers and dog teeth and the horrible grooved tonges geese have and eventually one of them bites the shit outta my eyebrow and we go full art-film as the blood gets in my eyes and I’m left literally seeing red. Alfred Hitchcock is doing dramatic lighting from beyond the grave. O Fortuna is playing.
  
  A quarter mile later we’re finally far enough away that the geese feel like they can retreat, and there are no casualties except me.  I get home and my dad thinks I’ve been jumped until he sees the goose shit in my hair. 
  
  The dogs are extremely gleeful about the whole thing and Charlie keeps checking the river out here for geese.
  
  
• She also tried to teach him to flush the toilet for fresh running water but I caught them before that lesson could be imparted.  

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Next-day reblog for anyone who missed it!

A Short List of Shenanigans My Parent’s Dog Has Engaged In:

gallusrostromegalus:

This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:

• “I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her.  She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground.
  “Oh.”  Says dad. “Shit.”
  
  Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.
  
  
• I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts.  
  I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water.   I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there.  Fiance notices my absence and does the same.  
  Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!”
  We got her a circulating water bowl after that.
  
  
• My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges.  Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us.
  …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly.
   “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen.
   “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back.  Don’t eat anything.”
  She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.
  
  
• Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content.  She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen.
  
  Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it.   She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look!  I found Snacks!”
  
  I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock.  The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away.  I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail- 
  
  -And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse.
  
  I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day.  Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.
  
  
• One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time.  I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her.  It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that 
  1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and 
  2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight
  3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here.
  
  Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.
  
  
• My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery.  Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw.  So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it. 
  
  My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this.
  
  One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board.  Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed.
  
  She still doesn’t let him sit in it.

I love her so much.

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(If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Tip Jar or Paypal to get Arwen (and Charlie!) nice treats)

Reblog if you will always support Avi Kaplan, no matter where he goes.

professor-zee-chamberlain:

Even though he’s leaving Pentatonix, this shouldn’t even be a question.

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Reblog if you will always support Avi Kaplan, no matter where he goes.

professor-zee-chamberlain:

Even though he’s leaving Pentatonix, this shouldn’t even be a question.