I am not the only klutz in this house; Chester and Oliver have had their moments. These are some of my favorites:
There is a narrow space between my bed and the wall where I have a lamp, tape/CD player for audiobooks, puzzle magazines and...KLEENEX! For some weird reason, a side effect of Chester's allergy med. is a much-increased appetite, including a desire for fiber. Real fiber. He eats my socks, my underwear, sheets, whatever he can get his jaws on. But he LOVES Kleenex (thankfully, he hasn't yet discovered toilet paper). One day he ventured around the bed in an attempt to steal some Kleenex, and got himself stuck. He didn't have enough room to turn around, and couldn't or wouldn't back out, so he stood on his hind legs and barked for help. Mama laughed and came to the rescue. When it happened a second time, Mama was in the shower and had to go to work, and it wasn't so funny then. I heard Chester's "help" bark, hollered are you okay or something above the noise of the water, and he barked again. I knew he was stuck behind the bed again. I decided that if he could bark, he wasn't in any real danger, so I told him to hang on, and I finished my shower, the remainder of which was filled with increasingly desperate barks from Chester and Oliver, who came into the bathroom and barked in alarm that there was an emergency and I needed to hurry up. When I was done, Oliver led me to the bedroom and hopped on the bed and barked once: "Here he is! Here he is! Help!" I went to lift Chester onto the bed, but in the process he slipped on a puzzle magazine and fell on his back, his hind legs under the bed. He struggled like a turtle to right himself, and I struggled with him like a...an upside down turtle - I mean a rightside up one, and eventually he was extracted. I've learned to move the Kleenex.
I got a new (for me), free, queen-size bed recently, thanks to the generosity of strangers. It is higher than my former bed, and Oliver loves to scoot around under it and see what he can find, growl, and do who knows what else. (Chester uses it as an alternate route to the Kleenex.) The bed has a bed skirt, and the first time Oliver went scouting underneath it he couldn't find his way out again. He kept running back and forth and coming out on wrong sides and hitting a wall. Eventually I took pity on him and lifted the skirt and called to him, but not before I'd enjoyed the show.
I've already written about Chester tripping over the frisbee. He trips and bumps into things pretty often, when he's eager to get somewhere or thinks he's getting a treat.
When I first got Oliver, I hugged a lot of trees. Not because I thought they were somehow responsible for my getting this fun-loving dog, and not because I could sense a strong love for the environment in him, 'though he does love to smell and explore it. No, it was because the dang dog kept going the opposite way around the trees from Chester, and both resisted being pulled backward and around the other way, so I got fresh with the trees and transferred the leashes to one hand. Oliver is much better now - he's figured out the leash thing - although there was a day last week that he wasn't paying attention and went around a tree too large for me to reach around. I tried, and the people in the cars going by on the street can attest to this, but my arms didn't make it. I had to drop Chester's leash, dart around the tree, and pick it up again before he pulled it away from me as he merrily walked on down the sidewalk.
I think of Chester as more of the klutz of the two (although I must admit that I put that toy on his head in the sidebar picture), but Oliver features again in this anecdote. I may have been more of the klutz, though. We were coming home in the car and when we were on my street I let O. get in my lap and look out the open window (he's always trying). As we neared our house, he saw a cat or squirrel or anything small and furry, and leapt out of the window to chase it. Now, Mama can be a ditz, but she knows her dogs, and I had a hand on his collar. So when he jumped, I braked and clutched the collar and grabbed whatever body part I could with my other hand (fortunately, it was one of his hind legs). For a few seconds we struggled there, he wiggling to get free and me wiggling to pull him back in. To his immense frustration, I won that round.
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