June - Dog

I'm dedicating this month to my dog, Slone, also known as Bones.  She's a big source of happiness in my life.  If I had kids I'd spend a month on being a better parent, but thankfully I don't got no monster children so I'll spend it on my monster dog.  All in all Slone is a great dog, she sleeps curled up against my stomach in the nook, rides in her kennel in the car like a pro, she's cuddly, loves love, likes people, likes most dogs is adorable and easy to take car of. 

Slone is a fairly low maintenance dog and because of that I can be neglectful towards her sometimes.  She's 8 pounds, so about the size of a newborn baby.  She's partially house trained.  She pees on these pads in the storage room which are basically what a diaper would look like if if was a flat square.  This is necessary as we live on the 12th floor of our apartment building and we all work 8-5 and can't come home during the day.  Slone goes out once a day when I get home from work. 

During the winter Slone doesn't get walked much.  She's small and has sensitive feet so she likes winter about as much as I do.  It's a quick zip out to do her business.  Even now that the weather is better I often feel drained when I get back from work and it's a quick trip around the block.  My goal is to take her for a big walk 5 times a week.  There are some days where I won't have an hour right after work so I'm being realistic.  I'd also like to go to some sort of fenced area/dog park once every weekend this month.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube about dog training.  I particularly like ones by kikopup because she uses clicker training and explains how to do most tricks in pretty good detail.  I plan on doing a marathon session of watching these videos and picking a select few to try and teach my dog.  I like to work on one trick a week.  It might just end up being one trick only if she doesn't pick them up quickly.


Slone is not a yappy dog, but she does bark when she hears things in the hallway outside our apartment.  Our apartment is right by the elevators so people often stand right by our door while waiting for the elevator.  Groups of people chatting, or moving furniture, or coming home drunk and making a ruckus all set the dog off.  She'll run to the door and bark.  I thought she'd get used to it and stop but she hasn't.  I need to figure out a way to stop this.  A girl moved in next door and she has this mid sized dog who is perfectly behaved.  Doesn't bark, doesn't react to other dogs, very calm and obedient.  She refers to my dog as the 'noisy one'.  I feel like the parent with the bad child who 'misbehaves' and no one likes.  So... yeah got to fix that, no one talks shit about my kid.