Another Off the Honey-Do List

DH was a busy man this weekend. Not only did he finish my cutting table, he also washed down the windows outside and put up a zip line for Dani.

Dani's favorite thing to do outside is chase squirrels. She's actually caught one and then was surprised when it didn't "play" anymore. She tears off after them and turns completely deaf when you call her to come back. It would be OK if she stayed in our yard but she doesn't. She always, always heads right for the neighbor's yard and sometimes keeps going from there. Other than building a fence which we may do one day, the only option has been to take her outside on a regular leash. That's fine a lot of the time, but she and Chili love to play tag and wrestle all over and keeping them (and me) untangled and my arm in its socket is tricky.

I'd been spying two trees in our front yard which are about 100 feet apart from each other without a lot of anything in between. The dog trolleys I could find locally are only 30 feet long. I found a 100-foot version online last week and ordered it. It got here on Friday, just in time for DH and the weekend. That was great, but there was still a problem. I really wanted a retractable drop line for it so that Dani could have more space side-to-side without dragging a line on the ground that would tangle her and Chili. I can't believe these dog trolley things don't have retractable leads but I couldn't find anything anywhere. So I improvised.

We cut the drop line so the hook is about 4 feet off the ground. Then we just loop her regular leash through it. With her harness on so she's attached at the back and not the neck, it's perfect. The leash follows along on the zip line and stretches/retracts as necessary. The harness prevents the lines from swinging around her neck and getting trampled and tangled. We'll never leave her on it unattended, but this rectractable set-up means we don't have to walk over to her every 5 seconds and unwrap a line from her legs. She's not very coordinated so "every 5 seconds" isn't an exaggeration. ;-)

Here a shot of the two trees and the zip line between them highlighted in yellow:



Here are the wrestlers, and you can see the leash hooked onto the drop line:



And a little video that was much better quality before YouTube got ahold of it. You can see the handle of the leash swinging by as they move around. The main objective of this game is to trip each other, by nibbling legs and tails. Today Chili is playing the submissive. Other days, he's the aggressor on top. They have tons of fun together and play this game in the house too, incorporating zooming up and down the stairs as part of the play. Sometimes even Pepper joins in. Read: Herd of Wild Elephants



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Sewing related, I've cut and sewn the Connie Crawford pants. I was out of camera memory card space so I had to process the dog photos first. I'll be back later with an update on the pants.