A Room With a View

This weekend my mom left Sammy and I alone (with Dad) for a bit while she went to get her hair cut.  The curtains were open so Sammy and I took advantage to watch her drive off from the best vantage point in the house – the top of the couch.  Sammy isn’t as eager to get all the way up on the top like I am…unless of course the mailman or UPS guy are at the door!

Then today she went over to the neighbors house and I watched her the whole time.  This time I used the window on the east side of our living room for the best vantage point.  Luckily Sammy’s bed was under the window so I could stand on it and not have to stretch too much to get the best angle on the action.

When I set my mind to a task I can get really focused.

But this fact doesn’t prevent me from getting excited (with a good ol’ tail wagging) when I see my mom outside…

…and leave to meet her at the front door (but Dad wasn’t quick enough to capture that part this time).

Mo-Tor

No love

So, despite my thorough and thoughtful analysis of my Whistle data that I presented in my last post my parents went to work every day this week.

Needless to say I was not happy about their decision not to stay home with me and Sambuca.

Sammy may put on a better game face than I do but if you were to ask him directly – like I did – he was none too happy as well.  You’d think they would at least give us some steak or fish (boy do I love seafood).

OK, they did share some of their left over steak and fish tacos with us but that was after they got home from work.  I thought for sure that once they saw the data in graphical form they would have worked from home or left us some goodies (steak) to work on while they left us alone.   To be fair though, it only takes us a second or two to work over a whole plate full of food.

Thankfully, the work week finally ended and the crappy weather that was Saturday finally gave way to a sunny but chilly Sunday.  Needless to say that I found a great spot in the sun to take a nap….after I did my time on squirrel watch (I am in the way back – between the two hanging baskets in the picture below- checking the trees and telephone lines for intruders).

By the way, Sammy was able to find some shade to get in a good snooze too!

Have a great week,

Mo-Tor

Everyday is like Sunday…

The data are in! And looking at the results this blog could just as well been called:

1) I wish Everyday was like Saturday

2) Why my parents should take me with them on vacation

3) Why my parents should retire…or at least work from home.

Below are some graphs from the numbers my Whistle has collected over the past 130 days or so.  I am going to focus most of this discussion on my Activity levels.

Figure 1: My daily activity over time.

Figure 2:  My activity based on different types of days.  Weekdays – days our parents are at work (54.4 + 1.3 activity units); Weekends – days when our parents are at home (69.1 + 2.3); Vacations – days when Sammy and I got to go with our parents on a trip (97.5 + 6.8); Left Behind – when our parents went on a trip and left us at home (24.0 + 3.5).   By the way, those are statistically significant differences.

Figure 3: Percentage of days I hit my goal of 30 or greater based on the type of day.  On weekdays, weekends and vacations I have hit my goal 100% of the time!  When we were left behind I only hit my goal 40% of the days.

Figure 4: My activity during the period my parents were on vacations that we were left behind and the days surrounding their absences.  Blue dots are either weekdays or weekends.  The orange dots are the days my parents left or returned where they spent at least part of the day with us.  The red dots are when we have not seen them all day.

Figure 5:  My sleep numbers over the same time frame.  In general my sleep is pretty consistent but it did spike and hit new highs during those vacations my parents took without us – no coincidence, these are the same days my activity bottomed out.

Conclusions:

Well really there is only one conclusion I could make from this data set and that is for an active girl like me it is best that my parents take me wherever they go.  I’ll even go to work with them if they are not ready to retire.  And I’ll behave.  Honest!  I took the liberty of “Photoshoping” myself into a picture of Dad at work to illustrate how good I could be:

But if I was given the choice, my parental folk would either stay home everyday or take me up into the mountains where I can run and run and run…and then relax or nap like Sammy (plus I don’t think Tornado-ing would be allowed at work 😦 ).

Mo-Tor

Have I mentioned I am a numbers girl?

Don’t Stand so close to me…

Again I must apologize for my lack of communication lately – this time it wasn’t related to college basketball.  I’ll tell you more about why I haven’t been very productive recently but that is going to have to wait until this weekend after I have had a chance to completely analyze the data.

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you a short story about something that happened to me recently.

In our room we had a bowl of water on plant stand.  Having it up a foot or so off the ground helps the old guy drink and I like it because I can really slop the liquid around when I take a lap.  Now I’ve also knocked the water bowl off the stand time or two when running in and out of our dog door (I’ll tell you more about this “invention” in another blog).  Usually when I run into the stand there is a loud clanging and splashing of water.  However, this particular time I got entangled in the stand and my dad had to rescue me from its grasp.  Needless to say, I was quite upset with the offending piece of metal.  Dad moved it out of our room and put it on the counter.  I had to investigate it to see if I could figure out how/why it had attacked me.

After this event the stand has been relegated to a different part of our house where we do not run and therefore it can no longer get all cheeky and try and attack me.  I am not one to hold a grudge for long so I will still drink out of the bowl that is sitting on it…so far it continues to behave itself.

Now the water bowl holder that was made for the back seat of the Civic for when we go for a long drive is in our room and  supports our bowl.  So far I haven’t run into it during my sprint through the house to get outside to chase squirrels or any other suspicious noises in our yard.   But trust me when I say that I am keeping an eye on this one!

More soon,

Mo-Tor

Spring Training

Finally, after a long winter, I was able to let out some of my artistic energy.  Granted this isn’t my best work but I figure I deserve a little bit of a break because:

1) It has been many weeks since I was last able to utilize my water bowls in my work (they don’t behave the same when it is below 32oF for some reason).

2) My full canvas was not available to me since Sammy was lying on part of where I was trying to work.

With that said, I did allow my dad to capture some of my moves on his iPhone, so I could study it over the next few weeks to see what part of my game needed work.  I figure this is fair since Major League Baseball players take a month or so getting ready for the regular season.  I would be more in form now if my parents would have taken me to Florida or Arizona in March instead of keeping us holed up in the Chicago cold.

The attached video is what I have been studying this week.  Hopefully during the summer months I can share some more of my work and maybe some performance art videos of me in action.

-MoTor

Postprandial Routine

As I may have already mentioned both myself and Boo (that is how I like to refer to my bro Sambuca) really like to dine.  Or snack.  Or clean the plates after our parents have eaten.  Or…well you get the idea.   We LOVE to eat…(except I am not a fan of green beans and my dad says that is quite okay by him – but maybe that could be a topic for another day).  We don’t mind where the bowls are set or what time of day it is, but some food in front of us and we eat with gusto.  In fact, if we don’t show interest in our food we’ll be visiting our doctors at the vet clinic ASAP.  I should also mention that when I say we eat at any time I didn’t mean we would wait patiently to be fed.  After all, we have routines and expectations that we expect to be met.  If food isn’t in our bowls once in the morning and once in the evening then we WILL let those people know.

Yesterday was nice out and really felt like spring was here.  Therefore we got to eat outside by the fire pit.  We still have to do that ridiculous waiting thing before we start which causes me to get that “stop torturing us” look on my face but when we hear “GO Puppies!” we are all into it.

Anyhow, something I don’t think I have mentioned is what I do after a good full meal…and this was the whole point of this blog – sorry I got a bit off topic earlier.  Rather than try and describe what I like to do after each meal I thought I would just share this short video.

Boy does that feel good!

Until we eat again –

Mo-Tor

News Flash!

This morning, Sammy and I had a blast on our walk.  After watching some of the footage that my dad took while we were out, I thought it might be fun to use one of the other templates on iMovies.  So this in this edition of my blog (or vlog) is the first ever…

Montana Moments News Report!

ASIDE: to be clear, this report contains about as much veracity as most FOX news segments…:)

(My apologies for that last – seemingly unprovoked jab at FOXnews but the Daily Show – our source for current events (unless we steal the Wall Street Journal off the counter) – has had some funny bits recently on FOX patting themselves on the back for actually getting something right.)

Anyhow, here is our breaking report:

Take care,

Mo-Tor

NOTE: For other Elder Law issues – Better Call Saul