Inside-dogs

It was pretty cold in Penrith on Sunday night. So cold that when I went to my car at 10 to 8, the windscreen wipers skittered over ice rather than bunching all the frost up at the end of the arc like it normally does on a cold wintry morning. Comes of being a long way inland, apparently. Further from that big blue thermally dense ocean which takes longer to heat up and cool down with the seasons, so that coastal suburbs are warmer in winter and cooler in summer. I suppose that being at the foot of the Blue Mountains, but uphill from the river might have something to do with it too? Pressure zones and precipitation and what have you.

Anyway, I was whingy, because I'm in NICU (neonatal intensive care) this week, and there's nowhere for students to leave coats or scarves, and you aren't allowed to wear anything with sleeves that come past the elbow. When it comes to protecting tiny little sick babies from infection risks, these people do not mess about, so no cuffs are allowed to dip germs onto the tiny under-ripe patients. This wasn't so bad for me, since my bare forearms and I were only out in the cold for maybe 10 minutes in total. Our poor old dogs, however, were not so lucky.

Usually they seem pretty happy in their kennels, which have floors so they're not lying on hard wet ground, and they've finally gotten past the stage of dragging the bedding out of the kennels to play with and destroy during the day, but leaving them less warm and comfy at night. Still, when you're an arthritic old collie with un underactive thyroid (this makes you feel the cold more, for those of you who are as familiar with what the hell thyroids do as I was before I had to start doing things like sit exams on them), it turns out, a kennel on an icy night is about as warm as it looks, fur notwithstanding.

When Mum went to let them off the chain (they're chained (by a pretty long chain each, don't worry) to a tree in our yard, able to get to kennels and food and water and a reasonable radius of playing space, because if there's one thing our dogs agree on, it's that 5 acres of yard to run around in is nothing compared to the thrills of escaping over the cattle grid in the driveway and having adventures like "going to the Kingswood Pub and being patted by delighted dudes drinking Tooheys New" and "playing tag with the neighbour's teens while they try to ride their dirtbikes and not accidentally fall off trying to avoid a cheerful, supportively barking, dog" and "trying to get run over on the nearby Motorway") on Monday morning, one of them actually yelped when he tried to stand up, because the poor thing had practically frozen in position, what with cold and arthritis and what have you. So at the moment, these last couple of nights, we're experimenting with letting them sleep inside.

It's sort of funny actually. Remember when you were a kid, and you went on long drives in the evening, like coming home after a big day at the zoo, or driving back from a holiday? Remember when you used to pretend to be asleep when you got home, pretend that you hadn't woken up in the backseat when the car had pulled in the driveway, so your parents would carry you in to bed? (Don't give me that "no" look, every kid does this, I'm pretty sure. I definitely remember pulling this off up to the point when my mother put me down on the sofa and I figured that if I was really asleep I'd slide off (what? Why, tiny past self? You've slept on that sofa before! I know you're floppy when you're asleep, but you're not Alex Mack, you don't turn into a liquid. Floppy isn't the same as runny) and slithered off the sofa onto the floor, still with my eyes closed, trying to act as asleep as possible, not realising my mother was still watching me until she said "You know, people who are asleep don't actually do that, so how about you go put your pyjamas on and go to bed" and I was all "Curses, foiled! I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you infuriatingly canny parents!") The dogs are sort of doing that in the evenings, because they don't really believe their good luck. Lying around looking conspicuously Asleep and watching you through one very slightly open eye, just to see if you're buying it, and will let them stay in, unaware that you're already planning to.

I have to say, they've gotten the hang of it awfully well, not running about all night or soiling the hall or eating the furniture. I guess it's silly that this has surprised us, since they often spend chunks of the day, and certainly most evenings, lying around the house, napping in weird positions, and they've been up to that challenge for years. (Like, really quite weird positions, though. There's one of them who always seems to sleep with his head either up on something, or down, but almost never on the same level as his body. You'll find him apparently perfectly comfortably asleep with his head hanging off a step, or propped up 90 degrees on a wall. Either that or having in some way wedged himself somewhere. Unless he's totally exhausted (or his thyroid hormone is under-replaced), in which case he sometimes lies dead straight, on his side, with his legs straight out, like he was innocently standing there and was suddenly petrified into position and then knocked over. A bit like Rowdy in Scrubs.) Anyway, now we sort of feel guilty of suspecting them of not being able to comport themselves with dignity overnight, but rather pleased. My parents keep telling each other how soundly they (the dogs) seem to have slept, and how charming it was that Darcy decided to eschew the towels we put out as bedding, and instead sleep on the scrubs lying by the door to be taken back to the hospital, with a couple of pairs of Crocs by way of underlay.

I realise that maybe choosing to write an entire blog post about your dogs sleeping inside is a bit odd, but it's really a surprisingly large mental gear-shift for us, because our yard is so big that we always think of them as spending a lot of time outside roaming free, even though they don't much, that's just what we hoped they'd be able to do, before we discovered their penchant for adventure and impressive ability to completely ignore a cattle-grid which I personally find it a complete bugger to walk across, even with my flat hominid feet. Plus, I did literally nothing today (so what else could I tell you about?), and there's a dog lying on my bedside rug right now, occasionally sort of snoring to himself, or waking up to look at me as if to say "are you still clicking away on that thing? Don't you know it's late, and that no-one wants to read about the sleeping arrangements of some poor dog who can't get to sleep anyway since the light is still on?". It's pretty cute, you guys.