The fuzzies are all reunited!

So I moved into a new apartment over the weekend. I boarded the dogs and left the kitten with my parents. It made for a quiet move, but damn, I missed them!

Yesterday I rescued my parents and their old fart dogs from Curtis. Their dogs couldn't understand why the strange new cat kept attacking them and wanting to curl up and sleep with them, and my parents were totally unused to having a wild monster kitten hooked on to their feet at all times. I was *really* glad to see the little bastard, and he seemed at least somewhat glad to see me.

Curtis is definitely shaping up to be a dog-cat. He comes when he's called, at least part of the time, and he loves Jaime and Cersei. He'll sleep with them and play with them, and he seems to enjoy getting slobbered on. What a wonderful weirdo :)

My parents figured out pretty quickly that they could bribe Curtis to leave them alone by feeding him canned Whiskas. For two and a half days, he didn't have to eat the much less desirable yet much higher quality Natural Balance dry food. He was pretty pissed when I dragged him to the new place and refused to break out the Whiskas, but when he got hungry enough that NB looked good enough to eat. I'm not real bright (or I wouldn't keep ending up with all these strays and castoffs) but I did manage to outsmart a kitten!

And today - tonight, actually - I got the dogs out of jail. Well, I picked them up from where they were boarded at the vet's, but same difference in their minds. They had an enclosed outdoor run which they shared, for $28/night. It's slightly cheaper to share a run, but mainly I wanted them to have each other. They've been through a lot lately, and I hated boarding them, but at least they had each other. And it was a lot less stressful for them to be locked up together than to have to do the moving with me. Anyway, all three of us were just stupidly glad to see each other. God, I missed them! At least til we got to the apartment complex...

Jaime hasn't had to walk nicely on a leash for two months. Two months is, like, an entire lifetime to a dog! Obviously he'd completely forgotten that I'm supposed to be in charge of the human-dog-rope contraption. He tried for a good 15 minutes to yank me around.

I'm not a very good dog trainer. I am, however, a surprisingly good horse trainer. That's not to say I'm a bona fide horse whisperer or something, just that *I* am surprised at my (not objectively very high) level of horse training skills. So I've decided to pretend like the dogs are just very small carnivorous horses, and maybe I'll have better luck with them.

Well, it worked out pretty well tonight. I thought of what I'd do if I had a horse on a lead rope that wanted to bull past me and yank me around, and I tried to that with Jaime. Horses, to me, are actually easier to physically manipulate than dogs. I think it's a combination of their size and their jumpy prey-animal nature. But anyway, I pretty much waited Jaime out and eventually he realized that yanking wasn't getting him anywhere. Then he started listening to me, and listening to the leash, and all of a sudden he was a decent dog on a leash. And again - it's not like I taught him to walk nicely on a leash in 15 minutes. It took the stubborn bastard 15 minutes to *remember how* to walk on a leash.