Last night was a sleepless one over here. Scout has been spending her nights in her crate, in our room; last night she decided that she really REALLY did NOT want to sleep in the crate, and spent all night telling us so -- brief interludes of quiet broken up by lengthier episodes of whining and scratching that we could not put a stop to, no matter what we said or did.
We can't just let her out to sleep under the bed or wherever, because then she's 'won', learning that there is some threshold of whining and complaining after which we'll give in and she'll get to sleep where she wants. But we can't go on like this, either. It looks like this is going to call for some late-night clicker training, rewarding her for quiet periods spent in the crate. When we lived in Hamburg, she had been spending all night in the crate without complaint, sometimes not wanting out until 9 or 10 in the morning! I think that living at Grandpa's house has given her a certain spoiled sense of entitlement.
And why do you guys want Scout in the crate, anyway? Well, crateless, she had been feeling that it was her God-given right to go outside every night around 2 AM -- and not heeding her late-night summons brought the danger of, um, accidents. In the crate, she'll wait until morning, which is reason enough to use it right there -- especially when we're travelling and she's crated at a hotel (although I don't know how often that'll be happening anymore, now that we're back in the States).
In Other News: My sibling-in-laws, Brad and Katrina, are on the vacation from heck -- at least when it comes to getting their family back to California. They've spent this past week on a family Carribean cruise; on its return, their ship was supposed to dock in Orlando. For a while, it looked like Hurricane Frances was going to push them out to sea for a few more days (the big ships just sit on the open ocean and ride it out), but now they're supposed to dock today in Tampa. Thankfully Shelby's mom (travel agent extraordinaire) was able to change their return tickets from Orlando to Tampa, even with a Labor Day weekend and hurricane threats. But now the big news in SoCal is that LAX, the Los Angeles airport, has been completely closed and evacuated due to a pair of nebulous security threats. At this time, CNN is writing up the story as if everything's already been resolved, but that's not the impression we're getting from local news.
Posted by Kevin at September 4, 2004 10:28 AM