Escaping Aussies and Cutting Class

It seems I'm not done thinking about crates quite yet.

When I got home from work on Wed, my brother informed me that Iris went on a little adventure that afternoon. Steve was upstairs hanging out in his room (the only room in the house with AC), and Iris was loose in the house. This probably had about the same effect as leaving her home alone and loose. I imagine she spent the morning obsessing over the windows.

My brother heard Iris go completely nuts and then silent He came downstairs to check on her, only to look outside and see Iris circling the UPS truck parked in front of my neighbor's house. The UPS truck is Iris' arch-nemesis. What I'm sure happened is Iris was sitting on my bed looking out the window and saw the truck drive into the neighborhood. She goes nuts as soon as she sees the UPS truck. So she sprints to the other end on the house to watch the truck drive around the corner. Because it was hot, just the screen door was shut. So, Iris flies into the room and skids on the tile floor into the door, probably barking the whole time. The screen door wasn't shut tight, so when she skidded into it or jumped up on it, it opened. Freedom!

Luckily, my brother thought to go downstairs when he heard her go crazy. Iris is even worse about the UPS truck than she is about cars. Steve ran outside and called her, which of course she ignored because the truck started to drive away. My brother went back in the house to grab his car keys and some cheese. Iris didn't make it too far down the street before she lost the truck, and she hopped right into my brother's car.

I have one lucky little Aussie. I'm positive that if Steve didn't notice her escape, she'd have been hit by a car. I can't have her getting out like that again. Not only is it dangerous for her, but it's also a bad situation to have her harassing people like the UPS driver. The solution I have right now is to keep her in an x-pen down the basement when I'm at work and my brother isn't actively supervising her. I think that ends up being most of the time. She hates being down the basement, but the x-pen gives her more space than a crate, and it's significantly cooler down there. I worry about her overheating in the crate, so I'm overriding her on this one. Right now, there's not enough space for her to have a crate in the x-pen. Once the basement gets cleaned out, I'll see if I can combine 2 x-pens and include a crate. It's not an ideal solution, but it's the best one I have right now and at least she can't get out to chase cars. Even if the screen door had been shut tight, I don't think it would take much for her to go through the screen.

In other news, Iris should have had her first 5 Directions class on Thurs, but I'm a bad mom and completely forgot about it. Somehow, I got it in my head that class didn't start until next week. It might actually be a good thing that we missed class because after her adventures in truck chasing, Iris was limping Wed night. She was putting weight on all 4 legs, but she was definitely favoring one of her back legs (I had trouble telling which). I don't think the injury was completely cause by the truck chasing. When I was walking her the night before, I thought her gait seemed a little off. I couldn't quite pinpoint what was wrong and started thinking maybe I was just being paranoid. Something was probably not quite right and running around acting crazy was just too much. She's completely fine now, but she probably needed a night off anyway.