Understanding Yara

Last night during some free time, Yara noticed something outside that got her attention. I heard a few woofs before I’d found her pacing around the dining room. When she saw me, she came running over, but whatever it was still bothered her enough to growl softly about it. I softly reprimanded her and after one more tiny bark she trotted off to the living room and started batting her ball around. I didn’t hear anyone outside, so my guess is it was most likely one of the various cats in the neighborhood. Probably out pawing through the garbage cans in my driveway. Still, barking is kind of a big no-no in guide dogs.

Since today is one of our “off” days for training, I took advantage of that and slept way later than I should have. Yara didn’t seem to mind that I wouldn’t crawl out of bed until 9:00 AM, but I do wonder how much she sleeps at night. Any time I roll over I can hear her jump up and excitedly run around the length of her tie-down. It’s pretty cute how attentive she is to me at night, but it’s kind of creepy thinking about this dog just staring at me all night long. She’s so silly. It cracks me up.

Of course, when I finally dragged my lazy butt out of bed, I was greeted with the morning crazy. Yara had chosen one of Dolly’s rejected chew toys¹ to toss around this morning. For all the excitement she has when I get up, I’m always surprised that she never relieves herself on the first trip outside. It’s odd. She didn’t eat much of her breakfast this morning either. Perhaps the novelty of the canned food has worn off. Dinnertime will make this hypothesis a bit more conclusive. I still have yet to fully understand her eating pattern as she’s been so finicky.

She’s not a big fan of being groomed which I’m not so used to. Dolly never enjoyed it either but she just stood there with a forlorn expression and let me brush her out and clip her nails and all that other stuff. Yara, on the other hand, gets quite doggishly annoying; she’s very whiny and mouthy with me when I get to a sensitive area. If she’s really getting fed up, she’ll just plop her butt down and starts getting very silly. This morning, I managed to get a good amount of brushing done before she finally had enough and since the session had managed to fill up my sinuses, I thought I might try to vacuum a bit. There is already a ton of Yara hair in the house already, but I’ve been reluctant to take out the vacuum since I don’t know how she’ll react.² I decided to start off using the Dirt Devil hand held vacuum to test things out and so I started in my bedroom and cleaned the rug under her fleece bed. She didn’t seem too thrilled about it, but she wasn’t especially bothered either. In fact, she seemed cautiously curious about it all. I’m relieved.

1. A very sturdy tire on a rope toy that my grandmother gave Dolly one Christmas as a “last resort,” having had every previous gift be eaten up or destroyed before all the presents under the tree were unwrapped.
2. Dolly gets pretty traumatized by the vacuum cleaner, for instance.