Nick Names

Today, I thought I’d talk about BoDee’s nick names. Here’s a list with a little description next to each explaining the name:
Mini Pig: BoDee snorts a lot, he sounds very piggish! And he’s little, so Mini Pig!

Explo-Dee: BoDee’s brutal bowel movements when we first got him are where this name came from. He was exploding from the backdoor, hence, Explo-dee was born.

Chirpy Boy: This one came from an episode of The Simpsons. Bart hatches two eggs he believes are birds, they turn out to be lizards. He names one Bart Jr. and the other Chirpy Boy.

Puppet: Jonda accidently called him this once and it just stuck.

One (or Little One): BoDee’s “Momma Erica” gave him the name “One”, so of course he gets to keep it. We’ve sort of morphed it in to “Little One” for our own use.

Garbage Face: “Garbage Face” is something I’ve called Jonda for a long time, it migrated to BoDee somehow and stuck.

Stink Pig: There are dozens of “Pig” variations in open rotation. Stink Pig is used often because anyone who has a Boston knows they have AWFUL gas. Just…terrible.

Bug: Jonda called Jay “Bug” all the time and it carried over to BoDee when he arrived. We like to keep things like this going so it keeps JayDee in our memories.

Bubba: Jonda calls him Bubba sometimes, no reason why…it just rolls out.

Cowboy: BoDee is not a cowboy in the traditional sense. He eats grass all the time, so I guess the name should be Cowmale for clarity, but try saying Cowmale a few times and tell me that it sounds better then Cowboy.

Turd Tail: Thanks Jermey!

The Great Boudini: (sounds like Houdini): Thanks Ian!

Demon Dog: BoDee is only “Demon Dog” at very specific times; when he’s being bad, when he’s running around like a crazy person, or when he’s making his pig sounds at someone in particular. Normally it’s Mark.

Bundle Boy: When we ride in the car in the winter BoDee has a special blanket that stays in the car so he can be bundled up, he loves his bundling blanket :)

These are just the main names we call him, I call him something different just about every day. “Hey, stink ass, get over here” “yo little buddy, what are you doing?” “Hey, dog breath…get outta that cat food” and so on and so on. I’m also totally into calling him some suggested names as well, so feel free to toss um out there in the comments section of this dohicky.

Bath Time

Well...it's Monday again. But it's only a 3 day week for us, so hopefully it won't be too brutal. Happy Monday to all of you :)

Now that you've all learned about Fern and his history with us, let's get into the BoDee/Fern relationship. We've mentioned before that Fern is essentially BoDee's cat. We've come to accept that fact...but I'm not so sure Fern gets it. He seems to think that BoDee is HIS dog. Well, let me correct that, I'm not sure that he knows BoDee is a dog. Honestly, I think that Fern thinks BoDee is his baby. He takes care of him. He CLEANS him...and BoDee seems to like it.
He'll wander over to Fern and just sit down next to him, and Ferny will just start bathing him. Meticulously. I really think he does a better job of cleaning BoDee than he does of cleaning himself.
Speaking of which, I think Fern is getting to that point where he's too big/too old to really clean himself as well as he should, and I fear he may soon be entering that old man kitty stage. You know the one. There's this big old cat who just wanders around screaming at people, and his fur is in clumps on the top of him. I really hope Ferny doesn't get to that point too soon...but hey, at least his hair could match his Daddy's! I think I shall brush him when we get home, just to be safe.

Anyway, BoDee used to try and clean Fern as well, but I don't really like to have him do that. I have one pet that hacks up hairballs, I don't need two.

This morning, BoDee dragged himself out of bed to begin his morning routine, and we found him in the hall, getting a bath from Fern. He was really enjoying it...damn near fell asleep again. So we snapped a photo for all of you. :)



Now that I'm looking at it...I see that it could maybe look like they were up to something a little less wholesome, but I assure you, Fern is not attempting to sodomize BoDee. Just a little bath.
Have a great Monday, y'all!

Ferniture Warehouse

Welcome to Sunday, the melancholy weekend day. It's great, but you can't shake the feeling you gotta go to work tomorrow. I mentioned Fern in an older post on this blog, I feel like he deserves a bit more then just a mention. Fern is between 4-5 years old, he is a Black Cat, apparently "Black Cat" is a literal breed, I had no idea. I thought they were mixes of a few different things. He actually joined us before we found BoDee, a past roommate was a vet tech and had a small problem with bringing home every stray animal the vet brought in. She brought home 4 different animals in the 10 months we were living there, one of which was a skinny black cat missing two teeth and a toe.

He spent the first two or three weeks at the house hiding in the dirt area under the floor in the basement. He was filthy in ways I cannot explain BEFORE he went into the basement, so you can imagine the nightmare that was basement cat after a week digging around. That was his name for a long time, just basement cat. Eventually basement cat evolved from the basement to skittering around the upstairs and mainly hiding under beds. At the time we had a pitbull (JayDee) that loved to chase basement cat around. The feeling was not mutual as basement cat did everything in his (we're pretty sure he's a dude) power to avoid Jay. One afternoon Jonda was trying to coax basement cat out from under the bed without using the typical "grab by the scruff of the neck" method. I play drums in a band in salt lake city, normally I wouldn't mention anything like this but the band has a song called "I love fern", the name was given to the song prior to basement cat ever coming on the scene. So Jonda is laying on the floor staring at the cat under the bed and she starts humming "I love fern" to herself, not in an attempt to coax the cat out, just the human mind bouncing along. As she hums to herself, basement cat prowls out and sits down in front of her. We decide this is some kind of sign and basement cat is given the name "Fern".

Fern chose us more than we picked him. I hated basement cat, whenever I saw him it was like "oh crap...there's that crazy effin street cat...you stay away basement cat! I'm just tryin to use the bathroom, this ain't your hood!". Once he really started getting used to everything he would sleep in the bed with us and let you pet him and he even got a few nick names. When we moved away from the vet tech Fern came with us. When Jaydee passed away a few months later Fern was a huge comfort during grieving and recovering from the loss. He was really there for us when we needed him, I know it sounds silly and that he's just a cat, but he has a great personality...sometimes.

So I've purposefully not mentioned one thing about Fern because I wanted to lay some groundwork on his background. Fern is a very needy cat, he likes to be touched and he'll get in your lap if your sitting down. He expresses his needyness by meowing...loudly...A LOT. Some of the meows don't even sound like cat sounds, I've been on the phone with people when he's meowing and more than once Ive gotten "How old is your baby?" "my what?" "your baby, I can hear it talking in the background." That's how loud and strange his meows are, but the really irritating part is the frequency. If he's not acknowledged right away the meows get louder and more often, sometimes even acknowledging him doesn't stem the tide. If his food dish is empty, acknowledgment sends him tearing off to his bowl whilst screaming bloody meow murder. It's the difference of "meow....meow....meow" to "MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW" and sometimes he'll make this "mow-woooooo" meow sound. he cutest sound he makes are little grunts or hums almost. You'll walk into a room where he's laying on the sofa, "Hi Kitty" "mmmmg". You can have whole conversations with him this way.

Fern is big. He's a big big kitty. He actually weighs more than BoDee does believe it or not. When I hold him up his body is just as long as my torso! They play and have a good time, BoDee is a lot faster then Fern but Fern is bigger, so it's pretty even battle for the most part. They have a couple youtube videos you can check out if you like, click here for those. BoDee pretends to be camara shy :) The video is kinda long because I'm too lazy to cut it up. We've talked about the laziness before now, so this shouldn't be surprising at all. Thanks for reading :)

Doom House (...and doom house dog)

Morning! Happy Saturday! Next door to us is a busted up, dilapidated house. When we moved in last February we noticed it and immediately started calling it "The Doom House". We live in down town Salt Lake, so there isn't a ton of room between properties. Our back yard area has a fence, and then about 4 feet away from that is the doom house window. The window has tons of cob webs in it and the blinds have always been pulled shut. The first few weeks of living here, there was never any activity at the doom house. Never saw anyone, never heard a peep from it. One night, I'm out back with BoDee and the doom house window lights up. I'm a little surprised because this house is seriously in bad shape, in the front section that faces the street there are similar windows to the window we always see from the back yard. Except the windows out front have three feet of VERY bushy ivy growing into them. So there's no WAY someone could be living there right? Three feet of ivy growing in the windows! Worse yet, at one point, we went to the front door to actually confirm no one lived there and there was a 55 gallon steel drum full off...goo. Seriously... goo. Black shiny greenish goo. I thought it might have been oil from the engine of a car, but it must have been sitting there for years and there was probably 40 gallons of it. Needless to say I didn't knock on the door and took the goo as a sign that nobody could live there and allow such a foul waste product to take residency on their main porch.

So the doom house window lights up, I'm totally speechless when this happens because it's about 1 in the morning and I'm sleepy and a little out of it. After 2 minutes of silence just staring at the window, the light flips off. That's enough to send me hurrying inside locking the door behind me. This same thing happens on and off for the next few months, the light turns on sometimes late at night, stays on for a short period of time and turns off. We begin to speculate as to how this could be happening. We've still never seen anyone in or around the house, never heard a sound from it. no one has ever maintained the yard or trimmed a tree even. Jonda thinks it's haunted at this point, I'm leaning more toward drug users breaking in to get lit up or some kind of timed light system that was never turned off by the previous tenant.

One day I'm out in the back with BoDee and a dog crashes into the fence we share with the doom house! BoDee goes charging over and is jumping and scratching at the weakened fence as the bigger dog next door is crashing into it and working his way through. I scoop BoDee up (he's still trying to get at the dog as I'm taking him inside, he ain't scared a nothin!) and run him inside as the dog finishes knocking the boards out of the fence. I come back out and the dog is gone, I set the fence back up (poorly, it's just my way, gimme a break.) and go back inside. Later that week the same dog comes over and knocks the fence down again, worse than before, but this time I see someone back there, I'm like "woah! The doom house...man!" Not a clever name, but this is the house that I'm assuming no one has lived in for the last 6 months, so I'm expecting this guy to be Gollum's brother or a leprechaun or something. Jonda is out there as well and I she wants to go next door and tell DHM that he needs to fix our fence. I'm still in shock about even seeing the dude. It's like I've seen a troll of some kind just now, and Jonda thinks we should ask the troll to fix the fence his dog just broke. We end up going over there and the dude answers the door (after about 5 minutes of silence) with no shirt, not a good sign. He says sorry about the fence (in no way sincere) and he'll TRY and make his dog stay away. He doesn't fix the fence...doesn't even elude to offering. I fix the fence again (poorly...) and his dog knocks it down pretty much every week now. Needless to say, BoDee HATES this dog. I kinda hate him myself since now every time I go out back I have to worry about dog busting through the fence!
Ivy Curtains

BoDee vs. Sweaters

Hi there, BoDee's Mom here! Thanks for finding my little pig as adorable as I do :)

Well, it's November and we're in Utah. That means it's getting really damn cold. That also means it's time for BoDee to start wearing his sweaters. As a breed, Bostons are pretty sensitive to temperature. If it's hot, you really have to keep an eye on them, especially when they're playing. They don't really have a pause button...they just keep going and going until they're overheated and possibly dehydrated.
In the winter, their short hair doesn't do much at all to keep them warm, and our little guy seems to be especially sensitive, so we make sure to keep him warm with an extensive winter wardrobe. We're actually thinking of including little dog boots this year...but that's another entry.

BoDee has a love/hate relationship with his winter clothes. He's a smart boy, and he knows that if a sweater or his collar make an appearance, it means he gets to go somewhere, so in that sense, he loves his sweaters. He'll jump up on the couch so it's easier to get it on him, and he's very patient about getting dressed. He never struggles at all. However, once you get the sweater on him...his entire demeanor changes. He will NOT move. He just stands there, hanging his head and looking pitiful, until someone picks him up and takes him to the car. If (God forbid) he should have to walk on his own while wearing a sweater, he does what we call his "crab walk". For some reason, he feels the need to walk diagonally whenever he wears his sweaters. It's like he's walking to the side and straight on at the same time. Come to think of it...it's like he's walking in each direction his eyes are pointing. That's another fun little Boston trait; most of them have wonky little eyes. One will go left and one will go straight on. BoDee is no exception, and we love his wandering little eyes. :)

Beyond the crab walking, sweaters also have sort of a straight jacket effect on BoDee. If he's wearing a sweater, he'll just lounge around alllll day. Everything about him is slower and calmer. But when you take that sweater off...WATCH OUT.
The first thing he does once he's rid of his enemy is get to the back scratches. He rolls and writhes and wiggles and snorts until he feels he's rid of all evidence he was ever wearing that damn sweater. Then, he flips over and takes off at full speed. Zoom! Seriously, our little guy can RUN. And that's what he does...he runs. Laps and laps. At that point, there's really no calming him. We've given up trying. The bad news is it seems he has now figured out how to take his sweaters off himself. So he could be going hog wild any moment now.

Greetings and Howdy

Hi there! I'm writing this blog to chronicle the exciting adventures of my dog BoDee. First and foremost let me explain the name of the blog, "This Little Piggie"; BoDee is a Boston Terrier, so he has a very short snout which causes him to snort quite loudly. When he's snorting it sounds JUST like a pig, when he's yawning he sounds just like a pig, when he's eating...pig , going on a walk...pig, looking at you...pig. He's a little pig.

That being said, here's a little BoDee background. We adopted BoDee when he was 2 or 3 years old, a good friend of ours had acquired him as a pup and raised him with her husband. When they got divorced the husband took BoDee and kept him for another year or so, then got into a position where he was moving to a place that did not allow dogs and he could no longer keep BoDee. Being long time Boston enthusiasts (seriously, we almost bought a Boston Terrier Christmas ornament yesterday...) we jumped at the chance to bring BoDee into our family. Let me back peddle a little bit. "We" refers to my fantastic girlfriend, myself and our huge black cat Ferniture Jasper Riker Windsorson, Fern for short. He's quite dignified so the long name is important. It also gives me about 15 solid syllables when I'm yelling at him to stop meowing, he's very loud. I digress...

We acquired BoDee in August of 2008, we picked him up and he literally came straight to work with us, we have dog friendly office(jealous? yeah you are). We'd never spent ANY time with BoDee at this point, we took him around the office and introduced him to everyone, then he promptly took a huge dump right in the middle of the production floor and tracked it all over. Fitting, and I'll tell you why, BoDee had BRUTAL diarrhea for the next three weeks, TMI I know, but it was so bad I have to mention it. We thought maybe mixing his old food with a new food we were putting him on would help, no dice. Then we decided we should put him back on his own food hoping that would slow the flow of doodee, no dice. Finally we put him on a diet of boiled chicken or turkey and white rice steamed soft and after about a week he was feeling better.

Once that messy business was under control we moved on to training. He had the good sense to hold his business until he was outside, but because of his poopin problem when we first got him we were taking him outside every 2 hours or so, this got him in the habit of peeing every 2 hours, so we'd leave him alone for a couple hours and he'd for sure pee in the house.

That was over a year ago, now BoDee roams freely around the office when we are here, he never has accidents at the office and RARELY has them at home. A typical day for him consists of waking up with us around 730 or so, rolling out of bed to grab a bite to eat and get a drink, then back in bed till it's time to go to work. I drag him out of bed as we are walking out the door and put his collar on him(possibly his favorite time of the day, this dog LOVES his collar) and we head out the door. BoDee immediately lays down in one of our laps in the car and gets comfortable, he'll typically sleep the whole drive to work, about 20-30 minutes. Once we got off the free way he'll perk up with a "oh we're here already!" sort of a look. We get to work and he hops out of the car and makes his way to the grass to take care of some business, ("pee-mails" we call um)once he's done we go inside and he runs upstairs to check on all of his people. He'll make the rounds, say hi to everyone, get loved up, and eventually end up back at my desk. I have a soft green blanket that is his, and he requires that I set it up in my lap where he can climb on and be bundled up. Once bundled, he's asleep and snoring...LOUDLY in my lap. If I have to leave my desk I'll cover his head up with the blanket and literally transplant him from my lap to my guest chair where he'll spend the rest of the morning snoozing(that's actually where he is right now!). Once lunch time rolls around he'll get up and come in the break room to watch whatever we have on the work TV, he typically scores some table scrapes from somebody :)

After lunch BoDee may take a nap or he may run around and play. When he plays you can normally find him with a stolen toy from Harley down stairs, Harley is a VERY understanding Cocker Spaniel. She's reasonable at levels I will never attain. Recently BoDee's Auntie Kim gave him a stuffed monkey, my first thought was "that monkey isn't going to last the night...", BoDee DESTROYS his toys normally, but that monkey is still going strong. He tore the eyes out, but he hasn't ripped it to pieces yet!

Hang in there monkey man! I should probably name that monkey...

Usually around 5:00 or so BoDee starts "getting ants in his pants" as we like to call it. He runs EVERYWHERE. Down the stairs, up the stairs, into peoples office, out of the break room, running running running! He knows the day is almost over and it's just about time to go home and see his kitty. That's right, HIS kitty. We have a dog who has a cat. It's confusing but at least we know who to put in charge when we leave the house.

Check back with us often! We plan on writing a little something for all of BoDee's friends to read about each day, so there will be lots of updates and fun things to look at. Also, I promise to not bother anyone with nonsense about my personal beliefs, nothing worse than coming to a blog with a specific topic only to end up reading about someone's political ideas or religious feelings. This will be all BoDee (maybe a little Fern) all the time. Much love and thanks for reading! :)