[Dailydrool] Ada's gottcha day gift to me and other mayhem

[Damien S Kraus]

Well, shame on me, I forgot completely about Ada's gottcha day on 
Saturday due to the chaos surrounding the lack of employment, mad dash 
to get the garden planted, 3 hatches of chicks and my regular family 
BS...  I pulled her on 4/7/11 from a shelter in Waco, after Curie 
couldn't cope with the lost of her bonded buddy Tesla several trainers 
recommended another female companion ASAP so she came home with me and 
Curie began to heal.

Ada didn't forget her gotcha day.  In fact she'd been planning a gift 
for nearly 5 days!  It all started on Tuesday morning when she spied a 
southeastern five lined skink (yes, I know my lizards, I'm a nerd like 
that) out sunning itself on the dismantled pool deck.  For the next few 
days she teaches Lisi the ins and outs of basset OCD.. uh.... basset 
tenaciousness by showing her how to stalk and hunt scaly things around 
the base of the deck.  We thought it was 'cute', little boob flapping 10 
year old Ada of 38 pounds and Lisi towering over her at 14 weeks old and 
already 35 pounds, both with their heads together trying to sniff out 
where the poor creature was hiding.
Saturday evening, after a long and hair pulling day at my mom's with my 
family, we let them all out for potty time after being cooped up all 
day.  Amazingly Lisi only flooded her crate this time and left us no 
land mines.  As we were calling them in for dinner Ada runs up all happy 
and bouncy and full of herself and deposits aforementioned skink right 
into my hand.  Of course I tell her she's a good girl and praise her 
highly with the dead critter still in my hand.  I won't tell her I saved 
it for a chicken treat the next morning but she did like watching the 
mayhem that ensued in the chicken pen when the lizard incited a game of 
keep away after the marans chicken took off with her new prize.
It wasn't until Monday I realized I had completely missed her gottcha day!

Lisi is bringing out the playfulness of the bassets again with her great 
dane goofiness.  Curie is so flipping happy it's ridiculous.  Ada is 
practically in heaven.  The three of them are well and surely attached 
and it's barely been 6 weeks.  They play constantly, loudly, goofy.....  
Lisi has gone from being ran over and pushed around by rude bassets that 
towered over her to now being triple the weight she was, taller than 
they are by 5 or 6 inches and able to roughhouse with them nearly non 
stop.  There are some days I have to stop myself from going out and 
fussing at them for playing too hard, I always had to do that for Tesla 
to keep her from working herself into a seizure, it's like this little 
one has brought back Tesla's spirit of shear goofy into the vacuum she 
left behind.

The bassets are teaching her all manner of bad things, like climbing on 
things she shouldn't (Ada's teaching), barking like mad for no dang 
reason or whining just for the heck of it (Curie's teaching) and 
guarding the yard from rabbits (thanks to Gus).  Kelvin isn't teaching 
her anything other than to leave him alone, he's old enough to deserve 
not being pestered and for the most part, she's learning to not be a 
royal mouth full of needles around him.

Carmen and the Bassets of Mayhem