Grady goes AWOL
Last night we lost our dog.
Gretchen was cooking dinner and commented that Grady must be really tired because he wasn't in the kitchen and usually he wants to be wherever the food is. So I went to check his dog bed and the guest bed (the two places he spends 98% of his time when not trying to beg for food), but he was nowhere to be found. We started freaking out because he's not the type to disappear, and our place isn't especially easy for him to escape. After some panicked running around, Gretchen finally found him downstairs--which you have to leave our apartment to reach--in our laundry room with the door closed, happily devouring a bag of dog food he had torn into. Another bag of dog food that I had emptied earlier and left in the laundry room was in the bathroom on the other side of the basement.
Perplexed, we tried to reconstruct the scene of the crime. About a half-hour earlier I had gone upstairs for no more than 30 seconds to leave a note for our landlords, but since I left the front door open Grady seems to have used that tiny window of opportunity to escape. We figure he got downstairs, came across the empty bag of dog food (which was probably what he smelled that compelled him to go downstairs in the first place), and most likely put his head into it, whereupon the bag got stuck on his head and he wandered blindly around the basement until he was able to get it off his head in the bathroom. (We have no evidence to support this, but having seen him get his head stuck in numerous bags in the house--always a treat to watch, by the way--it's the best we can come up with.) From there, he probably found the other bag of food in the laundry room. It's quite a sturdy sealed plastic bag, so he had to do some serious chewing to try to get into it, and our guess is that while working at it his tail swung the door closed. Luckily we think we got to him before he ate too much (Gretchen once had a co-worker whose black lab got into a food bag and ate at least 15 pounds of food and had to have emergency surgery). Not that the resulting diarrhea, indigestion and anxiety (for him, I mean) is very fun, but at least he should be back to normal soon and we're just happy we wasn't genuinely lost. Hopefully from now on he'll concentrate his energies instead on waiting for Baby to start dropping food on the floor...
Gretchen was cooking dinner and commented that Grady must be really tired because he wasn't in the kitchen and usually he wants to be wherever the food is. So I went to check his dog bed and the guest bed (the two places he spends 98% of his time when not trying to beg for food), but he was nowhere to be found. We started freaking out because he's not the type to disappear, and our place isn't especially easy for him to escape. After some panicked running around, Gretchen finally found him downstairs--which you have to leave our apartment to reach--in our laundry room with the door closed, happily devouring a bag of dog food he had torn into. Another bag of dog food that I had emptied earlier and left in the laundry room was in the bathroom on the other side of the basement.
Perplexed, we tried to reconstruct the scene of the crime. About a half-hour earlier I had gone upstairs for no more than 30 seconds to leave a note for our landlords, but since I left the front door open Grady seems to have used that tiny window of opportunity to escape. We figure he got downstairs, came across the empty bag of dog food (which was probably what he smelled that compelled him to go downstairs in the first place), and most likely put his head into it, whereupon the bag got stuck on his head and he wandered blindly around the basement until he was able to get it off his head in the bathroom. (We have no evidence to support this, but having seen him get his head stuck in numerous bags in the house--always a treat to watch, by the way--it's the best we can come up with.) From there, he probably found the other bag of food in the laundry room. It's quite a sturdy sealed plastic bag, so he had to do some serious chewing to try to get into it, and our guess is that while working at it his tail swung the door closed. Luckily we think we got to him before he ate too much (Gretchen once had a co-worker whose black lab got into a food bag and ate at least 15 pounds of food and had to have emergency surgery). Not that the resulting diarrhea, indigestion and anxiety (for him, I mean) is very fun, but at least he should be back to normal soon and we're just happy we wasn't genuinely lost. Hopefully from now on he'll concentrate his energies instead on waiting for Baby to start dropping food on the floor...
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