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Blog Entry 23 of 39 Forest Creatures

Let me introduce you to our cast of characters. My husband "Pops" and I are both over 50, fairly educated and we live on five plus acres between Black Forest and Peyton with 4 Akitas and a truly imperfect cat, named of course, Purrfect. I grew up in Colorado, he's from Chicago. We love the Broncos and the Bears, music, television and technology. Some people lead fairly quiet lives. Our lives are usually filled with constant misadventure. I am not sure if it is because we have several dominant pets or because my husband is always misbehaving but whatever the reasons we are usually in the middle of a storm. This blog will chronicle our adventures when I have time to file them. Sometimes I will be asking advice, sometimes I will just try to make users laugh.

Blog Url: http://coloradosprings.yourhub.com/~PulaAdventures

It's Electric!

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Contributed by: Pula Davis on 2/13/2007

When I last posted we thought we had solved our escapee, Beauty's daring leaps to freedom tendencies by extending the front fence and reinstalling the electric fence around the back of our property. No such luck.
What a fiasco getting the electric fence to work turned out to be. Until this just weekend we still had no current in the wire around the fence. I decided the culprit was the old wire so on Friday we rewired most of the fence, trudging through the drifts in the sun and the cold wind. Still no electricity. (We actually took off work to do this?)
Completely exhausted we vowed to get to the bottom of things the next day. Since I am an eternal problem solver, I reread the instructions for the energizer and decided the ground wires were faulty. Saturday morning we replaced part of the ground system, which was old and bought a new insulated ground wire. Had a horrible time doing this lite task, but we did. Still nothing. Even more exhausted, frustrated, I started to think a professional electrician was needed. Or Beauty could simply wear an anti-jumping harness until she was too old to jump.
Finally Saturday afternoon, a friend of ours was out visiting and we were whining about our failures. He noticed that the part of the wiring we didn't replace was wrapped around one of the wooden fence posts. Right in the front part of the fence. Groan... Talk about feeling stupid. Thank goodness we didn't pay to have someone come look at the situation.
Beauty, the reason for all the expense and work, got a small shock Sunday when she put her nose to the fence, but we aren't convinced that she has equated the shock with the wire. I think she needs a few more encounters before letting her run in the back acreage. To insure that when she is back there she can't just hop over fence, wire and all, we spent more time shoveling the drifts that are still, despite the warmer weather, about three feet deep along the back fence.
Our other dogs, particularly Sable, have been looking at us like we are nuts, further adding insult to injury. Sable and Kuma can't figure out why we keep shoveling in their territory. Or why we keep standing staring at the fence. Roshi, the puppy, watches our antics from a safe distance, usually a snow drift that he has adoted.
My resolution this year was to learn from mistakes so I am making these mental notes:
- Don't touch electric wire after working days to get it "live"
- Look into snow fencing this spring, enough is enough
- Start thinking about smaller dogs as old age creeps up
- Old age can definitely be hastened by shoveling constantly
We did have a momentary lull in our adventures Sunday evening, when all was quiet and serene. The dogs were laying at our feet. For that moment I savored the lifestyle that we have, the solitude, the sun setting in the distance. Then it was time to feed the animals and that's always a riot, almost literally. And once more, there is snow in the forecast for the next few days... so the serenity didn't last long.

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