WHAT I DID IN TEXAS

On Sunday, we left Austin early in the morning, and after we drove for hours and hours, we finally got home to Kansas City.  It is about 734 miles from our house to Aunt Cheryl's house, and it takes us 13 or 14 hours to drive all that way.  We could get there faster if we didn't keep having to stop and pee.  Also, the day we first drove down there, we got in some very slow traffic because people were doing construction stuff on the road.  When we came back, nobody was working on the road because it was a Sunday.  So now we know that it's better to drive to Austin on a Sunday.

Here I am standing in Aunt Cheryl's back yard.

The only bad thing that happened to us on the way home was we had a flat tire.  And it wasn't just a tire that went a little bit flat.  It was a tire that got shredded and mashed and torn apart.  Mom called it a "major tire malfunction."

Anyway, we had to stop driving because of our tire malfunction, and Mom called the nice people at AAA.  They said they could send somebody out in 45 minutes or maybe sooner.  But then, just when we were getting ready to wait for 45 minutes, these two men in a big, black pickup stopped, and they asked if they could help us.  Mom said it would be great if they could change our tire, so that's what they did. Dorrie and I had to wait in the front seat while this happened because our crate and a bunch of other stuff got unloaded out of the car so that the spare tire could come out of its hiding place.  Then everything got loaded up again, including us, and we drove the rest of the way home, which wasn't really very far.

I spent a lot of time sleeping in Texas.

But now I'm going to tell you about some of the stuff I did at Aunt Cheryl's house, which was mostly the same stuff that Dorrie also did.  Aunt Cheryl has a really huge, ginormous yard with tons of shrubs and flowers and weird stuff in it.  A lot more plants got put in since we were there the last time, plus the bamboo got taken out.  Gabe and I and Hank used to like to run around through the bamboo, so it was kind of sad that it was gone.  But bamboo is not a native Texas plant, and it is what is called "invasive," so that is why Aunt Cheryl got rid of it.  Now she is just trying to have mostly native plants.

When we first arrived in Austin, it was after dark because we got stuck in a lot of slow traffic on the way through Fort Worth.  Then Mom got lost trying to find Aunt Cheryl's house, so we had to call and ask Uncle Art how to get there.  Finally we ended up at the right house, but it was very dark, and the yard was very big, so we didn't go exploring until the next morning.  In my next blog entry, I will tell you more about Aunt Cheryl's yard.

Here's Dorrie looking goofy.

Dorrie and I both liked to be out in the yard, except that it was really hot out there.  Inside, it was cold because of the air-conditioning, so when we first went outside, it felt good to be warm again.  But then we got hot, so we went back inside where we could be cool.

I wish this collection had some basenjis in it,
instead of mostly Airedales.

Mom and Aunt Cheryl were gone a long time every day, so Dorrie and I slept a lot.  Mom put us in crates so that we wouldn't get into any trouble.  I only had a rug and some newspapers for bedding, but Dorrie got to have a real dog bed.  Mom said I couldn't have a bed because I would just tear it up and eat the pieces, and then I would have to have expensive surgery again.

Mom spent her time in dark rooms, trying to stay awake during lectures.

While the cactus and succulent convention was happening, Dorrie and I had to stay in our crates for hours and hours.  But this nice man named Uncle Juan would come a couple of times during the day and let us out to potty.  Uncle Juan is the person who helps Aunt Cheryl do all the yard work.  He talked to us in Spanish, and he said we were very good girls.

I have excellent pillow-shredding skills

One night, Mom went upstairs to watch a movie with Aunt Cheryl, and I was feeling kind of bored and stressed, so I tore up a feather pillow.  Mom was shocked when she came back downstairs and saw what I had done.  Then she had to go tell Aunt Cheryl that she had been foolish enough to leave me alone with a pillow.  Luckily, Aunt Cheryl has a sense of humor, and she understands basenjis.  She helped Mom clean up all the feathers.  This was hard to do because feathers fly, like birds, which is where they come from.  But if you suck them up with a vacuum cleaner, that sort of works.

The problem with feathers is that they stick to you.

After that, Mom made Dorrie and me stay in our crates whenever she went upstairs for very long.  Well, except one time she was doing her email upstairs, and I tore up the bag that Mom got at the convention.  But Mom didn't really care about the bag because every time she goes to a convention, she gets another bag.

Mom didn't really want this bag anyway.

I was going to stop writing there, but Mom said I should also admit that I wet the bed a couple of nights.  I didn't mean to do this.  The pee just somehow came out of me while I was sleeping.  It's very embarrassing when this happens.  Anyway, Mom thinks I have a urinary tract infection, so she took some of my pee over to Dr. Patricia's office yesterday.