Category: Cozy

Cozy Tales: 18. The Park

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Taking a dog to the park is, to me, part of the great American lifestyle. Taking a big dog to the park, though, is more complicated than just hopping in the car for a ride. There’s the drool on the windows to deal with, not to mention the drool down the back of your neck, on the rearview mirror, and in the cup holders. There’s also the space they consume in any vehicle to contend with. Some people are fine with their dogs on the seats, but we preferred to keep them in the back of the Outback since Cozy wasn’t all that different than any other wild bear with a drooling problem and a textbook case of attention deficit disorder.

With one big dog, the operation was usually pretty straightforward. One dog was happy to be there with their person, and they generally stayed with them. This isn’t always the case, of course. For example, there are dogs that love to run, or puppies with excessive energy that need careful attention. Many dogs, upon the first whiff of fresh park air, just like to sprint from the car as soon as the hatch is opened. Cozy was just such a dog. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 17. Cherrybrook

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Cherrybrook
Out in northwestern New Jersey there is a wonderful pet store called Cherrybrook that lets you bring your pets into the store. This was a big deal in the late 90’s, as not many places had started to allow such things yet, so we decided to bring Cozy and Daisy to Cherrybrook, in part to show them off, and in part to help socialize them.

At this point in Cozy’s life she was probably 140-160 pounds, but still very much full of youthful energy. She was a puppy in a huge dog’s body that couldn’t understand why she could no longer fit under the dining room table. Being the intelligent people that we were, neither of us could imagine how anything could possibly go wrong during a simple trip to the store.  (more…)

Cozy Tales: 16. Ginny

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DeborahAnnWoll-Face-1200
Dogs, we discovered, are a lot like children; if you have no idea what you’re doing, they become brats. With Cozy being so alpha coupled with the fact that she was incapable of being nice around unknown dogs (earning her the new nickname Cozy-Brat), not to mention the whole Daisy dragging Lauren incident, we decided that it was time to bring in professional help.

We found a local dog-training company and arranged to have someone come to the house to help us. Ginny was tall, thin, attractive, female, and had long curly red hair. I have a thing for women with red hair – especially long curly red hair. I found myself suddenly hoping that Cozy would require lots of extra work. Lauren was not amused.

The part of Ginny the Dog Trainer will be played by Deborah Ann Woll in this tale. You may remember her as the vampire Jessica Hamby from the HBO series True Blood, a show which occurred 15 years after the tale being told, and thus has nothing to do with the story. I must also point out that any similarities in this tale to redheads, vampires, actresses, succubi, dog trainers, or other creatures real, fictional, or imaginary is purely coincidental. And by purely I mean mostly. And by coincidental I mean have you seen Deborah Ann Woll? Damn…
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Cozy Tales: 14: Door-to-Door

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No-Solicitors
Living in rural New Jersey was wonderful, but there were some drawbacks that may not be obvious to those who live in more urban areas. For example, we lived in our house for 12 years before there was a pizza shop that would deliver. We couldn’t walk anywhere since the nearest store was four miles away and there were no sidewalks. Children didn’t walk to school, and many had to sit on the bus for 40 minutes or more every morning and afternoon. The benefits, though, were many; clean air, plenty of trees, and perhaps most important to me, we couldn’t see any of our neighbor’s houses except in the winter when all the leaves had fallen from the trees. This seclusion also seemed to preclude most anyone from visiting unannounced. Usually.  (more…)

Cozy Tales: 13. Cozy Learns to Swim

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Searching_700
There are a variety of ways in which we might have learned that we had become crazy dog people. Spending more on grooming equipment for them then we ever had for ourselves was a clue. Buying at least one vacuum a year due to an apparent infant mortality problem in modern vacuum cleaners was another. For us, though, the act of taking our dogs to the lake in the rain was the defining moment. We hadn’t planned on going to the lake in the rain. We took the dogs to the lake on a cloudy day and when we got there it had started to drizzle which then turned to light rain. Even that didn’t make us crazy. What made us crazy Newfie dog people was the fact that we never even considered leaving. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 12. Cozy’s Nemesis

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LookingOutWindow2
We lived on a nice two acre rectangle of land in rural New Jersey. The house had a large front yard that bordered the street along the front edge and the mailbox was in the middle of the yard along the road. I really wanted the mailbox to be by the driveway, but years ago I gave up trying to move it because four inches under the soil was some sort of material impervious to any of tool I could legally attain. Logically, I imagined this to be some sort of buried alien spacecraft, the discovery of which would cement my name in the annals of human history forever. Digging is hard, though, so I just tried not to think about it. The unfortunate mailbox position forced us to get off our lazy butts and walk to the mailbox every day, or at least on the days we felt like it. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 11. Nosy Cozy

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CozyKongTree
As my Cozy grew and grew, she seemed to get more and more nicknames. One of my favorites was Nosy Cozy, which is what we’d call her any time she’d stick her nose where it didn’t belong, which was pretty much all the time. We often called her Cozy Bear or simply Bear, since she looked like a black bear. Daisy was often called Daisy Bear for the same reason.

We called Cozy Baby Girl a lot, too. For Lauren and me, without children, Cozy was our first attempt at nurturing and growing a living thing with more personality than an iguana. She was our baby girl in every way, and she was doted on accordingly. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 10. Bloat

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Stethoscope
One of the greatest fears of knowledgeable large breed dog owners is bloat. Bloat (technically gastric torsion) is the result of a dog’s stomach actually flipping over which causes the gasses therein to have no means of escape. Imagine taking a loaf of bread while still in the bag, then holding the open end and twisting the loaf. This action causes the opening of the bag to become twisted shut which is basically what happens to a dog’s stomach during bloat. As you might imagine, this situation is not good. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 9. Homer

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WhiteTail2
Here in rural NJ we have always had a bit of a deer problem. Often herds of ten or more would wander through, destroying carefully tended gardens and trees in the process. They also brought with them disease ridden parasites aptly named deer ticks. My friend Bill, an avid hunter, once told me of harvested deer so covered with the parasites that the skin was hidden under huge patches of bumpy engorged ticks. Delicious.

There are two common types of ticks in New Jersey; the dog tick and the deer tick. I have no idea if those are their scientific names, but that’s what they’re known as ’round these parts. The dog tick is what we used to call a tick when I was a kid since none of us had ever heard of deer ticks back then. They were about a quarter inch in size normally with a dark brown flat body and icky arachnid legs. They were easy to spot and easy to grab, though they were notoriously difficult to kill. If you found an engorged one it could be an inch long or more and swollen to the point of bursting like a juicy blood-filled grape. As a kid I remember throwing engorged dog ticks into the fire and waiting to hear the pop of them exploding. Farm life is filled with myriad other delightful memories of a similar type. (more…)

Cozy Tales: 8. Tales of the Kong

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CozyKong2_1600
Many dogs love toys. Some love their stuffies, some love a sock, and some have a penchant for the fine bouquet and delicate aroma of whatever tennis ball they happen to find that day. Cozy had a nice collection of toys including an orange octopus that she enjoyed, a small squeaky dog-catcher man, and various pull toys made of rope, nylon, and rubber. For Cozy, though, there was only one toy that mattered, and that was her Kong. (more…)