32 things you never knew about my dog, a.k.a. a few minutes you’ll never get back

To commemorate 30 posts of “A Guero and His Perro”—well, this actually post 32—here’s 32 random facts about Katniss that I find amusing. If you’ve been drinking enough cough syrup or if you’ve been exposed to certain fumes (see number 19!), maybe you’ll find them amusing, too:

1. We can’t say the word “walk” around Katniss—we have to spell it out—otherwise she’ll whip herself into a frenzy thinking it’s time to go for a W-A-L-K.
2. Katniss has a middle initial, P., which my wife has determined stands for multiple attributes: play; princess; parched (she needs more water than a redwood); poop/pee (she does that a lot); prancer (she prances when on her leash on our walks); pampered (Katniss is more spoiled than a gallon of milk left out in this Texas heat for a day); persnickety (she has to sniff everything on her walks); perro, of course; and popcorn (she loves it more than anything we’ve ever fed her).
3. Her little paws smell like Fritos. Now that I think of it, I bet she would like Fritos almost as much as popcorn.
4. She insists on cuddling, but if you smother her too much she will get up and move away from you.
5. She is terrified of the hair dryer, the vacuum and large objects such as our trash bins.
6. She tries to shame us into staying home with her each morning by making the saddest dog faces I know of.
7. She likes to be held and carried, even though she is fully grown.

   

   What a baby—my dog loves being held more than you love reading this blog. And I think Katniss may have eaten the star atop our Christmas tree thinking it was a dog treat. (Photo courtesy of wife)

8. She likes to steal socks and be chased around the house while she has them in her mouth.
9. She has a cousin, a miniature schnauzer named Turbo, that belongs to my in-laws. The two of them play together occasionally, and Katniss tries to herd her 20-pound relative.
10. Her birthday is Jan. 12. Well, we don’t know that for sure, but we guessed it based on her age when we got her.
11. We thought she would be way bigger than her fully grown 40 pounds.
12. She HATES having her claws trimmed. Some people call them nails, but I think claws sounds more wolf-like.
13. She wakes me up—but almost never bothers my wife—sometimes multiple times per night to play or be let outside. She doesn’t realize her papa has to go to work to be able to make money to buy the socks she eventually destroys and needs sleep.

    

    Katniss and her buddy/cousin, Turbo, at play (Photo courtesy of wife)

14. She has developed an awesome new habit of random night barking to go along with pawing at me to play with her as I enter REM sleep.
15. She once dug up dozens of pieces of an old clay pot someone buried in our yard years ago. I thought about piecing it back together, but I took a nap instead.
16. We once had sago palm trees in our yard, but when I learned they were poisonous to dogs I removed them. Katniss dug holes where the trees once were, for whatever reason.
17. You can pull on her tail, and it never bothers her.
18. Sometimes I will act like I am incapacitated and lay on the floor to see how Katniss will react. She’ll start barking at me and giving me kisses. I’d like to think that’s her way of trying to revive me.
19. Her farts are horrendous. They’re so potent that they were actually the chemical weapons we were looking for in Iraq 12 years ago—and Katniss wasn’t even born yet. Figure that one out.
20. She loves bath time. As ornery as she is, Katniss is fairly well-behaved when being bathed. I think it’s because she loves water so much.
21. After her baths she gets really excited, for whatever reason, and runs around the house at top speed.
22. My wife once walked her 2 miles, and then I took Katniss jogging for 2 miles. Katniss was still super hyper after 4 miles of exercise and did that thing where she runs around the house at top speed.
23. If my wife or I go to the bathroom, Katniss will always try to get into the bathroom with us. To be fair, we watch her go to the bathroom a lot when we walk her, so I guess she thinks it’s OK to watch us? I think it’s creepy.
24. She caught on to potty training almost immediately. She learned to fetch in what seemed like minutes, too. As wild as she is, Katniss is also very bright, which I probably don’t mention enough. I joke that Katniss gets her crazy, clingy side from me and all her good qualities from my wonderful wife.
25. Katniss still has several toys she plays with regularly that we bought her the day we adopted her. She is really hard on her toys and has destroyed several of them, but her Kong products in particular seem to be quite durable.
26. She once pooped four times in a single walk. I know that’s somewhat disgusting, but I was amazed at how much kept coming out of her, seeing as how I had to pick it up. This is the fifth poop/fart/potty reference in this list. I wonder what that says about me?
27. I recently joked with a group of fellow bloggers that I carry a small plastic bag filled with Katniss’ hair in my pocket so I can “pet” her even when I’m not around her. I don’t think they found that as funny as I did.
28. Katniss likes to sleep in bed with us, and sometimes in the middle of the night she’ll get me out of bed just so she can hop up and lay in my part of the bed. What a stinker. Even worse, she looks at me like she’s completely innocent, yet I keep falling for it.
29. Katniss might have been named Tiger if my wife wasn’t a “Hunger Games” fan. Our agreement upon the search for a dog was that I required a female dog (I don’t want to see my dog’s twig and berries all the time, if you catch my drift—plus my mom always said female dogs are better-behaved), we would both need to agree on the type of dog, and in return for my wanting a female dog, my wife was granted exclusive naming rights. She could have named our puppy Turd Ferguson if she wanted. She said she likely would have renamed Katniss as tiger—my wife loves tigers—but Katniss was and is a perfect fit. And that’s six poop/fart/potty references. I may need counseling.
30. When either my wife or I or both of us are lying in bed and Katniss runs at full speed and leaps from the floor onto the bed, we call that a Katnissbomb™, a play on the term photobomb. Isn’t your life infinitely richer for knowing that?
31. I also considered naming this blog “Gringo and Bingo,” a play on the nursery rhyme of “Bingo” (“There was a farmer who had a dog/and Bingo was his name-o”). However, I thought it was a bit of reach seeing as how my dog isn’t named Bingo, though I am a gringo. Feel free to use that title if you’re a white guy with a dog named Bingo and you’re thinking of starting a blog. Other names for this blog featured endless riffs on the rhyming of “dog” and “blog.” Sometimes I worry “A Guero and His Perro” (a white guy and his dog) might not register with folks who don’t know a little Spanish, and maybe this blog’s name hinders its popularity slightly. However, I love the title, and it’s also a reference to when I used to live in deep South Texas near the Mexican border. OK, so this fact isn’t technically about Katniss, but it’s my blog, guey, so I do what I want.
32. Katniss is most likely what is known as a sheprador, a mix of a German shepherd and a Labrador retriever. We don’t know this for certain, but she absolutely looks like a mix of both breeds. Whatever her DNA may be, we love her and her little quirks.

Congratulations for making it this far—I barely did. In the time it took you to read this blog, you could have instead made a sandwich, put gas in your car or gone to the bathroom—not that I would have blamed you if you did. And there’s yet another poop/fart/potty reference.

Speaking of farts, I think Katniss just had another gas leak. You can maybe even smell it from where you are, which probably means the fumes have affected your judgement, hence your questionable sanity for reading 32 random facts about a dog you’ve likely never met.

To my coworkers: If I don’t show up in the morning, call for help; I’ve likely passed out from Katniss’ gas-passing. Hopefully all the practice she’s has in reviving me (see number 18!) will pay off.

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