Hooligans, Squirrels and a Cheshire Cat

 Want to know how important you are to your dogs?

Just come home from a long day at work and arrive just a few minutes after your Mom has given each a big ole ham bone.

You’ll come down to earth very quickly. No tail wagging, not a glance at you, no nothing. 

One of my neighbors has a large black and white cat named Noah. Noah is not saintly by any means. His daily routine consists of walking in front of the house in the field across the road looking for my three hooligans. If they are in the front yard, he walks back and forth, rolls, get ups and walks back and forth again and rolls again just teasing the dogs. The hooligans in the mean time are having a hissy fit barking at him.  If they are in the lower forty, he goes down the dry creek and sits on the bank just on the other side of the underground fence. Somehow he knows that the dogs can’t get him and he just sits there grinning at the dogs like a Cheshire cat.  Occasionally the collar batteries are weak and he lands up in the top of a tree. 

 Another critter which likes to play with the hooligans is a squirrel.  It likes to run around in the front yard and if the hooligans spy it, will run up a wild cherry tree just on the other side of the wireless fence, and hop from there to the trees along the creek. I had to replace a section of the fence and moved it back about 15 feet to avoid cancelling out of the signal to the collars by the old wire. Since I moved it, the hooligans can get to the cherry tree and have damaged a nearby native azalea in the chases.  It now has a hooligan cage (as I call my tomato cages) protecting it.  I hope I can free up some for my tomato plants this spring. I’m not sure what the squirrel is after, but I’m missing some of my flower bulbs.   The other day the hooligans had it treed in one of the birch trees in the front yard.  It was as high as it could go and hanging on for dear life.  Patches tried to figure out a way to climb up the tree and did manage to get off the ground a little. Come dark it tried to come down, but was chased back up to the top. 

  Taking the picture you see of me above was an adventure with the three hooligans. A photographer friend who was to take it had the flu, and Mom was elected and had never used my camera before. I set it on landscape and was going to sit on my John Deere and have her take the picture.  The first thing that happened was Levi jumping up in the seat with me and laying in my lap.  Then Blackie and Patches decided they wanted to drag him down off of the tractor. At some point he decided to push me out of the seat trying to get higher and away from the girls. I should have put the camera on the sports section as most of the pictures turned out fuzzy.