Dog Signs and Shyla's Progress

When we arrived home from our trip and coasted down our driveway, we were greeted by a sight that I think will always make us smile. Yup, Labradors own this house!

This is a new sign which we were given by SmartSign.com. We hope that it will remind visitors to drive slowly down our driveway because Labradors might be around. In particular, one delivery guy roars down our fairly long driveway, and we're hoping that this sign will remind him to slow down.

Then, when we headed out for a hike on the National Forest that surrounds our land, we ran across our other new sign that is designed to alert hikers and bikers that they are coming close to our house - and perhaps motivate them to turn around rather than amble into our clearing. We thought that the sign was amusing because Labradors are more likely to hurt you by greeting you too enthusiastically than by being real "guard dogs".

Ferocious R!

If you peruse the website where we got these signs, you'll see that they include a huge variety of breed-specific signs. There's even a "Dachshund Guard Dog" sign!

On a different front, when we headed into town after returning from our trip, Shyla regressed to a similar level of fearfulness as when she first joined us in late August. Her sudden terror totally surprised me because she'd handled every aspect of our camping trip so stunningly well.

On our trip, Shyla saw a huge variety of new things, all without a hint of fear. In one place we visited, she saw base jumpers plummet off a huge cliff and glide to the ground with parachutes. They jumped from the middle rock in this formation.

Those rocks are stupendously high so we were surprised when we spotted people on top of one.

We were even more surprised when a person launched himself off the top and then almost immediately opened a parachute. The roar of the chute in the wind was loud but, after a bark, Shyla was calm about it. I have to admit that, although I too was calm, the jumpers certainly shattered the peace of the desert.

In another site, we were all surprised by a hot air balloon floating past our campsite early in the morning. It was quite loud with the bursts of hot air, and it was close to our camp when we first saw it. Again, Shyla didn't seem afraid of such an odd thing.

The balloon floated all around us, down into the canyon and up onto the huge sheer rocks that make up the canyon walls. It was cool to see the balloon at first but then it started to feel like an invasion of a quiet and peaceful canyon from above. I hope that no balloons make this journey in the spring when falcons nest high on the walls of this canyon.

 The dogs watched the balloon along with us.

 Neither of them was upset about it. I was beginning to think that Shyla's fearfulness was behind her.

So, you can imagine my surprise when a visit to the vet (a place that Shyla likes) was terrifying to her on Tuesday and then a visit to another part of town that Shyla likes was scary today. Due to this sudden reappearance of fairly extreme fearfulness, my trainer and I are starting back at Square One with basic socialization but our hope is that she'll bounce back fast this time. Indeed, we started to see some signs of Shyla's incredible resilience today.

No news on her leg yet... we're hoping to hear the radiologists' conclusions soon. For the sake of my sanity, I'm just assuming that it's going to turn out to be okay, one way or another.