Electronics for Dogs: All's Well That Ends Well

Mountain slide into a den on the walk back to the truck. She said somebody was home, but we did not have time to dig, and so we left it for another day.


I am frugal. Or, as my daughter describes it: Cheap, cheap, cheap.

I take pride in it, and so when something goes wrong that could cost me money, I tend to get vexated.

Such was the case on Friday, when I brought in the dogs for the night and counted three dogs and only two Invisible Fence collars. Where was Pearl's collar?

For the record, these collars are not cheap -- $300 a unit -- and I live in fear of having one of them come off and disappear into the half acre of ivy in the back yard. There was nothing to do about it on Friday night, as it was already dark. On Saturday morning, however, I swept the yard and found nothing, but on a second go-over I located the collar sitting on the top of an ivy-free mulched bed. A small miracle!

The other bit of electronic vexation this weekend was that I lost my Deben locator box on the farm last weekend. These old Deben boxes are no longer made, and though I have a spare, I do not like the loose feeling on that particular box's dial . I wanted my old Deben box back!

And so, even though I did not have time to hunt, it was back out to the farm yesterday for a bit of "locating the locator." I was pretty sure I had left the locator box at the last hole of the day, but I was afraid I might have accidentally buried it.

The good news is that I did not bury it, and I did find it. The case on the box is cracked (Was it cracked before?), and there was a huge pile of poop on the repaired den. I mean a HUGE pile. It was hard to tell what it was -- it looked a bit like raccoon scat, but it was such an enormous pile that I could not believe it. Could it be coyote scat? No hairs in it, so probably a coon, but a really big one with bowel problems and an eating disorder.

No matter; I got my locator box back, and with a little piece of hard plastic cut from a CD-rom case, and a little black PC-7 epoxy to bind it to the side, I have repaired the box and it is in fine working order again, if considerably uglier. All is well.

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