Glad the festivities are over

Chinese or Lunar New Year is over,.......... wellll...there are actually 15 days to the new year celebrations but the official public holidays and bulk of visitations are over. The first day of the Chinese New Year (or CNY as I like to refer to it) was 18 Feb and we had the 19th and 20th as public holidays. CNY is celebrated by all Chinese, regardless of religion. This is when families open up their homes to relatives and friends and where food (can be proper lunch or dinner but is usually in the form of snacks, goodies) and the exchange of hong baos (small red envelopes containing money and is for children) feature prominently. There is also the reunion dinner on the eve of the CNY where families adjourn to a relative's house for a huge meal. CNY is a celebration of family but friends are very welcome too. Oh and I forgot to mention that a massive spring-cleaning of the home is generally done before CNY.

My favourite part of CNY is the food, I love all the snacks laid out and that goes double for Brandy. The family and I do not feed her any of these but it is the visitors who 'ooh and aah' over her and then drop tidbits on the floor for her to gobble up. She also loves all the attention. She received lots of pets and was duly applauded when showing off her small repertoire of parlor tricks (shaking hands, sneezing, rolling over). She also ran around with some of the young kids.

This is Brandy all tuckered out last night. Whenever I try to take a closeup of her sleeping, she usually raises her head to look at me or at least opens an eye to see what I'm doing. But there was no head rising or eye opening for her last night, not even a twitch of an eyelid when I snapped the shot.

Barking madness

Brandy is a barker. There is no getting around it. She may be little but her bark is loud and strident (like those big old-fashioned alarm clocks guaranteed to get you up even if you've only had an hour's sleep last night). She barks when the phone rings, when the doorbell rings, when family comes home (even when we open the door with our key and not ring the bell),when someone drops something loud in the house, when there is any sort of steady noise (like a car alarm or house alarm) outside the house or when thunder growls. Basically she takes any excuse to bark.

Barking to alert the humans that something unusual is happening is ok but she does not shut up even when we, the humans, acknowledge the event and tell her to keep quiet. She does stop barking once the phone stops ringing or whoever is coming in to the house actually gets into the house, then she is all wagging tail and happy yaps. I have had the phone and the doorbell ringing at the same time and yes, there was barking madness and no, I was not a happy human.


(My sister thought Brandy had green eyes 'cos of all the photos I took when her eyes turned out like this, but it's the camera flash. I don't know why but she sometimes sits like this with one of her hind legs sticking out. I think it's bad posture and have tried to correct her many times.)


We have tried different ways to try and stop the barking madness, scolding her, reassuring her, distracting her, calmly and quietly telling her no, yelling even but the madness continues. I watch Oprah sometimes and she has this dog trainer guru (I forgot his name) that comes on every so often and his approach to dog training is to show the dog you are the boss. He says that pet dogs prefer to be part of your pack and once you've established that, it is easy to train the dog not to bark or jump around wildly. And it seems to work for him. I have a strong suspicion that humans are not the dominant party in Brandy's world.