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So…this happened.

I had a brilliant blog post idea today (Sunday) that I meant to work on this afternoon.  But…this happened.

That's our doggy door. You'll note that it's in pieces. You'll note that there's a lot of duct tape involved. Yup.

Here’s the story.  This morning, we put the dogs outside before we left for the church meetings.  Choco and Yaris haven’t been the best behaved dogs in the house lately and when that happens, they get to spend the time we’re out of the house in the backyard.  Normally this isn’t a problem.  Choco entertains herself by sleeping in the one puffy bed they have left.  Yaris might decide to help in the garden by digging some holes, or even a trench.  Maybe she’ll go around and pick all the apples off the trees or sample some of the fig leaves.  She probably has a bunch of raquetballs outside that she can play with.  At any rate, they can keep themselves entertained until we get home.  Normally.  But not today.

Today, when I got back, I went to let the dogs in the house.  When I slid the cover off the doggy door, I noticed that the flap was missing.  When I inspected the hole where the flap should be, I noticed that two of the three mounting holes for the flap were also missing.  Now, perhaps you’re asking how holes can be missing.  They were missing because chunks of the mounting plate in which the mounting holes are drilled were missing.  Obviously the flap could not stay on in such a situation.  It was lying forlornly off to the side.

I guess the dogs really didn’t want to be outside today.  It was kind of cold and rainy and I guess they were indignant that they had to stay outside in the cold and rain.  Never mind that our patio is covered and if they really wanted to, they could have shared the puffy bed and kept warm.  I’ve seen them do that before.  Also, they’re both ridiculously furred.  They are plenty warm just on their own.  At any rate, I suspect Choco was the one who actually ripped the flap off the door.  Yaris was the one that probably did all the other damage in the yard (chewed up hat, chewed up box, some bags strewn about, not sure if there were any new holes or trenches dug).

Well, our doggy door is a very old patio sliding glass door mount type but it was still functional.  It was just the flap area that was broken.  So I set about checking to see if Home Depot or Petco carried just the door and flap portion of the unit.  It turns out, Home Depot does.  By this time, my father came home and declared that the door portion was beyond repair and we should just replace the whole unit, which meant the frame as well as the door/flap assembly.  I thought this was pretty strange.  I mean, I had just checked and I saw the Home Depot carries just door assemblies.  Why would we need to replace the whole frame?  But whatever.  I checked if Home Depot had the frame unit big enough for our dogs and they did.  Off we went.

As it turns out, our sliding glass door is ESPECIALLY SHORT.  If you’ve seen the rest of our house, you’ll realize that this does not make any sense.  When my parents remodeled their house, they made everything taller so that it would be more comfortable for us.  Why then do we have an ESPECIALLY SHORT sliding glass door and door frame?  I do not know.  But we have one.  And it’s too short for the new patio doggy door unit.  In fact, I found out that our old unit was also too tall and we had it cut down to size.  We didn’t want to do that this time because this particular unit was also wider than our old one and it meant there was less clearance for humans to get in and out of the door.

I took this time to disassemble the door assembly to prove my original point, that we could just replace the door and flap assembly.  I really wish I did that to begin with.  Oh well.  We made a trip back to Home Depot.  The patio door unit we just bought was returned and I went on a search for the door and flap assembly.  Well…it turns out that the company that makes the patio door set no longer makes the large size one, which is what we have, of course.  Their sizes are small, medium, extra large, and super large.  What?  What is super large?  And how can you have modifiers on “large” if you don’t even have a “large” to begin with?

Now I have to call the company now and see if they still have spare parts for this discontinued large patio door set.  They are not opened on the weekends, of course, so I have to call during work tomorrow.  The door assembly doesn’t have a part number so I have to bring it with me to work in case I need to reference sizes.  I would bring a tape measure too, but I guess a perk of working in a manufacturing environment is that I can easily obtain a tape measure from one of the guys on the assembly floor.

This is all well and good but I still have a patio doggy door with a big hole on the bottom.  A big hole is not conducive to keeping heat in the house (not that I mind, but apparently everyone else in the world does not like cold weather, including the dogs).  A big hole is not conducive to keeping curious animals out of the house, although the dogs generally do a pretty good job of keeping them out of the yard in the first place.  A big hole is not conducive to keeping bugs out of the house.  The dogs are not so good at catching bugs.  I needed to cover the hole in a way that allowed the dogs to still get in and out of the house.

It’s a good thing I have a lot of duct tape.  It just needs to last until I get a spare door assembly in.  Maybe a few spare doors.

Meet Mr. Tentacles

This is Mr. Tentacles. He’s a sundew. Specifically, he’s a Cape sundew (Drosera capensis). I got him along with a Venus fly trap who is still unnamed (suggestions, anyone?) a few months back.

Not long after I got Mr. Tentacles, I brought him to the office with me.  I thought he’d make a nice office plant and I figured he could help keep the fruit fly population down once he warmed up to the idea of being in my office.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.  He never really liked the idea of sitting in my office even if I’d let him outside to get some air and sunbathe sometimes.  He stubbornly refused to put out new leaves and the few new leaves that were growing withered and died.  I think he was on strike.  Possibly, he was depressed.  That made me really sad.

So, I decided maybe he wanted the company of his friend, the Venus fly trap (who I had never intended to bring to the office), so I brought Mr. Tentacles back home.  And since then, he’s been thriving.  The photo above is from only a few days after I brought him back home.  I placed him next to the Venus fly trap on a windowsill that gets a good amount of indirect sunlight (and even some direct sun) and gave him his own water bowl so he can have water whenever he wants.  He’s putting out new leaves!

About a month later, he has lots of new leaves and they’re all drenched in dew.  The leaves look like this, like they’re supposed to (minus the fly, Mr. Tentacles hasn’t caught a fly yet):

And, just last week, Mr. Tentacles caught the little spider that has been spinning webs around the Venus fly trap and himself!  I was very proud of Mr. Tentacles.  Stupid spider.  I looked yesterday and the leaf that caught the spider has unfolded and it looks like the spider has been digested.  Hahahahah!  Take that!

So, moral of the story: cape sundews get very lonely and need company in order to be healthy.  Or…they need a good amount of indirect sunlight and lots of water.  Take your pick.