Oooh, wonderful news!

After three years of effort, Finn has finally stayed on command for long enough for me to bring my mother her coffee and then walk back across the room to him. I mean, it took him a few tries first, and I had to sprint on the way back to get there and snuggle him before his butt left the floor - but still! He stayed! When he didn't want to! Good dog!

I'm not sure how you're supposed to do it, but I'm pretty sure that we lucked into this. Over the past year and a half he's grown a lot more used to the idea that we leave the room and then come back, and so he doesn't start howling and dancing around the instant he finds himself without a human in view. Better, he's even worked out that sometimes we go and come back so fast that it's not worth getting himself off the bed/couch/cushion just to catch up to us right as we finish peeing/getting water and head back to him. But he likes to know if he ought to, and so once I realized he doesn't always follow I started letting him know if it was going to be a short trip out of the room or a long one, by either signalling "come" or "stay" at him. I wasn't trying to train him to stay anymore, having given that up as a lost cause, I just didn't want him to follow me if he didn't want to and I was only stepping out to take out the trash, or to wait for me to come back if I wasn't planning on it. (If he thinks he's been abandoned, he still starts howling about half the time instead of coming to find us.)

So I think he finally understands what I've been trying to tell him! "Stay" means "I'm coming back, you goofball!"

(I'm reasonably sure he doesn't fully believe it's possible I might not want him to follow at all, but he's trying.)

Of course, there's other stuff in the news too

and I have 130 tabs open and I haven't even checked my mail yet, so let's clear some out.

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