I took Roxie for a walk tonight.  It was my first time in a while, as Melody usually does it.  The last time I walked her it was still light out this time of day.  Now it's after dark.  Tonight was also misty from the rain earlier.  In the cemetery.  In late October.  With just a couple streetlights casting an eerie glow through the mist.  Edgar Allen Poe would have loved it.  It could be worse, though.  A week from now it would also have been Halloween Eve.  

Meet one of the victims in the ongoing struggle to domesticate our dog Roxie. It's a little hard to see here, but Roxie decided to make her own doggie door for the garage.  She chewed completely through the door by stripping off pieces, one layer at a time.

Admittedly, this door has no business being on the garage in the first place. It's an interior door, and it was on it's last legs even before Roxie got hold of it.  But it's what we had, and it's been there since before we moved in to this house.  One of the problems with the whole situation is that the door is an odd size; it's both shorter and narrower than is typical.  This has made it difficult to find a replacement.

Today, after much time researching alternatives, I finally purchased that replacement.  The new door will be taller, which will mean some minor surgery to the side of the garage itself, but it will make it easier to find a match should anyone need to replace the door in the future.  Not that this is likely any time soon: the new door also has a steel shell.  Let's see Roxie chew through that!

It'll be a couple more weeks before I have a chance to install (I need to borrow some tools and labor), but the ball is rolling now.

We're trying to housebreak Roxie. And for the most part she's getting it. However, she does not like the snow. And since we got a couple inches on Saturday and Sunday, she decided that she didn't want to go outside to do her business - even after the snow started to melt.