Espionage

I'm spying on the dog. You've heard of "nanny-cam"? Well we have "doggy-corder".

Having been told a couple of months ago about Toffee barking 'constantly' when we're out I had become somewhat ... ahhh ... paranoid about leaving her on her own. Just one of many Toffee-related issues that dragged me down to the point of us deciding, as a family, just over a week ago that we could no longer keep her. Cue spasms of agony and floods of tears all round and we realised how much the little booger had wormed her way into our hearts over the last 14 months - and changed our minds in the space of about 30 hours! So I did what I should have done in the first place and focussed on solutions instead of seemingly overwhelming problems. On this particular issue technology has come to the rescue.

I have a pretty basic mp3 player that I mostly use at the gym to prevent brain death while chugging along on a treadmill. It also functions as a recorder and flash drive. And we have a neat little program on our computer called Windows Movie Maker which just so happens to also work with audio files.

So now whenever we're all out and Toffee is left on her own, I park my mp3 player in a ziplock bag (because weather has a way of happening when you least expect it around here) on the roof of her dog run and set it recording. Then when I get back, I import the recording into Movie Maker and it gives me a nice little graph showing how much noise has been happening while I've been gone. Which is extremely cool because it means I don't have to listen to the whole darn recording. I can think of better things to do with my life. Anyway. I can just jump to those points to investigate what exactly the noise was. Over the last week we have had a whole lot of construction noise, lawnmowers, planes going over (quite impressed by the pick-up on the recorder!) and occasionally ... very, very, very occasionally ... Toffee. So if anyone's barking 'constantly' it ain't her! Did her behaviour suddenly improve? Was it someone else's dog being noisy all along? I don't know. And at this point it just doesn't matter.

Saved. By a cheap little DSE mp3 player. I love it.