The Infamous Holly Tales
Holly The Tractor Thief
I've always known that Holly was mechanically inclined. After all,  any dog who unlocks dishwashers, opens locked doors, and spends time  seriously thinking about a project before going ahead with it is obviously a  mechanic at heart.

On the 4th of July I was heading out front to watch our local parade (in which the neighbor kids were participating) when I realized I hadn't seen Holly or her Jindo buddy Kiva for a while. Silence and absence always make me wonder what Holly is up to now, so I went looking.

Despite the heat, it soon became obvious that Holly was not inside the house hanging out in the AC. Truthfully not that unusual for Holly, she's a true California girl who likes to get in her sunbathing time.  I figured she would be laying out in the yard. A quick look yielded no dogs however.

My first sign that Holly was up to something came in the form of several pieces of metal being carried around by Kwest. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where he got them. I don't make a habit of leaving such things lying around the yard. It took a bit of searching, but I soon realized that there were nuts, bolts, and pieces of various hoses lying around the tractor in the yard. Since the tractor had been intact the evening before I took a good guess that I'd found my dog.

Sure enough, around the other side I found Holly underneath the tractor, surrounded by bits and pieces of hose, and very intent on the engine.  Since I'd been heading out to the parade I happened to have my camera in my pocket, so yes I did get a couple pictures of Holly and her assistant Kiva doing their best to dismantle my dad's tractor. The big surprise came when I then approached them and asked what on earth they thought they were doing. All of a sudden I realized that the tractor was making a "chuck chuck chuck" noise. All I could think of was "oh my goodness - she's hotwired the tractor".

I shuffled all the dogs away just on the basic principle that tractors should not go "chuck chuck" and who knows what might happen next. Holly was not happyafter all she had spent considerable time working on this project and here I was disrupting her work.

I'm not totally sure what she wanted the tractor for. Perhaps she was planning on joining the 4th of July parade? Better yet, I'm betting she had heard me say at the weight pull the day before that we were coming back to pull again on the 5th. Knowing Holly, she was plotting to take the tractor down to the weight pull so that she wouldn't have to do all the work. Instead she had to pull that WWPDX leg all by herself on Saturday without the benefit of any help from a tractor (yeah, Holly went back and pulled an X-leg on Saturday - I'm still in total shock that she would do any such thing but she sure was having fun).  But trust Holly to try to find an easy way out :-)

I've suggested to Dad on many occations that he might want to park his tractor in a location where the dogs can not reach it. He has insisted that there is no way the dogs can dammage it. He said the same about his boat trailer, and then had to chase down the whole wiring system while Kwest was having a ball draging it around the yard at full speed (he was a pup at the time, though I've always suspected that Holly was the culprit who pulled the plugs and actually removed the wires). Maybe this time Dad will listen to me. Holly hopes he doesn't, after all he leaves such interesting stuff for her to play with.