Toto was crate trained

Check it out! I never noticed it before, but there it is – his own little covered wagon style crate.

I've been watching the black and white part of the Wizard of Oz most of the day today, much of it frame by frame, studying the cool old Depression-era details. Clothes, shoes, furniture, dishes, buildings, tools, the layout of the farm, the professor's gypsy wagon, Margaret Hamilton's bike and baskets – all of it interests me. For example, at the very beginning Aunt Em is out in the yard gathering something into her apron, and I can't quite tell what it is she's doing – possibly taking tiny chicks from some kind of incubator and putting them in with a big mama hen who presumably will sit on them to keep them warm ...?

Anyway. I didn't do crate training with Tater because we were never apart from each other long enough when he was small to have to worry about his training at all. Training him was truly effortless – he slept in the bed with me from his very first night, and when he woke up at night and started moving around I took him outside and he did his thing and that was it. From the time he was a tiny puppy he's never had a single accident in the house, not even when he's been accidentally locked inside for a whole day. He did have a crate, which he could go into anytime he wanted to. But he never seemed to like it much.

I keep thinking about crate training lately though because there's a possibility I may be training another puppy later this year and I'm too realistic to assume it's just automatically going to be as easy as training Tater. For one thing, this pup would not be able to be with me all the time like Tater was – and I think that's what really made all the difference.

Back to the Wizard of Oz for a moment – I really love what Auntie Em is wearing, that long dress with the long dark apron, shawl and boots. If we do end up in another Great Depression I'm maybe in luck in that regard at least, being already 100% on board with the grim and practical fashions of rural poverty. The ruby slippers are actually a pretty cool look too, now that I look at them again. I've bought red shoes over and over again over the years just because I do love them so much, but for some reason I can never bring myself to actually wear them ... they seem too bright. I do enjoy looking at them on other people, though.

And you know, those scenes where Dorothy's house is blown away – that is really scary to me now, in a way it never was when I used to watch this movie as a kid. The sequence when she runs into the yard in the storm and everybody's gone, and then the one with the house flying through the center of the tornado, falling, falling ... that could give me nightmares even now.