Puppy Lesson #3 -- Purse Diving

Today, Maya would like to share the joys of purse diving with those unfortunate puppies who have not experienced the thrill and joy:

Purse diving is one of the most entertaining things you can do.  For those of you who have not mastered this great past-time, or who are unfortunate enough to have a person who doesn't have a purse, you don't know what you're missing!

Female persons are very protective of their purses, so the first thing you need to do is wait patiently until your person leaves the room where the purse is located.  The key word here is patiently.  I know you want to get to the purse, but if you show too much interest, she'll just put it somewhere where you can't reach it and then your fun is over before it even begins.

Once your person has left the room, and you're sure she won't be returning soon, walk slowly to the purse.  This is very important for puppies like me who wear more than one tag on their collars.  You do not want to make any noise at this point.  If your person's purse is open, or only closed with a magnetic button in the middle, skip to the next paragraph.  If your person's purse if closed with metal teeth, you'll need to disarm the metal teeth before proceeding.  I know this sounds scary, but it's not.  All purses with metal teeth have a built-in opener.  It's usually located at one end of the metal teeth; it may or may not have a handle.  Either way, just grab it with your teeth and pull towards the closed teeth to the opposite end of the purse.  If the opener is in the middle of the purse, you'll have to decide which direction to pull.  One direction will close the teeth, the other will open them.  It's ok if you guess wrong, just stop pulling and then pull in the opposite direction.

Now that the purse is open, it's time to go diving.  To execute a perfect dive, simply bury your face in the purse.  There are always a lot more items than you could ever play with, so I'll just point out some of the common ones: 

1. Wallets -- These are not that fun by themselves, but they're filled with other stuff that is.  Credit cards are great because it takes a lot to break them.  Checkbooks are not fun.  I don't know about paper money because my person rarely has any.  I don't think it's much fun for her to play with it either.
2. Keys -- These are fun if you like metal like I do.  And they make a lot of jingly noise.  If you don't like either of those things, just move on to something else. 
3. Lipstick -- While this looks like fun, under no circumstances should you touch it.  I repeat -- DO NOT TOUCH THE LIPSTICK!!  Lipstick must be something sacred to people because my person freaked out when I grabbed hers.  I've never seen her that upset before.  In case you don't know what it looks like, think of a pencil only really short and fat, and it opens into two pieces.  If you're not sure if something is lipstick, don't risk it.
4. Rubber bands, hair clips, etc -- Don't bother with these.  Your person drops these or leaves them lying around all the time, so don't waste precious time playing with these - they are not purse-specific items.

My person has a lot of other stuff in her purse, but I don't know if they're common or not, and I just wanted to point out some of the common stuff. 

Last tip:  Like everything else, you have to take your treasure elsewhere to play with it.  Don't get caught near the purse, and don't pull out anything you won't be immediately playing with.  My person always seems to have some kind of paper in her purse, and I always mess up and accidentally pull some of the paper out too.  That's how I always get caught.  I'm still working on only grabbing one thing at a time, but until I master that, I need to practice getting paper back into the purse.

Happy diving!

-Maya