Skye is really good at staying home alone during the day, she has no separation anxiety whatsoever. She has full access to the house and the backyard, and usually settles in a sunny spot to nap.
The problem is in the evening. She becomes very active at dusk and barks a lot at all the critters moving around in the yard. With the end of daylight saving time, we've been closing the back door earlier so she doesn't spend hours barking. And she has really done well, not fussing about the door being closed and settling down inside with us.
Now, we've never left her home alone with no access to the backyard. And we are going to need to do that in a few weeks for a dinner party in the city when we will come home late. So we started leaving her home alone in the evenings. We turn on all the webcams to see her reaction, and go in the garage for a short period. We started with 5 seconds and she didn't react. Then we did 10 and 30 seconds, still no reaction. Skye remains sleeping on her bed in the living room. We increased the period to 1 minute, 5, and 10 minutes. She couldn't care less about us. We started opening and closing the big garage doors as they are noisy and indicate we are taking the car out. No reaction.
Yesterday we "left" for 20 minutes, but since staying in the garage is kind of cold and boring, we sat in the car with the heated seats on :) We were going to read our books, but we ended up exploring the fun toys Telsa hides in its onboard computer and playing a racing game in our car in our garage. LOL
Note the iPad below the Tesla screen so we can monitor Skye who has been sleeping all her way through. Yay!
Next 40 minutes and then 1 hour. Maybe we will drive out of the garage and stay in the driveway and watch a movie in the car ;) And if that goes well, then I think we will be ready to go out for dinner!