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WARNING: Guard Dog On Duty

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There she is; the fiercest of FaeFaes to ever nap in the driveway. Beware all ye who enter through Food Lady’s gate!

Especially if you’re a HAWK.  Or a PIGEON.  Or a SPARROW.  If you have wings of any kind, Addy bids you UNwelcome.  This is her ferocious battle-the-birds pose.

I kinda wish she wasn’t so bad ass.  She’s roughly the same size as my ducks, and three of those got eaten by hawks and eagles!

But what can you do.  She’s a junkyard dog, after all.

Today was the first really warm day of the year.  Like t-shirt warm.  I’ve taken a bit of a break from interior house stuff to work on exterior stuff.  Last weekend I spent a day putting up fencing along the orchard to separate the orchard from the yard, and by extension, separate the dogs from the outer perimeter fence and thus from joggers, cyclists, horseback riders and John Q Public, all of whom the dogs have taken to barking at and rushing at.  The following morning Winter forgot I spent all those blistered-hands and backbreaking hours stretching and u-nail hammering and ran full tilt into the fence when he tried to chase a cyclist going up the path.  HA HA HA.  WINNER!

(OTOH, today my landlord’s lovely dog Mia chased a cyclist along that very same path, so I’m relieved to know that my dogs aren’t the only morons in the neighbourhood).

The next day Michelle came to visit and I put her to work, as I usually do (she’s a good sport) and we finished fencing off my North pasture to separate *it* from my yard, so the goats can move in.  And so that the dogs cannot get into the pasture and eat my goats.  Because while I have nothing against the practice of eating goats, Harvey and Nibbles are not on the menu!

We also put landscape cloth up all along the front fence, so the dogs don’t see everything going by and bark at it, and it’s worked very well!  Only Addy is sneaky and pigheaded enough to get flat and peer under the gate for a glimpse of shoes or hooves or wheels, but when she sees them and barks, the other dogs have stopped joining her in her noise-making because they haven’t figured out her peeping tom trick and think she’s just being an idiot (and she is!).  It’s really super cut down on the decibel levels when the dogs are outside.

Naughty though she be, she remains one of my favouritest dogs.

The landscape cloth barrier has not stopped the entire neighbourhood from admiring Terrence though.  The dog room window looks out onto the walnut orchard and almost every evening while I’m preparing dog meals, I see at least one person strolling or cycling by stop to stare at Terrence.  A couple of days ago a neighbour I had not yet met came up to my gate when I was outside with the dogs, and explained that his niece and nephew who were here visiting from Alberta have wanted to meet Terrence for DAYS and were too shy to ask, so he brought them over.  They came on in, admired Terrence, held baby turkeys and just generally figured my yard was a petting zoo, which I find both hilarious and kind of accurate.  (They came back today for round two, and were lucky enough to get to go visit goats with the landlord).  And I guess Terrence’s destiny is to be famous.  Which is pretty impressive when you figure that his original destiny was to become Thanksgiving Dinner.  Instead, he has thus far given me 10 little Terrences to pass on the family line, with more potential little Terrences in the incubator right now!

I ALSO spent quite a bit of time last weekend building a stall in the chicken barn for the goats to sleep in at night, but my landlord said it might be a pain in the ass to convince them to go in the barn at night, and figured he would put a goat house in the pasture for me.  My experience with farm landlords for the last 8 years can be summed up with the sentence: “I have a really good idea and I’m going to get on it never!” So you can imagine my surprise when 20 minutes after suggesting he would do this, he rolled up on his tractor with an old livestock trailer hitched on the back and said “Here’s your goat house!”

And of course, me being me, I made him stop the tractor so I could compose a photo of the dogs in the trailer in the right light before he put it in the goat pasture.

Piper is conspicuously absent from this photo, because in her old age she has developed a phobia of vehicles.  She seems to enjoy hiking with us every day, but does not enjoy getting in the van, nor her time in it.  So when she saw me asking dogs to hop in the trailer, she scuttled away and vanished.  And because she’s going on fifteen, she’s allowed to get away with shit like that; it’s a privilege of old age.

“Can’t sleep; cars’ll eat me!”

My landlord also brought me 4 raised garden beds and put them in my yard so I can grow things!  Things like Dexters, which are already coming up nicely.

Things like food, and NOT like Japanese knotweed which has appeared everywhere, as Gracie so kindly demonstrates:

Gracie and her brother and sister came to stay with me for a week while their mom was away.  I took advantage of them living here to test drive my studio on not-my-dogs.

Gracie is the master of the Aussie head tilt!  I miss that head tilt – Tweed got the gene for it with his Aussie half.  None of my other dogs do it.

She’s also very photogenic!

Her, umm, “portly” siblings are slightly less photogenic, poor things.  They are old, and Gracie’s mom adopted them a couple of months ago, so they came to her really, umm, FAT.  They are losing weight slowly, but they are definitely not trim creatures, so it was a challenge to capture them without showcasing all their extra, err, fur ;-)

This is Cyan

And his sister Millie.

They lucked out with their new home for sure!  There were, I think, 6 of them in total, left in “boarding” at a local rescue and then never collected (and the rescue got stiffed on the bill, of course), by a breeder of border collies.  Le f*cking sigh.

This weekend I get to photograph my friend Christine’s new puppy, a border collie/whippet mix.  I am bouncing up and down excited about that, Peetie-style. (I love this photo.  It almost makes me like Peetie.  Almost.)

She may not be graceful.  Or obedient.  Or smart.  But she is funny.

I have another surprise coming this weekend too, but I’m not going to tell you about it yet.  I will photograph it, and spring it on you unsuspecting-like!

Don’t be suspicious.  DON’T BE LIKE THE WOOTWOO!

Next weekend I am at the ASC of BC annual trial as their official photographer, which I am excited about.  The trial is always fun to photograph, and they always feed me food.  And I’m a fan of food, especially free food.

Because it’s a relatively small trial with mostly the same competitors every year, I figure most of the Elite level people already have a kajillion photos of their dogs playing agility taken by me, so I’m going to concentrate on the Novice and Open rings mostly.  Last year I had entered Spring in Novice and photographed the trial at the same time, which means I didn’t get many Novice level photos as I was running in those classes.  So this year I’ll spend most of my time photographing the up-and-comers, and leave some free time for mini-sessions at the event.  If you’re interested, check out my newly designed website for information and pricing.  Hope to see some of you there!

I am going to leave you with this photo of Dexter, which looks like basically all other photos of Dexter, as he only has one facial expression, apparently.

And also with the word HAM.  Which is ANOTHER surprise I can’t tell you about yet, but should be able to spring on you in a few weeks :)

I, TWooie, Do Solemnly Swear

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That I will beat up The Food Lady’s landlord’s dog again at the first opportunity to do so.

Naughty TWooie!!  My landlord has a very sweet and amiable yellow Lab named Mia.  Sometimes Mia comes along when the landlord visits to do repairs or whatever.  Last week he and Mia stopped by to bring the pressure washer to try and clean up the DOGAWFUL MESS a turkey made when she got on my porch and managed to open a can of white ceiling paint, knock it over, and then tread through it all over the porch.  Although TWooie has been doing *surprisingly* well on our hikes and hasn’t objected to any of the client dogs who come along, he has a different view of dogs on HIS turf, and he Does Not Want Mia on his lawn.  He was actually doing okay – some growling and air snapping at her from a respectable and safe distance behind my knees – but when Mia and the landlord went to leave through the gate, TWooie must have figured all his bluff and noise had worked, because he went in for the hair pull (in a previous life, TWooie was an 11 year old girl) and Mia objected, and the dog fight was on!

As neither of them really had their heart in it (after all, TWooie is 98% posturing and only 2% malice) nobody got hurt, but it was quite the epic battle.  We* (*I) felt bad, so we* (*I) went to the doggie bakery and bought Mia a little heart shaped cake that said “sorry” on it to give to Mia when we got back from our hike.  And it was very easy to give to Mia, since she and the landlord were once again on our lawn doing stuff when we returned, so I assume the landlord wasn’t too upset about the whole thing.

But can we talk for a moment about my turkey with superturkey strength?  How does a turkey open a can of paint?  And WHY?  I really don’t get turkeys.  I have two lady turkeys right now sitting on a dozen eggs between them, but will they nest inside the barn?  No no, they must lay their eggs and sit on them outside, behind the barn, under some old dead blackberry thornies, where they are guaranteed to get pissed on when the weather is bad, all night long.  Last night I went out in the pitch black and downpour with a piece of plywood and made them a shelter so they didn’t drown.  And then at first light they promptly abandon their eggs to run around squawking and eating all day.  I don’t have high hopes for those eggs hatching.

But I do have high hopes for the ones in my incubator hatching!  They are due in one week, and I candled them two days ago and found 13 turkey embryos bouncing around in their shells like teenage gymnasts.  Very exciting stuff!

I spent last weekend, about 10 hours a day, painting.  I painted until my arms felt like they were going to fall off, and I could no longer feel my hands.  I took care of the hideous, no good, very bad psychedelic room, which required two coats of primer and two coats of paint (and I swear, in the right light, I can STILL see the outlines of the hideous pattern!).  But now it’s done, as is the dog room (kinda).

 

The dog room needed a new floor, so I bought and and laid lino against pee errors (also known around here as “Gemma, Piper and Addy piss wherever they want to”) and painted, and installed new baseboards.

And psychedelic room is now a nice relaxing shade of pale blue-grey, and not an assault on the visual and aesthetic senses!

I also painted my bedroom, and I still don’t care if you hate pink or not; I like it, and I like how it turned out.  Especially as the bedroom used to be a horrible colour that looked like a cross between pea soup and cat vomit.

As I had repainted the bathroom a couple of weekends before that:

This leaves me with just three rooms to go; living room, office and kitchen.  Starting to see the light at the end of the renovation tunnel!  The living room will be an aubergine shade, if I can find a paint store that carries it and/or can replicate it:

and will also need white baseboards installed.  The kitchen is going to be a nice shade of apple green, and I haven’t decided what do with my office yet.  It also needs flooring, as it’s just subfloor at the moment (don’t ask me why, I really could not tell you the mysteries of Which Rooms Deserved Real Floors And Which Did Not according to the previous tenant).  I also picked up an extremely inexpensive table and chairs for the dining room.  The table top needs to be refinished, so that’s also on my list of things to do.

But as I say, I took this weekend off from painting.  Although it is sunny today, and I am itching to start fencing, because a couple days ago we arrived home to find two cows in the yard.  I did not see them initially.  This may seem weird to you, that I would not notice cattle on my lawn, and I admit it’s weird to me too, but that’s what happened.  And I let the dogs out of the van, and they DID see the cows, and exactly what you think would happen when dogs see cows for the first time happened, and it was CHAOS.  So I really need to make sure that cows and goats are one side of the fence and my acorn-brained dogs are on the other at all times.  Because Fae thinks she can *take* a longhorn cow protecting her 500lb calf, and I don’t think that’s how I want Fae to depart this mortal coil.

Anyway, since the photo studio room was painted, I was eager to try it out.  So yesterday I limited myself to just a couple of errands (I took garbage to the dump, since we don’t have garbage pick up out here in the middle of nowhere, and I picked up two lady ducks for my new Pekin drake Howard – Howard was a stray duck rescued by a friend who then passed him on to me.  And apparently ducks are racist, because my India Runners staunchly refused to make friends with Howard, and Howard was sad.  But I found a nearby duck farmer who provided me with two Lady Howards, so now he has his own little harem and everyone is happy again) and then I rigged up holders for my backdrops, set up my lights, and gave the studio a test run!

(for those of you who saw the original of this on Facebook yesterday – yes, Photoshop and I fixed “Winter’s Wonderland” that was advertising its presence very PINKLY!)

I’m lucky that the vast majority of my dogs like being photographed in studio and fall all over themselves volunteering to be the model.

Even Addy, who basically does NOTHING I ask her to do, ever, likes posing for the camera.  I suspect it’s just a combination of her loving being the center of attention, and cookies.  But whatever her motivation, she is simply adorable to photograph under studio lights.

Look at her adorable face!

And see all those tiny little white hairs sticking up on top of her head?  They are “sticking up” because the rest of the top of her head is bald!  Totally naked!  She suffers from Dilute Colour Alopecia, so she loses patches of her blue hairs on random spots on her body.  Usually it grows back in with coat change, but this time her head remains bald.  So when photographing Addy, it’s all about angles.  Otherwise, her naked head is very obvious.  See?  (btw, this is her checking to see if Wootie ate her modeling paycheque and if there’s any chance of getting it back before it slides down his gullet.  Wootie, OTOH, just views this as an opportunity to make out with a hot, slender woman  … even if she is balding).

Head shots are kinda my favourite, and I think Fae Fae won the session with this one:

It’s those big, big, round brown eyes and the wispy ears combination that does it, I think.

Although Dexter can give her a run for her money when it comes to, erm, “unique” head shots.

I messed with Piper’s photo a little too much in post, but I’m sharing it anyway because her expression kills me.  It’s so classically  Old “Who Am I?  What’s Happening?  Yay Anyway!” Dog.

She’s doing pretty good, my old lady dog is.  She has more cognitive issues than Tweed did at her age, but I kind of expected that because she was always a “live hard” kind of dog, whereas Tweed was a lot more laid back.  She is mostly deaf now, and I have to really keep an eye on her during hikes because it’s easy for her to march off in the wrong direction – she is very determined, and if I lose sight of her she can’t hear me calling her.  She has trouble with some of the paths if they are steep, or there are logs in her way, so she will head off to find a way around the obstacles, which sometimes leads to her just going somewhere else altogether, and then me running all over the forest trying to find her!  Sometimes, when she thinks she has had enough, she will simply turn around and start matching back in the direction of the car.  She’s tough as nails, bad knees and all.

And Wootie.  How can anyone not love The Woo?  I still can’t believe he’s almost 12.  He is such a perpetual puppy.

Whereas TWooie is just a perpetual weirdo.

And Peetie remains a perpetual PEST.  I have never had such an irritating dog.  Miss “No Drive” has no off switch and frequently has to be put in her crate to give everyone some down time, otherwise she’s hitting napping dogs with rope toys to make them mad, or bothering the cats, or standing on the arm of my chair and barking in my ear.  I don’t know what I did to transform her so completely, but I wish I could undo it!!

However, I will give her this – yesterday afternoon the landlord’s goats were grazing in the field right behind my yard, so I couldn’t take the dogs out to play ( I could only imagine the Cow Scenario played out again, but this time X 35) so instead I took them out for short walks two at a time to property meet the horses next door through the fence.  There was only one in the paddock, and he really wants to meet my dogs.  But Every Single One of my dogs was an asshole to the horse – Mad Teeth(tm), growling, lunging and barking … except Peetie, who was super keen to make friends and poked her head through the page wire and sniffed noses with the horse and licked his nostrils.

She’s very friendly, so I haven’t throttled her with my bare hands.  Yet.

So anyway, now I have a fully functioning in-house studio and I can start taking clients!  It’s super exciting, I have dreamed of this opportunity for a long time :)

Now it’s time to get out there and start working on the fence while the good weather holds, and prevent the Great Goat Slaughter of 2017.  Also, I want to get the fencing up so I can rearrange the poultry’s living quarters, so I can then bring MY goats home.  GOATS!  Also so excited :)

Hello, My Name Is The Food Lady

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And I inhale paint fumes.

No, not because this is THE SCANDAL you’ve all been waiting for these past 11 years of blogging, but because I spent the day starting to finally fix up this old new house o’mine.  I’ve been here nearly three weeks, but as I work, like, 10 or more hours a day, there’s not been a lot of time to do stuff. And also, first it needed to be cleaned.  If ever I meet the old tenant of this house, I am going to offer her my condolences on being allergic to cleaning products, sponges, cloths and scrubbing implements, because there is NO other reason for a house to be this gross.  I have found dirt caked into places I did not know dirt could even find.  It’s almost remarkable.  I am the first to admit that my fastidiousness only extends to things I can see and I cannot guarantee that anything is sparkling behind furniture or appliances I can’t move easily, like my stove (actually I can guarantee that it ISN’T), but dear doG in heaven, how do you get dirt INSIDE your medicine cabinet?

We are on well water here too, and the water is hard, and very high in iron.  My landlord installed a very expensive filtration system on both houses when he bought the place, but former tenant failed to maintain her system (it’s, umm, super easy to maintain incidentally) so it no longer works.  The water smells like it tastes when you bite your lip.  It also stains everything it sits in.  The other morning I was waiting for my toast and *idly* took an SOS pad to the kitchen sink because the entire thing was stained orange.  I assumed I was fighting a losing battle but guess what – 5 minutes later I had a stainless steel coloured sink again.  The bathtub is another story – it’s coming off, slowly, but I am using SOS pads at an alarming rate (and WTF does CLR even do?  Not clean rust off your bathtub, that’s for sure!).  Seriously – had she taken 5 minutes even once a week to give it a quick pass with an SOS pad, it would not be taking me days and days to try and make the bathtub not look like someone murdered pennies in it.  Ugh.

So I woke up this morning and had a lie-in because I was feeling sorry for myself.  I knew starting a new business would be tough, but I guess I didn’t know how tough.  Once I land a client they absolutely love me and their dogs do as well, but I need more of them; I’m not making enough money to survive yet.  I work from 7AM – noonish for my other job, which I can fortunately do from home, but it doesn’t pay very well.  Then I leave around 12:30 and walk dogs, and get home around 5:30PM, if traffic and such favours me.  The nice part of not having many clients yet is that all or almost all of my dogs can come with me, so I don’t need to then exercise dogs when I get home, but the downside is that between gas and bridge tolls, I’m earning almost nothing.  I know it will come – I have a full time client, and one part time client that is going full time soon, and one sporadic part time client.  Not enough yet.  I advertise online wherever I can, and I know it will take time, but at the end of the day, it’s just not enough yet.

My landlord is great and basically will pay for anything I want to do, as long as he himself doesn’t have to do the work as he has own very large farm to run and take care of.  So that’s fine, I buy what I need and take it off the rent.  But my morning job covers my rent, car insurance and car payments and that’s it, so if I spend too much money on stuff before the end of the month, one of those car payments or whatever will bounce.  So that’s frustrating.  I also still have not gotten my security deposit back from my previous landlord, which is supposed to be my hydro payment because I have no other spare money.  I’m living on tomato soup and toast at the moment and I count every penny before I spend it.  It’s kinda of exhausting.  Nope, it’s super exhausting actually, and sometimes it’s so scary I can’t sleep at night.

So anyway, I lay in bed this morning feeling sad, and decided that laying around feeling sad wasn’t going to change anything, so I got out of bed and went for a short drive and dropped business cards off at all the local pet related businesses in the area.  And I picked up some primer and got to work in the bathroom.  Because the bathroom was green.  And I don’t mean a happy apple green, I mean an institutional green like it’s the 1940s and my house is a hospital for mental patients and the nation is at war and there’s no money for nice coloured paint for a class of society we want to pretend is invisible anyway.  It was mental hospital green and DIRTY.  And for some reason, full of nail holes and screw holes.  So I filled them all in, and primed the hell out of it.  Note: “Second coat in just 1 hour!” is LIES DAMN LIES.  It’s bed time and it’s still wet.  But now that the bathroom is white(ish) it looks about 3 times bigger than it did this morning.  It’s going to look pretty okay when it’s painted a) white and b) not with flat paint.  And I am just going to assume that all of the other rooms are going to look bigger when painted too, because most them are ALSO green of some kind, or else some really depressing bargain-bin beige, or – like the room that is going to become my photo studio – an acid trip of insane psychedelic swirls (not.even.kidding).  Oh primer, we are going to become very good friends for a long time, I think.

Whilst waiting (futilely as it turned out) for the primer to dry in the bathroom so I could apply a second coat, I decided to paint the dog room.  But first I had to prime the door, because all the doors in the place are ALSO filthy.  And the dog room walls were covered in what looks suspiciously like snot, so they needed to be cleaned.  And then I started painting with a can of orange paint that is supposed to be terracotta with a kick, but looked alarmingly like a pumpkin on ecstasy at a rave when I first slapped it on. I’m hoping it calms the fuck down when it dries!  I did two walls and then decided I was just plain old done with painting for the day, because it was almost dinner time.  And I grabbed my camera and took the dogs outside in the sun.  And this is where you come in :)

“Look Simba, everything the light touches is our kingdom.”

(and yes, I recycled that from my personal facebook page, so here’s my preemptive shut UP to my FB friends)

We started out playing ball in my front field, but that field is ringed with old blackberry bushes (although they are not bushy, just huge tangles of dead and thorniness) but RABBITS hang out in the thorny and RABBITS cause Spring to go berserk.  Even the thought, hint or suspicion of RABBITS cause her to go berserk.

And when Springs goes berserk, all the other bastardogs lose their collective minds and then this happens:

And when that happens, it cannot happen quietly.  It has to be accompanied by as much barking as possible, as well as the ungodly sounds of Wootie barkscreaming.  And since we live next door to, and share a fence with lots of these:

And those are guarded by a couple of – okay I don’t have a photo of them, but let’s just say REALLY BIG DOGS.  And I don’t want my new neighbours to hate me right out of the gate.  So I have to put a stop to the RABBIT insanity as soon as it starts.  So we moved to the pasture between my house and my landlord’s house to play.  Because the turkey won’t let us play in my actual yard.  Ever since we moved here, the turkey and the roosters have become crazy territorial.  They don’t f*ck with me, because I schooled them from the get go (with a shovel), but last weekend Tyrone the rooster attacked my friend Michelle!  It was a cheap ass sneak attack from behind too, the asshole.

Anyway, Terrence the turkey scares the little dogs, and also Dexter.  Because Dexter’s body is large, but his brain is little.

So we just decided to play in the field.  It has a couple of little ponds that my ducks were not using at the moment, and kindly let the dogs splash around in it.

And they raced up and down the hill, because the pasture is … well, pastoral and full of gently rolling hills and other The Sound Of Music shit.

(last weekend my landlord took me and Michelle on a tour of the rest of the 18 acres.  Dudes, there’s a LAKE at the back, like a trout lake. where my dogs can swim!  And there are cows.  And I met my baby goats.  This one many of you have seen already; I named him Harvey.  He thought my coffee cup was his milk bottle and he was REAL happy to meet me as a result.  So I named him Harvey Milk)

harvey

Anyhoo.  There was much gallumping and gleeful running around after frisbees and toys to be done, border collie style.

Look at this ole lady dog!  14.5, still tough as nails.  She comes hiking almost every day, and though she has to be lifted over logs, and  she goes up hills sideways because neither her front end nor her back end has the power to propel her up an incline, she’s determined to do it!

And still the non-border collies found tangles of thorniness to hunt RABBITS in.

They didn’t find any RABBITS though, so at least they came back when I called them.

I really have to get on the fencing and keep them from reaching that side of the field though, because it borders a path that lots of horse riders use, and as my dogs are both OBNOXIOUS and not used to horses, they tend to race over en masses and scare the bejesus out of the horses and riders both.  I really don’t want to inadvertently kill some horse rider when it gets chucked off its 1000 lb mount, so I am double fencing, so they can’t reach that fence.  Also, I want the poultry to live between those two fences, as when they are in my yard they take disgusting liberties like pooping in my porch.  And a while ago I had my kitchen door open while I was doing stuff and came into the house to get something and found like 7 chickens IN MY LIVING ROOM.  Impertinent assholes.

Anyway, that was our first real playtime on the property and I think everyone had fun, because they are all now passed out cold, about 80% of them in my office here with me now.  Piper favours the closet, while Dexter and Gemma argue over the bed under my desk (Gemma usually wins because she can’t hear or see Dexter’s ugly faces and sounds, and he’s all teeth and no trousers that one).

I think I like it here.  I think the dogs do too :)

I will like it just a teensy bit better when the wood stove finally goes in though, because when it’s cold outside, it’s COLD in here.  When the temperature drops, I can see my breath in my house.

I will also like it a little better when I can afford it.  So please, be sure to tell your friends about The Walking Dog so I can round up some more clients to walk.  We walk in some really amazing places with tons of stuff to explore, rivers to splash through, logs to leap over and stuff.  The dogs are so pooped when they get home.  It’s really awesome!  They just love it, and so do I … and I really want to keep doing it!  Even if some weirdo sent me a huge long email in response to one of CL ads that accused me and all dogwalkers of destroying wildlife habitat (I don’t EVER take dogs to areas where there is wildlife habitat risk!) and wrapped up her insane rant by suggesting I should want to kill myself for being such a horrible person.  Like, wow.  Whacko.

Also, you can really help me out by booking a photo shoot, or purchasing a print or two from me.  I have a few 18X24 prints ready to go already – if you’re interested in seeing them, contact me and I’ll send photos.  if there’s anything I’ve photographed that you’d like to have a print of, please let me know and I can make that happen too.  Soon I hope to have my photo studio IN MY HOUSE ready to roll, and can do studio sessions right here at home, which saves you the cost of me renting studio space.

Hopefully tomorrow that blasted primer will be dry enough to apply the second coat, and I can finish painting the dog room, and then get rid of the acid trip in the photo studio room.  *shudder*

Then Monday it’s back to work.  I have all three clients to walk on Monday, so TWooie gets to stay home because otherwise he beats up the 100lb Lab.  Because TWooie is small, but his ego is enormous.

Much love to you all from our slowly-being-improved stixier house in the stix (now with RABBITS)

Well Hello There!

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Worst blogger ever right?  Wow have I ever been busy.  Last weekend I managed to mostly unpacked (we’re just not going to talk about the stacks of boxes in the dog room closets.  Nope) and got the house at least moderately livable, as in I know where my cutlery is now,  and have somewhere to work.  I also managed to get back to my old place to clean it.  But no rest for the wicked!  Back at work as soon as Monday rolled around, and lemme tell you, having two jobs is exhausting. I work from 7AM – 12PM from home for my one job, and then I’m on the road with the dog walking in the afternoons.  I don’t get home until dinner time, so it’s a long day.  Haven’t hauled the camera out for any dog walks yet, but if you follow me on instagram (@rdm_aka_tfl) you’ll see the odd sub-par quality iPhone photo and video.  Lotsa snow pictures, because doG darnit, winter is hanging on for dear life ’round these parts!  The snow seems to finally have petered out except in the mountains where we walk, and I’m hearing rumours about double digit temperatures arriving next week!  I am beyond excited!

I have not dug out the camera at all, except for a photo shoot I did last weekend as a surprise gift for someone else.  A friend of mine had a lady-Aussie visiting to make sweet sweet love to her gentleman-Aussie and asked me to get some pretty photos of said lady-Aussie (not to worry, they are both registered and titled up the wazzoo and all those fancy breeder things).  Now that the owner has been gifted with them, I can show you!

Isn’t she purdy though?

And bouncy!

Super sweet gal too.

That inspired me to grab the camera when I got home from walking this evening, but it was just too close to dusk to really get much of anything at all.  It’s supposed to positively pee rain all weekend, so I won’t be do any photographing, but here are a couple of random shots to whet your wootube whistles.

The WooTWoo on patrol at the gate: Wootie discovered the floppy frisbee I managed to throw straight into the blackberry branches and had to assess it as a potential threat (he’d already investigated and deemed safe the rag my landlord used while fixing the wheel on my gate).

He managed to get it down and give it a thorough sniffing, which made Dexter very happy because Dexter is not smart enough to find a frisbee hanging above his line of sight.

It also made Dexter’s doppelGALger happy.

*sigh*  Peetie.  I’m giving serious through to finding her another home more suited to her than I am.  I like Peetie a lot, but Peetie hates the car so very much, and is not enjoying being in it every single day.  Sometimes I have to drag her out from under the bed as she hides when she sees me getting ready for dogwalking.  She drools so excessively in her crate in the car (doesn’t puke anymore, thankfully) that her crate mat is soaked – like the other day I pulled it out to replace it and a virtual river of drool ran off it.  Her paws are turning that gross orange-pink that excessive lickers get on their fur, even though she doesn’t lick – it’s all from drooling.  She pants like crazy the entire time she is in the car and her underside is often soaked by the time we get home.  She starts drooling when we head back to the car after our walk.  I feel like I’m torturing her, but she can’t stay home without exercise every day.  She’s starting to not even enjoy her walks very much and I feel like she might be happier with someone who doesn’t have to drive her places very often :(  I don’t know.

There is so much to be done here – every single room in the house is in desperate need of a coat of paint, as the previous tenant was (not to put too fine a point on it) gross.  For some reason she pulled up the flooring in my office and in the dog room, but failed to put anything new down, so it’s just sub floor (?).  Fortunately, my new landlord is fantastic.  I mentioned that I wanted to put down linoleum in the dog room, but that I realized it was a weird flooring to install so if he didn’t want to pay for it, that made total sense.  He told me not to worry, install what I wanted and he’d pay for it.  He’s done so much work around here already, he’s a really on-the-ball kinda guy.  I’m liking it here quite a lot.

Tomorrow my plan is to start settling the poultry in.  Right now they are locked in the barn/garage at night and I let them roam the yard during the day – landlord says they can roam all over the 18 acres if they want, but they don’t really leave my yard.  Thing is, I don’t want them in my yard.  They poop on my porch, which I don’t like.  And the other day I had the front door open while I was doing stuff and thangs and damn if a bunch of them didn’t just walk into the house and hang out in the living room like the owned the joint.  NO HOUSE CHICKENS!!  I am fencing off the walnut orchard for them (landlord cut down all the walnuts in my immediate yard when he found out they were toxic to dogs – seriously, how awesome is this guy?) and outfitting the other half off the garage for them to live in.  Because I’ma park my car in the other side of the garage!!  Parking in a garage – unheard of!!

Then I’m going to get to work on fixing up the interior of the house.  But I am going to take the time to walk up to the landlord’s part of the property and MEET MY BABY GOATS!!  He’s several acres away, and I haven’t had a chance to go up there to visit yet.  I really want to get something set up for them to come live with me.  I am so excited about the goats.

The dogs were super weirded out about the move for the first little while, but they seem to have gotten the hang of it now and are digging the whole place.  The yard and front pasture are fenced enough that I can let them out without worrying, as long as I keep half an eye on them.  I’m going to shore up the fencing until it’s Addy-proof.  We are absolutely surrounded by horse farms, horses everywhere!  And right on a path that riders use, so the dogs are trying to get themselves used to horses – they are barking less and less every time.  Except Addy, as she does not appreciate animals with heads bigger than her whole body.  I picked her up and introduced her to a neighbour’s horse and it did that lippy taste-testing thing they do to Addy and she LOST HER MIND.  hahaha!

My cat Cyrus objects to the move and keeps escaping out windows, immediately regretting his decision and yowling until I let him back in.  Although he has now figured out how to climb the rhododendron outside my office window and let himself back inside, so it looks like I just got myself an indoor/outdoor cat.  harumph.

Otherwise, things are getting settled for everyone.  Here’s Terrance The Tom Turkey keeping manly watch over his lady wives in the field:

Since we “spring ahead” this weekend and the weather seems to be improving, I am hoping to get more time with the camera of an evening!

I do find myself in need of scraping together some cash to catch up on my bills though – paying hydro on two houses for a month while getting my new business up and running, and my rent now being several hundred dollars more expensive than it was (and no return of my damage deposit in sight, as apparently the old landlord is broke and can’t scrape it together yet) has made it a really tight time around here.  I’m hoping some of you Wootubers would be interested in a photo shoot, or maybe buying some prints if there’s any photos you particularly like?  I have some really lovely 18″X24″ prints I had done of some of my favourite photos and they look awesome in inexpensive frames I picked up at Michaels.  I could make more prints, if anyone was interested in buying something?  I am slowly getting more dog walking clients, but it’s a gradual process and I think in a couple of months I will be able to eek out an okay living between it and my other job, and I am working on a couple of projects with artists that I sorta had to put on the back burner while moving, but right now I just need to catch up, so it’d be great if you wanted to buy something.  Wanna buy Peetie? ;-)  Feel free to contact me.  I don’t want your charity, you guys have been absolutely fantastically supportive of me, and I love each of you for it, but if I have something you would like, I would really like to sell it to you!

As soon as we get a nice day, I’ll make a point of bringing the camera for a walk one afternoon and you can see what I get to see every day.  It’s just wonderful to spend time outdoors in nature every day.  I’m really liking this dogwalking thing!

(PS – I promise to get baby goat photos this weekend, come hell or high water!)

Up Next On Snowcase

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More snow!

Half a Wootie’s worth of snow, to be precise.

This ridiculous.  On Thursday I went and picked up the keys to my new place and the world looked like this:

newhouse

Now everything looks like this:

And guess what else?

WE’RE GETTING MORE SNOW!

FOR THREE MORE DAYS!!

And you can just wipe that border collie smile right off your happy face Dexter.  We are running out of essentials.  Soon you dogs will be forced to eat one another.  I recommend starting with the fat ones (I’m looking at you, TWooie!)

So. Much. Snow.  It’s really rare for us to get snow at all here – usually we get a smallish dump of an inch or three, just enough to make it look pretty and fun for the dogs, then it melts away within 48 hours or so and we’re back to the wet stuff.  But this winter has been drunk, and should go home.  We had snow on the ground for SEVEN WEEKS in December and January – it didn’t snow like A LOT a lot, but it snowed and stayed, which is rare in and of itself.  It finally melted, we all remembered what the world looked like without being frozen … my chickens thought it was spring and started laying again, I could open the windows and type without wearing gloves.  I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO MOVING INTO MY NEW HOUSE.  Then this happened.  And this was a LOT of snow, well over a foot in 24 hours.  A few more centimetres last night.  And now they are calling for more snow right through Wednesday.  I hear this morning it’s already snowing again to the East of us. *ETA – as I typed that, I glanced outside … it’s snowing again here too.  UGH!

Inexplicably, the dogs *love* the stuff.

So many happy faces!

(Fae looks freaked out, but believe me, it’s one of her happy faces)

Not sure what they’re so happy about.  The snow is deep enough, and heavy enough, that is causes the hairy dogs to turn into snow transportation delivery devices:

And you know what dogs hate?  Blow dryers.  You know what gets rid of snowball collections?  Blow dryers.

You know what I hate?  Snow shovels.  You know what I had to use for the first time in memory?  You know where this is going. I had to shovel a path to the poultry, and then paths FOR the poultry so they could walk to their feeders.  I shoveled the driveway like 4 times on Friday, gave up, and basically screamed via text message at my landlord until he took care of the driveway.  Not that it matters, seeing as how our road is not plowed and I can’t  go anywhere once I leave the driveway anyway.

MINI-ME INTERLUDE.

These photos make me laugh, because Dexter and Peetie are basically one-dog-same-dog.

Ears up, happy faces on

Ears back, crazy faces engaged.

The snow is good for photos, I’ll give it that.  It turns out that winter makes Winter look nice even!

When I mentioned earlier that my landlord “took care of the driveway” what I should have said was “#childlabourforthewin.”  He put his teenager, his brother’s teenager and some other random teenager to work with snow shovels and the poor buggers are the ones that cleared the driveway.  Which might explain the half-assed job of it, but hey, at least its not under a foot of snow anymore.  Rumour has it he paid them in Doritos.  The dogs heard this rumour as well.

Often I hear from people “I don’t know how you handle so many dogs!”  Well, it’s easy!

First of all, don’t bother training them, let them be shamelessly ill mannered and jump all over people and try and steal their food.

It’s especially effective if you let them mob people en mass.  Much less work than instilling manners.

Pay children Doritos to make them play with your dogs, so you don’t have to.

And then let them free-feed on the blood of those children.

Pre-order my book, “Owning Ten Really Bad Dogs And How To Live With Them Without Guilt” coming soon!

Just kidding.  BUT – as those of you who follow us on Facebook already know, I did in fact publish a new book!

book

I did it a little differently this time; I made it an EBook, so you can read it on your tablet, like an iPad or Kindle, or even on your desk top.  I did it this way because the traditional coffee-table style book is SO EXPENSIVE to produce, especially as my books are so photo-heavy, that it’s cost prohibitive to publish.  Like this one would have been around $70.00.  Ridiculous.  So as much as I love the coffee-table style photo book, I figured – y’all already look at my photos on some kind of digital device, why not make the book in the same format?  That way it’s affordable and convenient and full of instant gratification (order, download, enjoy!)

My personal goal is to sell 100 copies of the Ebook, and I am nowhere near that goal.  So please help me accomplish something this year, and boost my kicked-in-the-arse self esteem, and buy my book!  It’s only $10 CAD, so practically free for you Americans, and it’s pretty funny if I do say so myself :)

Mr. Woo will judge you if you don’t buy a copy.  Don’t nobody need that kind of grief in their lives.

And now I am off to make the long long trek on foot to the store to buy milk,  because without milk there is no coffee, and without coffee, there is no life.

And *Poof* – Like Magic, It Was Gone

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The snow that is.  It got warm, started raining and overnight, inches and inches of snow has vanished, like it was never here.

(This post would be more effective if I had photos taken after the snow melted, but it’s raining and I don’t wanna take my camera out there)

It’s hard to imagine that just a few days ago it still looked like this!

The only thing that has still not melted is my driveway, which remains not only an ice rink, but a wet EXTRA slippery ice rink.  Apparently the expression “it gets worse before it gets better” was invented specifically to describe trying to drive out of said extra slippery ice driveway, which was the silly thing I attempted yesterday before giving up, sliding backward into my spot and deciding I didn’t *really* need to go out after all.  I’m hopeful that another day of rain will make it navigable.

Addy is completely skeptical of the sudden change in weather.  She starts shivering before we go outside in anticipation of this:

And then is pleasantly surprised when there is no snow to be found and it’s a balmy 11 degrees.  But then is pissed off that everywhere in the grass that is springing back to life after being smooshed down for a month and a half, is a puddle lurking right at Addy-belly height.  It’s hard to be a tiny dog sometimes.

The other dogs don’t seem to care either way.  As long as they have a ball, the collies don’t care if it’s a monsoon, typhoon, hurricane or sandstorm.

It’s mine, you can’t have it.

These two just want cookies.

I would also like cookies pleaz kthnx.

… and nobody knows what this dog wants.

And this dog just wants to cosplay Snoopy.

(These two just kill me, the are SO FREAKIN’ ADORABLE!)

I actually miss the snow.  Despite complaining about it for like 6 weeks, I guess I had forgotten how much I hate mud.  I was spoiled by not having to wipe paws and bellies every time the dogs come in from outside for so long!

Stop wiping my feet, or I’ll kill you.

 If only the snow wasn’t so cold … and if my landlord would have sanded or plowed the driveway, the snow coulda just hung around until it was 25 degrees outside.

Also, I will miss taking photos like this:

I’m sorry I said that thing about my feet and murder.  Please love me.

(I taught Winter to stand up on his hind legs and turn his back to me rather than putting his paws on me when he wants cookies or pets, that way he doesn’t get reboundy terrier mud feet prints all over my clothes.  This is my view of that trick.)

Winter’s creepy!

You’re all creepy.

(says the turkey with a tiny penis on its forehead)

So Wootubers … I am looking to partner with other creative types to create some sellable items that combine my artistry and yours.  I partnered a few years ago with Claudine of Laughing Dingo Studios for a limited edition Woo print if you recall, and it was quite a hit and very successful.  I would like to do this again, or something similar, or work with an artist wherein we could combine our services for a fee – ie, I take the photos, client chooses a photo(s) to be turned into a painting, sculpture or similar, at a discounted rate for the client for combining the services.  It will build up both our portfolios while earning us both some dineros and also offer people a unique blend of services!  Are any of my Wootube friends interested in partnering for something like this?  Any Wootubers interested in purchasing such a service?  Food Lady needs to make some dog food money while building up her business (and thank you all for the many many shares, please feel free to keep sharing and recommending my business!).  I have a couple of interviews coming up for part time jobs to keep us all in kibble and potato chips in the meantime, but I have this funny catch-22 where if I am employed full time I can’t walk my clients’ dogs, but if I don’t walk dogs full time I can’t … you know, afford to live.  Got any other brilliant ideas for me?

Judgey Spring will judge you if you don’t!