STOP. Hammer Time

whooaa ohhh ohhh ohhh ohhh ohhhh ohhh oh

At least he can dance to 90’s radio-friendly pseudo rap, because he SURE CAN’T PLAY AGILITY.

But first … oh hai!  *waves*  I haven’t been around the blogosphere at all because I’ve had like NO time off for weeks.  Either I was agility-ing, or working to make up the time I took off for agility-ing, or I was photographing agility.  And then there was the windstorm that cut out all our power for upwards of 30 hours.  When you’re on a well, no power means no water.  And no power means no … anything, except driving around aimlessly in your car to charge your phone so you can use it to tether your Kindle Fire so you can watch Netflix on your Kindle in the dark.  Good times.

So.  Agility.  Nationals.  Whut?  We weren’t there, we didn’t do REALLY BADLY (cough*42 out of 48 dogs in the 26″ division*cough).  What a gong show my dog is.  We got through the pre-qualifier in 4.5 of 6 runs, so I had hopes that we would end up somewhere in the middle of the pack at Nationals.  I WAS WRONG.  Such a disaster.  Refusal after off course after wherethehellishegoing??  Just ridiculous.  Me and Dex, we’re done with agility.  It just goes to show it doesn’t matter how much you love something, doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it!

Time to train the little gazehound … if I don’t kill her first for stealin’ eggs.

(in case it’s not clear – she jumped up on a TABLE to steal them there freshly collected eggs)

Dexter had his 6th birthday just after Nationals (he’s lucky he made it to 6) but we didn’t celebrate because F*CK YOU DEXTER.

Auntie Fiona and Rogue did pretty okay at Nationals though, you know, WINNING and everything. National Champions and all that.

 

I’m at a bit of a loss now what to do about an agility dog.  Because Piper – ANCIENT.  WooTWoo – HAHAHAHAHA.  Dexter – SUCK.  Winter – yeahright.  Spring – SUCKYPOUTYPANTS.  Fae – *!scared!* And Addy – ADHD.  Only I could amass this amount of dogs and having nobody to play agilities with.  ONLY ME.

For a while I thought long and hard about this:

But ultimately, I don’t have the time or energy for any more dogs right now.  I would like to have fewer of them, so I could do a new puppy justice.  Doesn’t stop me from looking at his photo 6,000 times a day, of course.  I haz the puppy fever, bad.

I be your puppy, k?

Stop that Winter!

I’ve still got Fergus … but I don’t want to keep him because he’s some kind of hillbilly.

Just kidding.  He’s a nice dog, and is mostly over the random weirdness with the odd stranger he meets.  He gets to greet so many people at work that he has pretty well decided there is no point in being on his guard all the time.  He’d rather climb on my desk and bark at my face to get me to play with him.  If there was one thing I would encourage everyone with a puppy to do, that would be to instill impulse control from the get-go … dogs are so much easier to live with when you get tell them to stop doing something, or go lie down, or otherwise not give in to their base desires to do something naughty!!

Fergus will make someone a nice dog – he is learning to control himself, and has developed manners he previously didn’t have, like wait your turn at the door, and let someone else get the ball sometimes, and don’t grab the ball out of the Chuck-It if the Food Lady doesn’t throw it fast enough.  He spends part of his time on a small horse farm with one of my staff, and has also learned he doesn’t need to be underfoot all the time in case one of the things you are about to do is pay attention to him.  Instead of being All About Fergus he is is figuring out how to share the limelight with his handler and form a working partnership.

With the exception of TWooie, who still snarks in his general direction (because he’s TWooie, what else would he do??) he gets along fine with everyone here.  One time he piledrived Dexter, just for fun, and I brought the Fist of doG down upon him, and now he doesn’t try to slam into my dogs anymore as a form of play.  I mean, Dexter may SUCK as an agility partner, but I’d still like him to have all his ribs intact!

Everyone else in the pack is doing well.  Piper seems to be getting a bit senile … she will be 13 in November, for crying out loud.  How did that happen?  But she has started doing this thing where, when I throw the ball for her, she gets it and then frantically runs to the porch and stands there with her pupils all dilated.  You know, instead of bringing it back to me to throw again.  It’s the weirdest thing.

Tweed retained most of his cognitive function right up until the end, with a couple of blips along the way.  He would sometimes stand at the hinge side of the front door and ask to be let out.  To be fair, the door used to open on the other side before my landlord remodeled the mud room and bathroom.  Once in a while he would have a post-dinner nap and then wake up and be pretty insistent that it was dinner time again.  But he never did stuff like this!  But then again, Piper has never been the brightest star in the night sky.

Mr. Woo, going on 10 (also in November) retains his stellar sense of fun.

Haylo.  I am Meester Oow, a gentlemanz with a snazzy brown goatee.  We haz never met before, Mees Food Lady, I assure you.

His Flamboyance(tm) remains its glorious self.

I think he’s going a bit deaf … I mean, he’s never been the world’s most responsive dog, nor the best behaved one, but lately I have managed to sneak up on him a few times, or he’ll seem surprised when I get annoyed that he hasn’t come when called.  Being the master of deception that he is though, it could well be all an act.

TWooie – still fat, still lazy, still hunting for his own breakfasts.  When he’s not sitting around doing nothing.

Dexter is …well, we’ve already talked about how I feel about Dexter!  After Nationals, The Sadist said something about how proud he was of all of us for doing so well, and I made one of my generally snide comments about how he probably didn’t mean to include US in that assessment, and he said “Hey, Niko didn’t do so great either!”  And I said “But Niko’s just a baby dog.” And The Sadist said “But Dexter is DEXTER.” Which says everything you need to know about Dexter’s success in … life.

This sums him up pretty well also:

The terriers are being terriers.  I don’t even have any recent photos of them because they spend all their time divesting the property of wild rabbits.  Winter makes fair attempts to rid our lives of Piper’s ducks as well, but thankfully the fences hold up pretty good :)

As for The Littles; I may be disowned by the border collie community for saying this, but I just adore them so.  Sure they are naughty.  Yeah they poop in the house as soon as it’s not a thousand degrees outside any longer.  Definitely they have all the work ethic of a couple of crackheads on a tropical all-inclusive vacation.  But they are so damn funny.  And cuddly.  They snuggle up with me under the covers at night and they don’t kick me in the neck, or fart in my hair.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is love.  And all they wanna do is play, play, play.  Happiest dogs on the planet.

Last weekend I got to photograph the Australian Shepherd Club of BC’s annual agility trial.  It’s always so much fun, I am super glad they invite me every year.  Shooting big events can sometimes be thankless, as everyone is an armchair photographer and thinks they could do better, but the ASCBC people are low key and friendly folk and they always feed me lunch.  Bonus!

Also, I got to photograph some dogs who came to BC for Nationals, and I got to have a little creative post fun in the editing department with their photos :)

I have not forgotten about your old dogs that I promised to photograph; I just haven’t had any free weekends for ages.  I promise we’ll get on those before the winter comes.

Anyway, now you are up to date on my life!  Things should be settling back down now to a more normal routine, so hopefully I will have a bit more free time to blog.

Remember; no matter how big the challenge, face it head on.

Who knows, you just might come out on top!

(Unless you’re trying to teach Dexter how to play agility.  You may as well just forget that altogether!)