The Red Puppy

I got tired of waiting for a red border collie puppy.  So I got a red poodle puppy instead.

She’s ten months old and came with the name Deirdre, but ’round these here parts, we refer to her as Dodo.  It was going to be Deedee, but Dexter thinks his name is Dee a lot of the time.

She’s bigger than Fae but smaller than Spring, so a nice size.

Her Royal Highness Fae’s nose is pretty out of joint about the new addition.

But that’s just too darn bad for her!  Isn’t Dodo just the cutest thing?  I’ve pretty much decided to get nothing but poodles from now on.

Ha!  Did you believe me?  You’re silly.  This is not my puppy, she’s just a temporary puppy.  She is boarding with me for a few months while her real family, who loves her very much, isn’t able to care for her.  She’s a very nice dog with just a couple of little habits we need to fix, like barking in her crate and being a fussy snottypants about her food and not always coming when called.  We can work on that.  After all, I did manage to turn no-drive Peetie into a ball maniac!

She even brings the ball about 85% of the way back about 90% of the time, so we’re getting somewhere!

She has also become a holy terror of shrieking and trying to claw her way out of her crate in agility class when it’s someone else’s turn.  This is a completely different dog from the one who just curled up in the back of her crate and tried to pretend she wasn’t there.  Time to bust out the Manners Minder in class, I think!

But she is much nicer to Dodo than TWooie is.

I mean sure, he LOOKS happy here, but really he is a) trying to rub off the Hannibal Lecter mask residue AKA basket muzzle he wore for the first half an hour of meeting (and by meeting I mean muzzle punching) Dodo and b) doing it in something dead and stinky to get back at me.  He is always such a dick for the first little while.

Addy’s already had a good play with her, because Addy is awesome like that.  I am so very grateful for my Addypants.

I am extra grateful that I still have my Addypants, because about ten days ago Addy ate a big ole block of RAT POISON and I was so afraid she was going to die.  We don’t put out poison here (because pets) but in the process of tearing down the old trailer on the property, one of the guys working on it tossed a full, unopened package of poison on the burn pile.  Which Addy of course found and helped herself to.  She had just previous to that stolen an egg from the chicken coop, and I thought that’s what she was eating while I played ball with the other dogs, until I decided she’d been eating the egg for a little too long and went to check what she was doing.  I. LOST. MY. SHIT.  Started screaming and freaking out, picked her and the package up and tossed them in the car, chucked the other dogs in the yard and drove to the vet as fast as I could.  Whereupon I lost my composure (haha) and burst into hysterical tears.

Fortunately she was at the vet and puking within a half hour of ingesting the stuff, and I had the package so they knew what we were dealing with, and after much vomiting, Vitamin K and big scared saucer eyeballs, Addy was just fine, if a little mystified about what was going on.  We went back for a clotting test 72 hours later – all good.  She is on Vitamin K daily for a while as a precautionary thing, but is in no danger.  So I still have my Addypants …  and a big ole vet bill.  I was super irritated with my landlords because we *talked* about the possibility of there being poison in the trailer, because I had seen poison pellets when it was still intact and I asked them to be careful when dismantling the stupid thing.  And they weren’t.  And my dog ate rat poison.  Nor are they inclined to pay the vet bill because Old Skool Farm Boys who don’t really understand spending good money on a sick dog when you could just get another dog.

*grumble*  This farm is trying to destroy everything I love.  Two nights ago a weasel got into one of my hen houses and slaughtered a bunch of my hens too.  Srsly.

But in GOOD news, I have had a lot of fun with my camera lately.

I got to photograph 16(!!) year old Josie at the lake.

She was awesome!

And I got to photograph a bunch of dogs at an agility trial.

The trial was so much fun!  FaeFae made her debut-debut, and got some Qs, and some other very nice only-5-fault runs too.  She is so adorable, I can’t stand her sometimes.  I just wanna squish her and make squealy noises.

Spring did awesome too!  She got a bunch of Qs as well and she was FAST – as in, the OPPOSITE of running her at Thunderbird.  She was so fast that I messed up her first run because I was expecting her to be slow and I was in all the wrong places.  She was so HAPPY.  Which leads me to believe that her days of running Regionals are done, because they are at Thunderbird next year too, and she really really hates it there.  So all hopes will now rest on The Fae Face.

Dexter was … ridiculous.  He managed one Q and a bunch of disasters.  He is a very special boy.

I also got to photograph a whole bunch of agility students doing candids, action and portrait type shots in 20 minute mini-sessions in a private agility yard, which was super fun!  You can take the same shot over and over again on the equipment to get the one you like the best, and set the dogs up in places where the light is nicest.  Here’s a random sampling of some of the shots from the day – I just closed my eyes and pointed at the screen to pick a few, because there were so many good ones I couldn’t choose to post them all.

Detour the Jack Russell Terrier

Juno the Papillon

Dulce the Havanese

Zappa the border collie

Dixie the poodle

And so many others!  It was an excellent day, and I hope to be able to do another one.  I like doing private outdoor sessions a lot, but these mini sessions were really awesome too, and a challenge to capture their personalities in such a short time frame.

But all the photographing and editing means not a lot of time to photograph my own doggies (and also a numb ass from sitting in the editing chair for so many hours, and also all the money going straight to Addy’s vet bills, le sigh).  I did manage to sneak in a few though because my dogs is purdy ;-)

This is not mine.  Why isn’t it mine?

(Also the font on my new watermark makes it look like it says bigairphotography.CORN which is bothering me.  I’m going to have to fix that.  You can’t unsee it now, can you?  mwa ha ha ha)