Well Hello There!

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!)