WARNING: Guard Dog On Duty

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 :)