2018

2018 – just like 2017, only with more rain, and less sleep.

Ugh.

If it could just. stop. raining for like a few days, I would be ever so … much drier.  I know I live in The Rainiest Place On Earth and everything, and have for pretty much all my life, but I’M SICK TO DEATH OF IT.    In October we had two whole days with no rain.  In November, three whole days.  In December it snowed, just to break up the monotony of rain, and now in January it has rained 20 out of 28 days so far.  But that’s only because everything was frozen for the first week of January and it was too cold to rain.

DOUBLE UGH.

Near constant rain means nothing is ever *quite* dry, including the ends of the sleeves on my coats (which I have to switch out sometimes twice a day because apparently “waterproof” is just a suggestion, not a fact) and the collars and/or hoods of the sweatshirts I’m wearing, and my ever rotating gang of shoes and boots that live pretty much permanently up against the heater with the sincere hope they will dry out before I have to rotate back to them again.  Plus there’s soaking wet dog and the never ending cycle of dog laundry of wipin’- towels and wet dog blankets and let us not ever not remember the peed-on dog beds, because tiny dogs with tiny bladders that go on strike as soon as the sky starts spitting at them.  You can never get totally warm when the damp permeates everything like this.  Dear Mother Nature, please turn the faucet off!

There are no good photo opportunities in the grey and rain either.  Even when I get a rare afternoon off from the streaming skies and bring the camera out, it’s still grey and dreary and darkish and I am totally demotivated by the photos I do manage to take.  That makes blogging kinda difficult, unless I start posting reruns.

Right now the dogs are all asking to go out for a run and I don’t wanna go! Well, Addy isn’t asking…she’s in my shirt (making typing difficult) and doesn’t wanna go outside as much as I don’t.

But I have to go, because while adult dogs can coexist tolerably in the house without exercise for a day or two, this cannot.

THAT eats my furniture when he’s bored.  And staying inside is boring, even when we play games of tug and clicker.  At this exact moment he is laying with his head on Dexter’s thigh and I can see that he is eyeballing Dexter’s tail which is wiggling in his sleep, and thinking of biting it.  Which means we gotta go out before there is bloodshed.  BRB

Annnnnd, we’re back!

It’s the Year Of The Dog so I suppose it was only fitting that everyone get puppies and leave me seething in a green fit of jealousy.

Ann got a puppy.

This is Fever, she’s a border collie X whippet and is itty bitty!!  And so flippin’ cute.

And The Sadist got a puppy.

She’s an Aussie with a tail.  She’s basically just a carbon copy of Niko.  Also itty bitty … and also flippin’ cute!

And this is Dorothy’s Sonic, who is not a puppy, but he’s super adorable.

And what did I get?

THIS.

He is not itty bitty.  He is 26lbs at 16 weeks old(!!!)  He is extremely Silly, so that’s how he got his name.

A person bought Silly as a smaller puppy and decided he was a “monster” and tried to make his breeder refund her money.  When that didn’t happen, a friend of a friend heard about him and was so horrified by the lack of like the person had for the puppy that she bought him from her and then surrendered him to me.  Other than his gargantuan size, he is definitely not a monster!  But he is kinda crazy, so it’s fitting he ended up with my oddball crew.

(The breeder is aware – and pleased – that I have him and has even invited me to come meet his parents.  Please don’t send me messages about contacting the breeder)

He’s a pretty smart dude – pretty well housebroken, fairly well mannered for the most part (though he does like to put paws on my counter and snarf up everything that comes within reach of his pointy face) and he isn’t even all that whacky in the house.  He has already adjusted to our routine – get up and go outside for about half an hour, have breakfast and then nap until we go hiking in the early afternoon.  He does tend toward a bout of craziness about 9pm when he thunders and gallumps around the house throwing toys in every direction, but that’s pretty normal puppy stuff.

He figured out very quickly that TWooie is mostly all bark and very little bite and TWooie figured out pretty quickly that even as a clumsy-limbed, legs all akimbo wherever he goes, adolescent Silly can out-maneuver TWooie the butterball, so he has given up trying to pull out clumps of Silly hair altogether.

Nobody else seems to mind Silly at all, except poor Mini Mama, who seems to lack the ability to convince him of her intent to kill him when he pounces on her.  I mean, even Addy and Fae clued him into that right away, but somehow Mini Mama can’t quite drive the point home, so we’re working on that.  She is such a nice dog.  I am forever confused about how she still isn’t adopted.

I never thought this sentence would come out of my mouth/off my fingertips, but thank doG for Peetie.  She is endlessly tolerant of Silly and will play with him as often and for as long as he wants to wrassle or chase or tug.  She keeps him entertained when I cannot.

Because I’m fairly busy.  I’m also boarding these little ladies until the middle of February, while their parents are off having fun in the SUNSHINE of Costa Rica.  Usually I quite like their parents, but as I sit here with the ends of my hair dripping rain down into my sweatshirt, not so much.  Fortunately, Kita and Lupa are the nicest and easiest dogs ever, I am always happy to have them to visit.

You’re probably thinking “hey, that looks like sunshine in that photo and you keep complaining about non stop rain!”  Well don’t be fooled, I made the sunshine in post.  That’s how bad I wanted sunshine.

I made it up in this one too.

Silly is even respectful of Piper (but she has Mad Teeth(tm) so he doesn’t have a lot of say in the matter) and doesn’t ever knock her over or otherwise make her life difficult.  Which is a good thing, because her life is difficult enough :(  She is not bouncing back this time like she did last time and is still having a great deal of difficulty walking.  We’re at three weeks now since she lost her back end, for the most part and she’s just not really improving.  It’s frustrating to not know what the problem is too, at least for me.  For her it must just be frustrating because her back end gives out on her after a few moments of standing or walking, and she has a definite problem with circling to the left … sometimes she just circles endlessly to the left.  I make sure she gets at least a small amount of exercise by walking around the acreage with us in the mornings, but more often than not I end up carrying her because she will end up laying down in the mud somewhere and when I try to herd her back to the house, she wanders off to the left and falls down again :(

Her cognitive function also seems impaired, but it’s kind of a chicken or egg thing and I can’t really tell if her cognitive decline is a result of her physical decline or the other way ’round.  She gets stuck in weird places at odd hours of the night, like in a corner of the bedroom where she wouldn’t normally go at 3AM, and wakes me up crying for help.  Sometimes she wakes me up 3 or 4 times a night, which is really messing with MY cognitive function in the daytime hours, because I can’t get a solid night’s sleep.  Sometimes she gets stuck because she slips on the laminate or lino … the other day I came home and found her asleep on a pee pad in the dog room presumably because she couldn’t get to her feet on the slippery surface.  I tried confining her to xpen and that stressed her out so much I couldn’t do it again.

I *think* we are managing her pain well enough – it’s hard to say of course, but she isn’t groaning as much as she was and she isn’t all hunched over either.  She is still continent, though it’s difficult for her to squat to eliminate, but she only pees herself when she gets stuck somewhere and I can’t get there fast enough (like when I’m, you know, asleep).  And show her a hockey ball and her eyes light up and she’s after it like a … well, maybe not like a *shot*, and more like a three legged hamster on a whiskey bender, but still she wants to play.  And oddly, she will join a game of tug with the Flying Squirrel and stay on her feet no matter which way Peetie whips her all around.  It’s the craziest thing.

But I want her to get better, because I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing waiting (hoping) for her to get better or not.  I mean, this can’t be much of a life for her, fiercely independent as she is.  Whenever I have to pick her up (which is fairly often, given the frequency with which she falls down) and she doesn’t fight me as I carry her, my heart breaks a little, because she HATES being carried.  It’s like she knows how vulnerable and helpless she is.  I am afraid to make a decision because what if I make it a day too soon and she would have spontaneously recovered like she did last time?  But how long do I wait?

These are the questions that would keep me up a night, if I weren’t so freakin’ tired from being awoken several times a night.  As awful as it was to lose Tweed so suddenly, I had no other choices to make with him – he had a very terminal cancer.  Even Gemma went from fine to unable to breathe overnight, and she was suffering, so I had no other choice to make.  But this I think is worse … especially with her bloodwork being so great and radiographs being so damn useless.

*sigh*

In other news …

Dexter.  “Hiding” behind one blade of grass.  Some things really don’t ever change.

Mr. Woo, best poser ever (now that Tweed no longer holds the title).  This was the beach on a very foggy day, and I am so pleased with how it turned out!

Fae can give him a run for his money though.

Even the turkeys are excellent posers!  Like father, like son … Terrence and Philip.

It’s so tempting to keep this puppy, guys, even though it would be the stupidest thing ever for me to do, given what’s going on with me right now … but so tempting, because he is SO RIDICULOUS.

However, he is going to be pretty huge.  I’m not sure he’ll fit in my lifestyle (ie, where am I going to put him in the dog hiking van??)

But that FACE!  LOL