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There’Snow Winter, like A Cold Winter …

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When everything is frozen.

We got hit with some CUH-RAZY weather the last couple of weeks, after an unusually mild winter.  I was feeling pretty pleased at not having to contend with anything exceptionally brutal my first winter in the stupid tin can, but Mother Nature showed us!  After nearly two weeks of below zero temperatures, both day and night, and days/nights on end of endless winds ranging from 50-90 KMs an hour, everything froze. And I do mean everything. The water was the first to go – the first day it froze, my drinking water hose committed suicide, and I was forced to  to go buy an ungodly expensive heated water line (still paying that off, actually).  I was apparently not the only one caught off guard, as it was the last one in stock.  By the time I got it hooked up, it was too late… the water lines in my trailer had frozen.  Then the underground waterline froze.  You have no idea how much water you go through every day until you’re using bottles you have to fill up at your neighbour’s place every other day.

You also have to be super cognizant of how much of that bottled water you’re emptying into your grey water tanks when they are frozen/frozen shut and you have no means of emptying them.  And speaking of emptying … black water tank frozen too.  Enough said.

The first night of the bad windstorms, two panels of my poultry shed blew right off the frame.  My poor, tropically-inclined Mexican stepdad had to come out and brave the tundra winds to fix the shed so my birds didn’t freeze.  We then stuffed the whole shed with straw up to their eyeballs in an effort to keep them warm.  Turns out bales of straw expand a LOT when you untie them, so the second bale of straw was somewhat superfluous.  We put up boards all around the underside of the trailer in a (as it turns out) wishful attempt to insulate the underneath and used the extra straw bale to close one of the gaps.  The gap that happened to be at the intake and outtake flow of the furnace.  Which, as it turns out, gets really, really hot.  And straw bales and heat aren’t super good friends, so it caught on fire.  Which is a cool thing to see happen when you have no running water.

Which makes you paranoid forever after about running the furnace, so you don’t turn it on at night.  So when your power goes out because of the wind, so does your space heater.  And when you get up in the morning and can see your breath in your living room, and you try to put your shoes on to take the dogs out only to find that your shoes are frozen to the floor, you realize that you pretty much hate everything that ever existed.

And then it snowed.

In some places there is no snow, and in others, the drifts are over 3 feet high.  The poor poultry exit their house every morning and stare at a wall of snow, which confuses and depresses them. Addy faces a similar wall of snow when I force her to go outside to pee, which confuses and depresses her.  Actually it doesn’t depress her, she’s irrepressible.  But she sure doesn’t like it.  I think I’m not going to like it when it melts.  I just hope it does it slowly, or we’re all gonna drown.

At least the snow managed to time itself around some important big commutes I had to make the last couple of weeks, and didn’t interfere with my ability to travel into The City.  Dexter and I have this job we do from time to time, where we go to casting calls for tv commercials and Dexter (and sometimes Maisie) spend the day interacting with actors auditioning for parts in which they would have to interact with a dog in the actual commercial.  This way the casting director can see if the actors are actually comfortable with dogs.  It’s actually a pretty fun way to spend a day or two – the dogs get a million pats and hugs and snuggles and cookies, and I get paid money.  And then sometimes the director likes my dog so much he gets a part in the commercial too, which is what happened to Dex, so last week we went and he “acted” and I “animal wrangled” him, for which I also get paid.  I didn’t ask if I was allowed to share what he’s in or doing, so I won’t, but if I ever happen to see the commercial once it airs, I will post it on the blog!  All I can say is that he got to do one of his favourite things ever, and he didn’t get yelled at to STOP THAT!! for it while he did it, so he was in heaven!

I wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to do the commercial for a minute there, because in the days in between, he suddenly LOST HIS MIND.  He was FRANTIC, couldn’t lay down for more than a few seconds; he’d spring to his feet and start racing around the ‘house’ and then stop and scratch frantically.  He’d leap up and race down the hallway to the bedroom and back, was scared of the dog beds, was falling asleep standing up in between bouts of being frantic and he did it ALL NIGHT LONG.  None of us got any sleep.  The next day, driving to our hike, he was exactly the same except he was seatbelted in the front seat and couldn’t go anywhere, so he thrashed around and kicked the dashboard and flung himself from side to side.  It was extremely unnerving.  When we got home that evening, I checked him over and discovered this terrible, awful rash across his shoulders and under his armpits.  I washed them, and slathered them in a cortisone spray, then put him on an old t-shirt so he couldn’t scratch and watched as he visibly calmed down and finally fell asleep.  I realized that the rash was in the exact place his seatbelt harness sits – he hasn’t worn it since, and it hasn’t happened again.  I don’t know why he is suddenly reacting to the harness he has been wearing forever, but I’m just glad he is back to normal.  “Normal” being a relative term, when it comes to Dexter.  Or any of my dogs, really.

The dogs don’t seem to care whether it’s snowy or not (Addy being the very notable exception – when it’s time to go potty, her thrusters engage and she goes into warp drive, flies down the stairs, skids into her snow-free spot in a 90 degree corner where the wind is at its weakest, and empties her bladder like someone turned the valves on a geyser, and is back in the trailer and in her sleepy sack before you can blink.  I’m actually surprised she can pee at all; she clenches so hard that she runs around basically on her front legs.

I don’t think Maisie has seen snow before, given her age, but it didn’t give her pause at all.  She was in it up to her eyeballs without a second of hesitation.  There was just one night when I let her out to pee and the gale force winds just blew her right back inside.  She eyeballed the doorway for a second, and decided she didn’t have to go that bad after all.  But other than that, it seems the snow is just one more thing for her to revel in.  She really is a lot of fun!

At our most recent casting call gig, I brought her out of the van to pee before bringing her inside, and a homeless guy lurched at her and tried to grab her (dude appeared outta nowhere!  He must have been a ninja) and that was it for her for the day – everyone was terrifying, she couldn’t relax in the building at all (everyone clumping down the hallway in their snowboots scared the bejesus out of her) and I realize that living out here in the sticks means she’s not socializing enough in unfamiliar locations.  She is super comfortable in the middle of a trial in the building, because I bring her there all the time for that purpose, but the Big City streets are something else altogether.  So something we need to work on.

The snow has now mostly frozen, so everyone is skipping lightly across it rather than plowing through it.

But periodically there is a soft spot under the crust and a dog disappears for a second.  Yesterday Maisie sliced up her carpal pad in the icesnow, so after playtime I wrapped it in cotton and then covered it in vet wrap to prevent her from bleeding all over my furniture.  The vet wrap is the kind that tastes bad when they try to chew it off, but there as an *itty bitty* piece of cotton sticking out from under it, which she made diligent efforts to remove by unraveling it … I would hear her chewing at it and look over the top of my computer screen and she would make eye contact with me, with a cotton string in her mouth … she’d slowly lower her head until her chin covered her whole bandaged foot, then she would blink at me innocently, like she hadn’t been doing anything.  She’s so funny.  And smart as a whip.  A few months ago, I was rating chips while watching a movie, and I noticed she had found a piece of paper that had fallen off my desk that I didn’t want her to destroy.  I was covered in dog, and didn’t want to get up, so I asked her to bring it to me and I traded her a potato chip for it and told her what a good girl she was.  The following evening I was in pretty much the same position (I’m a creature of ritual, what can I say?) so she ran around the place looking for paper, finally found a small piece of some kind of wrapper sticking out of the garbage, and she finagled it out of the can and brought it to me for another potato chip.  There were lots of toys and stuff she could have brought me, but she had decided that chips were only traded for paper products.  Brainy little thing!

The WooTWoo and the Seasons seem to believe that there is a veritable sea of small critters who exist in a hidden mouse city underneath the surface of the snow, because they spend all of our outside time hunting for small furry things while the rest of us play dumbball.  I think this is because about three weeks ago Winter found ONE mouse in a dirt pile and since then, it’s Good Hunting for everyone who enjoys that sort of thing.  It seems to exhaust them as much as playing ball, so whatever floats their collective boat.

Us:

 

Them

Winter seems to have recovered as much as he’s ever going to.  His hind end is still a little weird, and he’s still a little weak on the left.  He can’t Be People anymore unless he’s holding onto something, like my leg.  But he comes hiking and runs around like a crazy thing without issue.  The deep snow gives him a little bit of trouble because the surface is unpredictable and one afternoon he started crying a little bit, made his way over to me, shoved Addy off my knees and tried to climb into my lap, which was our cue to cut our playtime short.  But he’s been fine since then, so probably he just tweaked something in the snow.  I have to wonder if he had an FCE, like Piper did, given the lack of pain and the continued weakness on the one side.

Even though snow makes my life difficult for a bit, I’m always excited at first for snow photos.

But now I’m tired of snow photos.  My knees get wet when I kneel down and I’m too lazy to dig out my waterproof pants every time we go outside.  I am counting down days to spring, when things bloom and the entire world isn’t either just white and/or or grey and brown.  But first I imagine everything will turn to approximately 3 feet of mud thanks to the snow drifts.

In the meantime, I will have to amuse myself with having the WooTWoo DNA tested!  I was contacted by a reader who works for a science project that offers, among other things, DNA testing.  In exchange for some behavioural studies I entered them in, the lab is going to try and figure out what they are, and if they are related.  So exciting.

What could they beee no-ow?

I’ve had their swab kits here for a bit, but have not had the motivation to do them and send them back, because honestly, right now I’ve just been sort of … struggling a little bit to get through every day.  I’ve been super stressed about money (I need to borrow $400, if anyone can lend me $400.  LEND), bummed out because I feel overall crappy about my life, bored because photo sessions this time of year are not abundant, and I lack a creative outlet, and definitely cabin fever because for nearly two weeks we were mostly stuck inside as it was frostbite-risk weather, with no water and just general all around suckiness.

Although this puppy photo session was a bright spot in my otherwise dreary life!  Her name is Friday and she is super itty bitty; in this photo she is 11 weeks and a whole 9lbs.  SUB ADDY in weight!  I have the Puppy Envies!

Now that’s cute!

Not doing a very good job of blogging more often in 2019 (Another new year’s resolution shot to hell) but I’m going to keep trying.  Promise.

 

New Year … Same Old Sh*t!

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Happy year that is pretty much like all the other recent years so they’re just blending together in a cesspool of crapola and irritation.  How’s that for starting things off with cheer?  I feel the need for an emoticon that means “meh.”

But first – a New year’s family photo!

Woulda been a beautiful day to take all kinds of photos in this beautiful location, but apparently the entire lower mainland felt the same way and the place was freakin’ packed!  I’ve never seen so many people there – we kept abruptly about-facing and going in different directions to avoid them, because not everyone appreciates all of my dogs running full tilt of them in a spasmodic tidal wave of greetings.  (Hell, I don’t even appreciate it, but have no idea how to make them stop immediately rushing and loving everyone they see.)  Eventually I threw up my hands (figuratively, not literally) and marched all the dogs back to the van and left.

The more perceptive among you will notice that this photo is short one funny little face.  THIS funny little face.

That’s because 2018 wasn’t only determined to merely be shitty, but to be shitty to THE BITTER END.  And because 2018 keeps its promises, the day after Boxing Day I got out of my new, more comfortable bed (because SantaParents got me a memory foam mattress topper that makes the Is-This-F*cking-Thing-Made-Of-Plywood-Or-Something-?-? rv mattress bearable to sleep on), and let all the dogs out into the yard.  They tend to exit the “house” (aka tin can) the same way they approach people they see in public – en masse and as quickly and chaotically as possible.  So I don’t know what happened next except that I heard screaming and screaming and I threw myself outside to find Winter hollering his head off and trying to run away from himself, but he couldn’t, because his back legs weren’t working (although his poop generator was, because he was shooting out poop like a canon).  I picked him up, poop and all, and ran for the phone to call the vet.

Within literal minutes he could walk again, albeit sorta sketchily, and with a brand new swagger in his hieney that had nothing to do with confidence.  My vet couldn’t fit him in, but another nearby(ish – nothing is actually “near” me) vet could, so I bundled us into my van and headed out.  Which is when Act II started – stepped on the gas and the van would rev like crazy, but no acceleration.  The gas pedal was nothing but dirty art on the floor of my vehicle.  I lead a really angry parade of cars down the road at 40kmh to a gas station, where I coasted into a parking spot and gently laid my head against the steering wheel and wished really hard I could go back in time to, say, before birth, and choose a completely different life, one in which dogs and cars both work like they’re supposed to.

Anyway, a friend came and picked me up and took us to the vet, where it was determined that something happened to Winter but we don’t know what, but I was to go home and put him in a crate and leave him there for a week with some anti-inflammatories.  BCAA towed my van to same-friend’s mechanic boyfriend’s shop where it was determined ($300 later) that the transmission in it was GOING BYE BYE (A-F*CKING-GAIN) and I should get rid of the piece of crap asap.  He got it running again, but suggested I sell it, trade it in or set it on fire as soon as humanely possible because the transmission was going to fail at any moment.

So my parents came to the rescue and we traded in the van for a slightly newer van two days later.  Just in time too, because my last finance payment on that thing WAS YESTERDAY.  Thank goodness I can literally go no time at all without a vehicle payment – that would really have messed with 2018’s  plans to screw with me.  PHEW.

Tonight, I zipped out to the store to get a snack and my check engine light came on in the “new” van.  Excellent.  I didn’t have the van mechanically inspected before I bought it because a) time was of the super-duper essence and b) I spent all my money on Winter and the previous van.  Seems 2019 has spoken with 2018 and has Big Plans for me.

Yay.

I am tired of seeing New Year’s memes about “365 new opportunities” and “looking forward not back” and other drivel, because quite frankly this last year has sucked balls and I really don’t anticipate anything changing just because 2018 changed its name to 2019.  I hate living in this tin can, I hate living in a parking lot, I hate the mudpit that is my “yard,” I hate never having enough money, I hate that my dog is gimpy, I hate that my Piper dog died (though I’m glad she did it before she had to move into this stupid tin can in a parking lot) and I’m just plain old grouchy about everything.  GROUCHY GROUCHY GROUCHY.

Also it’s impossible to find a comfortable position in my chair to make this blog, because Fae insists on laying behind me and I’m thinking of hurling her like a football into one of the many lake-sized puddles waiting outside for unsuspecting sneakers to sink into.  She is both uncomfortable and SASSY.  This is her giving Dexter shit for not dropping the ball so the Food Lady’s magic blue throwing stick can make it go again.

Worst part is she usually gets her own way too.

We cut a “gate” into the fence that separates Us from The Buffalo the other day … ostensibly so that the poor mud-logged poultry can free range in some grass and plants (another thing I hate about living here is their poultry pen, which is disgusting.  Also their poultry house, which broke in the windstorm.  I also hate windstorms.  And wind), but also so that the dogs and I have somewhere to play.  The gravelmud yard is not enough, and when I throw the ball, 7 times out of 10 it ends up bouncing through the livestock fencing and Maisie dives through after it and ends up out there anyway.  There are no buffalo out there in the winter months, so we’re taking advantage of the space.

There’s a fenced off leash area for the agility building and we use that sometimes, because it does provide for some nice photo ops.

But 4/9 dogs can get under the gate (I’ll let you guess which ones), so we can only use the play yard when nobody is using the building, which feels like is NEVER.  We won’t talk about the never ending barking that is the soundtrack to my home life and we really won’t talk about parking on trial days.  *grumble*

So the field at least has some potential for nice photos ops too, when it’s not peeing rain (which is all it seems to do these days … and my tin can is leaking somewhere as a result.  Also awesome).

There’s still some tall grass, until the chickens get ahold of it anyway, and that makes for some pretty photos too.

Also some silly ones.

Winter is still wobbly on his hind legs, but he’s been going squirrely in the crate – yesterday he ate a goodly portion of his bankie, and when I took him to the vet for a recheck, he had gained a whole lb from all that confinement and snacking (not on blankets, just FYI – like actual snackies to keep him occupied) so today I let him come out with us so he could desquirrelify his acorn sized brain a bit.  We still aren’t sure what happened – the vet said “spinal nerve damage from a traumatic injury” (like maybe leaping off the porch without using the stairs like a normal dog?) but the good news is he is no longer in pain when his back is touched.  He’s just wobbly.  And it’s not like I’m in a position to get him an MRI to make a definitive diagnosis.  I figure if he’s not in pain any more, we’ll work our way back up to full exercise over time.

The tall grasses, lovely as they are, comprise only a small portion of a very tempting, full-of-bunnies area for my bad dogs to run amuck though!  It’s worse than herding cats – I am constantly losing a goodly portion of them to the siren song of HUNTING.  Like, here’s Addy mid-bunny-chase.  You can tell by her ears, which only ever reach for the heavens when she’s trying to channel lightning (speed) so she can be fast enough to catch the wabbits.

I guess its a good opportunity to work on her recall, as well as practice dog-running-straight-at-me shots.

Here’s Peetie.  She’s still really, really annoying.

Here’s Dexter.  He’s still really, really deaf.

He got to play some agility at our club Christmas Party / practice and he was SO HAPPY.  I should really take advantage of the stupid building full of equipment I live next door to and play with my dogs some more.  But honestly, I lack the motivation and the energy.  Probably because I hate everything.

When Wootie’s not doing this:

He’s doing this.  Because possible rats.

You can see a little bit in the back there that his Flamboyance(tm) is working hard to make a comeback, though it still has a long way to go.

In the meantime, TWooie’s Flambe(tm) is doing a pretty reasonable job as a stand-in.

Fae Fae doesn’t find the new field access very exciting because she fits through the livestock fencing quite easily and goes out there all the time anyway.

This is still here too.  Can’t seem to get rid of it.  She’s basically a big, hairy (and barky!) tick.  With blackberry stems stuck in her tongue.

My only real “new year’s” resolution is to blog more frequently than I did last year.  First I have to find out how to be in a better mood though, because I know y’all don’t want to read about my being grouchy all year long.  I figure my first step is to find a real job, because I will probably be less grouchy if I’m not worried about money all the damn time.  And I need money to improve/increase my equipment … I have been saving for a portable strobe for what feels like forever, and every time I have some extra money together, something comes along that needs it and I’m back to square one.  Believe me, I know most/everyone has this same issue, on either bigger or smaller scales, and I know wanting a portable strobe is a first world problem.  I also know that I have great friends and I’m not living in my van and THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF THINGS I KNOW and don’t need to be reminded of.  I’m still grouchy about it.  So baby steps / one thing at a time / etc. BLAH BLAH BLAH.

BAH.

I guess my first goal is to figure out how to be more like Woo and less like TWoo in this photo.

 

Where Oh Where Has The Food Lady Been

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Do you know that last night when I started writing this, I had to walk all the way over to the main house, in the dark, to reset the modem because my internet went down.  Something of the insect variety was buzzing in the hood of my coat.  I still don’t know what it was, and I don’t think I want to know.  I know I don’t.

I also know I have been the WORST BLOGGER IN THE WORLD.  I haven’t blogged in over two months :(  There are lots of reasons why.  It was a busy summer and fall for me, lots of events to photograph, which is great fun (and an immense amount of work) – agility, lure coursing, dock diving, disc dog … just endless activities!  But I’m cutting way back on event photography next year, because it’s a lot of investment  and wear and tear on my equipment for not a lot of monetary return.  I had a very busy Autumn with lots of fall colours sessions, which was also fantastic! And now I’m heading into Holiday Sessions – 2 of 3 full days sold out!  Also great, but the editing will be endless ;-)

But I miss photographing my own dogs, which I hardly ever seem to get the chance to do these days.  In part it’s because I’ve gotten a lot pickier about what photographs I’m happy with and I want to put out there representing my work.  I was pretty laid back about my work on the blog and did a lot less “set up” of shots, and just kind of hung around with my dogs and photographed them at our leisure.  And that organic feeling is missing now, which is largely because my home space is … ugly.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful we have all have somewhere warm and secure to live, but the yard is nothing to look at it and even less to photograph.  Also, it’s in a parking lot of a fairly busy building, so the dogs aren’t relaxed all that often (nor am I) as there’s a fairly steady stream of activity most days, which distracts us all.  I admit I miss the lush variety of my old acreages, where we could just hang out and be in each other’s company and I could take photos at random.  Now, because of the ugly, and the activity, I take my dogs off the property for exercise most days and it’s just not always practical to drag out the equipment with us.  I need a lot of eyes on my busy crew when I’m out somewhere, and can’t do that when at least one eyeball is stuck to the eyepiece of my camera.  So I feel like the story-telling aspect of my blog is missing, because I have fewer stories to tell because my dogs are *exercising* rather than *being*, if that makes sense.

So today I hauled my ass and the dogs and the camera up a mountain.  Even Dexter was perplexed!

But (I think) happy?

Because it’s Vancouver, and it’s November, it of course started raining shortly into our hike, so I didn’t get a lot of photos.  I also miss my studio quite a lot!

Anyway, how about a pupdate on all the beasts?

For a fun fall activity, I decided to stop feeding Addy, so she has resorted to scavenging for food wherever she can find it.

She got so skinny she was practically floating away!

According to that Facebook Memories thing, today is Arriva-A-Versary …. 5 years ago 9lbs of squirrel brain burrowed into my shirt and never left!  She’s a lot greyer now.  She also, we have discovered, has mild seizures randomly.  Like maybe once a year – she had one a few weeks back, which was scary but very short lived.  She is so ADHD she can’t even concentrate long enough to have a real seizure ;-)

Fae, always a keen observer, figured she was next on my hit list, so she’s taken to hiding from me so maybe I will forget to starve her.  Or perhaps I’m hiding HER because my mom keeps threatening to steal her … on FB she threatened to run me over with her car and keep Fae for herself.  Obviously, I hail from a very loving family …

Mr. Woo is not hiding, he just thinks he’s a super model and he knows what colours compliment him best.  I actually have a HELL of a time keeping him OUT of photos these days, because he wants to be in every shot … because posing means cookies, and (hello) I starve my dogs.  Also, he’d really like me to stop taking photos of his sad, pathetic excuse for a tail.  And he uses his old-age deafness to pretend he can’t understand me telling him to get out of the shot.

(I’m thinking about having that growth removed from his eyelid, 10% because I worry it bothers him, and 90% because it bothers me in photographs.  Also, his tail is actually growing in quite nicely, albeit slowly.  I am hoping it will have recovered by spring and we can have a party to celebrate!)

And speaking of Spring, she has taken up Parkour (look at her back feet!).

Whereas her brother has taken up (mostly) coming when called.  We got pretty lax in that department, and it has resulted in Winter obsessing about running after things he sees in the distance, like cyclists, or other dogs, or people minding their own business.  And when Winter goes, Spring goes, and when 2 go, at least 5 of the remaining 7 figure SOMETHING IS EXCITING AND THEY SHOULD GO TOO.  So we went right back to basics (as Winter is a simple man) and every time I say his name, I shove something delicious in his mouth.  This month that deliciousness is chicken wieners, because they were on sale.  His recall has improved about 90% and last weekend I managed to call him off of not one but TWO bicycles he was thinking about chasing.  I’m super pleased with this, and he’s currently ranking about 7 of my top 9 dogs in the house as a result.

Also, he and his sister make a wonderfully delightful duo when they pose together.

Like this:

And this:

And this!

They have supplanted their Senior Sibling Duo, because I DON’T PHOTOGRAPH SOFT CORE PORN, MR. WOO!

Hovering around the very bottom of my Top Dogs list is this asshole.

A few weeks ago she and Fae were sharing a recliner and she shifted around and stepped on Fae.  Fae is, pound for pound, the biggest cow in the universe, so Fae snarked at her and told her off.  This asshole retaliated by picking Fae up by the face and shaking her around until I punched her in the ribs and made her let her go.  Fae had a little cut on her head, and a big pee on my recliner, and Peetie was very contrite, so I decided to chalk that one up as an anomaly from the world’s stupidest dog.  But then about a week ago we were out playing ball in the yard and she bashed into TWooie (because she has zero sense of personal space) and he snapped at her, because it was rude.  So she proceeded to kick ten kinds of holy hell out of him until I whacked her repeatedly with the Chuck It and drove her off.  TWooie has a hole in his face, and one in his neck, and Peetie has all my intense loathing.

I don’t understand this dog at all.  She is the first to befriend all new foster puppies, and is unfailingly patient with them … I used to catch Silly dragging her around the house by her face, which must have hurt (a lot more than Fae air snapping at her!) and She Who Is Not Friendly About Her Food can chew on a very high value pork bone while Addy furiously humps her (I don’t know why Addy does that) without so much as a glance at her tiny little violator.  And 11 months of the year she is perfectly lovely with her siblings, but once a year or so she decides to visit some furious vengeance on them for no good reason.  I don’t know what to do with her.  I’ve toyed with strangulation, but maybe rehoming is the more humane option.  Would you like her?

I mean, TWooie is an old man.  He may be an old jerk of a man, but old he is, and I can’t have her trying to kill him.  He’s pretty fragile these days – his legs give out on him sometimes in surprising ways, and while he is game for a full 1.5 hours of hiking and chasing squirrels, he also takes advantage of every opportunity to grab a nap.

And he Old Man complains about stuff.  Like, “this cement dock is too cold and wet” and “I might fall in the water, so I don’t want to sit here” and “back in my day, dogs got THREE cookies for posing, not just one” and stuff.

And then there’s this thing.  STILL HERE.  Can’t seem to get rid of her.  I haven’t found a home for her that I really think will utilize her potential.  Which is ironic, because I also don’t and won’t use her to her full potential.  Also, the number of people who don’t email back after I send them a lengthy, thoughtful response to their adoption inquiry is kind of appalling.  Like at least half a dozen people who didn’t even have the courtesy to say “thank you for your time” is legit disgusting.  With every passing year, I enjoy rescue less and less.  I might be burned out, but I think it’s more that I just don’t like dealing with the people very much.  Also, I might be getting old and complainy, like TWooie.

And my beloved Deafter remains … deaf.  And nine years old.  NINE!  Where has the time even gone?  I feel like it was just a couple years ago I was doing to the 365puppy blog (that’s a trip down memory lane!).

He is so funny.  Since this tin can we live in is so small, and meal time can get a bit intense, I have taken to feeding him in the bedroom behind a babygate so he doesn’t have to ugly-face off hungrier dogs who eat faster than he does.  So now when I get the bowls out of the cupboard, he goes and sits in the little hallway between the main space and the bedroom with his back to all of us, then acts delightfully shocked when I appear behind him with a full bowl of deliciousness.  It’s like he’s playing a little game with himself, and it makes me laugh every meal time.  He doesn’t quite have Tweed’s finely-developed sense of humour, but he really is a character unto himself.

We’re still all adjusting to life in this little space – it’s not like we haven’t done the small space thing before!  But sometimes it’s a bit up close and personal.  I was trying to do some clicker training the other evening (trying to teach Fae the ring-stacking game …. right now she thinks it involves picking up the ring and then laying down on top of it and pretending she has no idea where it is, so we have a ways to go) and literally the only space we have to train is the 3-foot-in-each-direction space between the side of the couch and the front door, and the two stairs that lead up to the hallway.  I have to fend off the other dogs with my elbows as they try to squeeze in on the action from behind, and occasionally a particularly daring (hungry) dog will launch an aerial attack from the end of the sofa.

At least when the weather is good we have our new outdoor space, courtesy of my mom and stepdad – my new deck!

This was my birthday present and it’s fabulous!  It’s since been painted grey to match the tin can.  It definitely makes coming and going a lot less perilous than the skinny RV stairs with the even skinnier dog ramp rattling atop them.  After it was finished, it took Dexter three days or so to figure out how to get back inside … first he would try and walk “up” the dog ramp, which was laying on the ground and nowhere near the door, and would just stand on it staring at the wheel of the rv, tail gently fanning congenially in the breeze (the same breeze running through the space between his ears, apparently).  When I’d get his attention from the doorway, he would then run under the deck and out the other side in a big circle and end up back on the Ramp To Nowhere again until I put on shoes and took him up the stairs by the collar.  After a day or so of that, he finally grasped the concept of the *deck* but remained blissfully unaware of the whole “stairs” thing and he would leap on and off the deck from the side.  I don’t know why, he is perfectly familiar with stairs in his life!  He seems to have sorted it all out now though, finally.

Addy is very fond of the deck because when it’s raining, she can attempt to sneak in there and pee underneath it and risk only minimal exposure to the evil IG-targeting acid shooting down from the heavens.  Though I am quickly filling up her would-be-toilet with stuff stored under there.  I am still trying to sort out storage – I divested myself of a f*ck of a lot when I moved out of my last house, but I still have a lot of things that I can’t part with, but have nowhere else to go, so I’m paying over $200 a month for a storage facility so my stuff has somewhere to live.  I am thinking I need to finance one of those shipping containers so a) my stuff can live beside me, rather than across town and b) once I pay it off, it’s mine and potentially added bonus of c) I can use half of it as a studio space, if it’s large enough.

But my immediate need is to insulate under the rig so everything doesn’t freeze this winter.  Can’t have the band getting cold on their winter tour!

Which is why I made a calendar!  12 months of The Wootube Crew for you to enjoy on your wall in 2019.  I ordered a sample from my photo lab to show you

WATCH HERE

(without sound unless you enjoy listening to part of an episode of Sherlock Holmes).  They turned out very lovely, but they are not inexpensive because they’re from a pro lab, which means if I want to make any insulate-my-trailer money off of them, they aren’t inexpensive for you either :(  Plus shipping.  Unless you have a better idea of where to order them from more economically?  I will have to sell them for $25.00 CAD, not including shipping, and even then I’m not exactly raking in make-me-rich profits.  The post office tells me it’s about $5 shipping in Canada and about $7 to the US.  Which makes them about $24 USD for American Wootubers, but $30 for Canadians, eh?

If it’s not too rich for your blood, then you can order by sending me an email with your order, your full name and postal mailing address, and how you’d like to pay – you can send money via paypal, or if you’re local, you can do an e-transfer.  Once I have amassed all the orders, I will then order them in bulk and then ship ’em out!

Mr. Woo hopes you will order, and help him keep him as warm this winter as he looks in this photo!

A Beachin’ Good Time

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It’s a good thing “our” beach is almost always empty when we go visit, because upon arrival, this is what happens.  It’s total chaos.  And it’s like a 15 minute walk to the beach from where we park, so you’d think they have become at least somewhat blase by the time we get there!  It’s no wonder we’re social pariahs.

Usually the water looks like this – one long swimmable length of water.

But the other day there was, like, no water.  I don’t know what happened to it.  It’s not actually a beach on the ocean, it’s really just a sandy stretch along a slough.  It’s nowhere near an ocean.  So I don’t think it’s affected by tides … so where did the water go?

It’s possible that 125lbs of Alfie gallumping along its shores terrified the water into a hasty retreat.  He sounds like a herd of buffalo when he gets it into his head to cavort with his sister Betty.  It doesn’t happen often, but it’s pretty hilarious when it does!

Betty has taken to flirting wildly with Dexter lately, which is mystifying to me, as she was never much interested in interacting with him when she basically lived with me last year.  If it’s a mystery to me, it’s 12 times as mysterious to Dexter who, like an immature 12 year old boy, really doesn’t understand female flirtations.  Mostly what he does is stare at me whilst she wiggles under his chin, leaps up to smooch his eyeballs and then does somersaults under his legs trying to get his attention.  He is completely affable but unaware while she gyrates at him.

But all her clowny shenanigans does have the affect of getting Alfie excited, and he usually comes thundering over to play … and if Dexter remains oblivious to the 25lbs of butterball roiling around underfoot, he is NOT oblivious to the extra 100lbs running in his direction and he usually takes some offense.  This annoys and confuses Alfie and in the resulting melee, Betty slips away.  And I think she’s laughing.  She is one sly, wicked little shit-disturber!

Perhaps the pre-receded water had caught wind that these two devils were coming to terrorize its shores.

I miss the terrier-teeth-play of these two, it doesn’t happen often enough, maybe because they’re both getting older.   Or maybe because when they try to play like this, someone (*coughMAISIEcough*) gets involved and despite the multitude of sharp and pointies between them available to drive off intruders, they don’t really like other dogs to get in the middle of their fun and they’re kinda emo about it.

Although occasionally they do gang up on her to teach her the meaning of the word “fear.”

Very once in a while, they will temporarily allow TWooie to cavort with them.  It never lasts very long, but that’s 100% okay with him, because he’s old and he doesn’t really have the stamina for that sort of foolishness for long anyway.  It is, however, 100% adorable.  After all these years, it still tickles me pink to see TWooie happy to play with another dog(s).

His brother rarely plays at all, with anyone, these days.  Sometimes I can get him to play a bit of fetch, or a short game of “I’m Gonna Get The Wootie Stick!” but it never lasts long either.  He doesn’t seem overly tired, or depressed, he just is more interested in snuffling around for possible dropped foodstuffs, or things to pee on.  I guess simple pleasures get more pleasurable as one ages.  However, I did buy him a new “Fifa”(tm) on the way home from the beach to see if I can’t rekindle some of our old joys together :) … provided Maisie doesn’t get involved, as she’s a “PLAY WITH ALL THE THINGS” kinda dog.

(Clearly he’s thrilled at the prospect)

(his tail still looks a little (okay a lot) sad, but notice it does have some wispy growth on it.  It’s gonna be a marathon growing session to the finish, I think)

Crazy Miss Maisie remains resolutely entrenched in my home and won’t go away because everyone who wants her so far hasn’t really been ideal.  I don’t think getting one’s sport dog from rescue is the cool thing to do anymore, so she remains unwanted :(

I decided after some thought that she is probably a Springer Spaniel mix.  I got a lot of sideways looks for that when I started saying it … you know, the “Food Lady’s making up whacky theories again” look.  You’re probably even doing that right now as you read this!

Then I asked a friend of mine to come over and evaluate her for some kind of sniffer dog job, because I personally think she’d be pretty awesome at it.  I placed quite a few of those kinds of dogs from the shelter (the sniffing-for-a-living kind, not the Springer Spaniel mix kind) and got a pretty good sense of what the handlers/trainers were looking for, and Maisie ticks off all their boxes.  So I asked my friend Teresa to come over and tell me what she thought.  First thing she said whens he met her was “Is she a Springer mix?”

Now, I think Teresa would know, since she owns and trained Angus the famous “C. Difficile” Springer Spaniel who makes his living sniffing out that nastiness in hospitals!

Anyway, Maisie ticked off all her boxes too, and apparently she thinks she’d make an awesome sniffer dog.  I find nosework stuff with dogs super fascinating *in theory* – I think it’s amazing what they can do with odour and how much they enjoy it.  In practice, I find it mind numbingly boring to watch – it was somewhat more interesting when it was “my” dog figuring it out, but not interesting enough for me to to want to do it myself with any of my dogs.  I think I’ve just been generally spoiled by sports like agility which have a lot of more instant and high octane gratification for my squirrel-like attention span.  Anyway, there’s been some interest in her for the sniffing thing, so maybe she’ll be famous one day too!

And speaking of agility, I have really super good intentions of going back to the sport, usually while I am laying in bed thinking about playing.  In practice, I can’t seem to muster up the energy to actually go train, despite living right next door to a big ass facility dedicated to the sport.  I do have a handful of dogs I could be playing with – Spring’s getting up there, but hey, Tweed won Regionals when he was 12, so it’s not like she’s OLD.  Fae is delightful to play with.  In my head, Addy would be great (in reality, Addy is a trainwreck.  Ha.)  And I suppose there’s Peetie.  Pesty, stares-at-my-cookie-hands-all-the-time Peetie.

I still want to try dock diving with Peetie.  I think she could be pretty good at it.  Cuz of all the leaping.

And I really do wish I had that sort of tenacious-trainer spirit to train Addy.  She is actually awesome at all the equipment, as she fears nothing and she’ll do it all (except weaves, we haven’t gone there yet at all) but her attention span is even shorter than mine.  We might simultaneously implode trying!

But she remains the cutest little thing that ever cuted or thinged.

In my facebook “memories” thing not too long ago, a memory of Dexter’s first trial came up in my feed, when he did a 15 obstacle Jumpers course in 15 seconds.  Oh how I miss *that* Dexter; before he started going deaf, he was such an awesome dog to play agilities with.  But I love the Dexter I have now too.  Often he rides along in the front seat when my van is full (seat-belted in, of course, airbag turned off) and I have inadvertently trained him stare deeply into my eyes and place a somber paw gravely on my arm, for which he is rewarded with cookies.  Now I can’t drive anywhere without his paw resting on my arm while he tries to mind-meld me.  I can only imagine what people think at stop lights.

Anyhoo.

I know I don’t take as many photos of my own dogs / blog as much as I used to, but the more I photograph for other people and/or events, the less time I have for photographing and editing photos of my own four legged furries.  There just aren’t enough hours in the day.  I’m going to try harder!  I do run outside to try and get sunset photos whenever the conditions are favourable.

Also, for those of you not on Facebook, I’m going to be putting out a 2019 calendar soon for sale.  This is the cover:

As soon as my print lab has the 2019 template ready, I’ll make one and video it for everyone, and then take orders.  It was a fun project, looking through so many old photos of my fuzzy family, those still here and the ones that aren’t.  I miss my old dogs.  I am so glad I have all these photos to look back on :)

Won’t You Be My Neighbour

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I dunno about you, but my neighbours are SUPER nosy.  They’re always staring at me.

Sometimes they bring some friends to lay around staring at me too.

It’s rude.

Also, some of my neighbours have kids.  They’re super loud.  How can tiny kids have such big lungs?!

Tasty, tasty kids …

The stupid turkey insisted on sitting and hatching outside of the poultry pen, and still refuses to bring her kids inside the pen.  The property is pretty thoroughly fenced now (the perimeter, not my yard, which remains unfenced.  *grumble*) so I am not worried about predators except for the ones that live in my rv with me.  Because there are some certain skinny dogs and some terriorists that would eat those babies in a nanosecond.  Yesterday I found the baby turkeys INSIDE the x-penned area I have for the dogs.  The dogs were, fortunately, inside … except for Maisie, who was thinking up turkey recipes before she made her move.  I shooed them out while fending off a hoard of hungry canines, but I don’t anticipate this ending well, necessarily, until I can convince mama turkey to join the community and stop living off grid.

I’m also not unconcerned about the cats eating the poults … this giant tin tube gets REAL hot when the weather is warm, so I have taken to leaving the door open so the dogs can come in and go out at will, rather than us all crammed inside here breathing and sweating on one another.  That means I can’t keep my cats in, so for the first time in their lives, they are being indoor/outdoor cats.  I was particularly worried about Donut, because on other occasions when she has escaped whatever house I was living in, she wouldn’t ever come back inside and I’d have to live trap her.  But now she seems to have settled into the idea that it won’t be her only taste of freedom and she will happily come back inside in the evening when I tap the tin of wet cat food with the fork.  She even lets me pet her when she’s outside, which is amazing.  But if you recall from my time in the penthouse apartment in the West End, she was known as The Serial Killer Tinker Nuts, who caught and killed birds on the rooftop deck with sociopathic glee.  I would not put it past her to eat a turkey poult or two if she can sneak them away from Mama Turkey.

Cyrus is the one that’s killin’ me though.  He wanders much further afield than ‘Nutz does; she stays mostly close to home, but Cyrus goes to visit the neighbours (including the cattle and buffalo) on a regular basis.  He seems to stay away from the road, but coyotes live in them-there grasses, so I worry about him all the time.  But what I don’t worry about is feeding him, because every morning our routine goes like this:  I let everyone out into the xpen area to hang out while I go feed and water the poultry, and the cats wander off to do cat things … then I take the dogs out in small groups to potty, then I feed them breakfast and I sit down with my cup of coffee at the dining room table.  And every morning by that time, Cyrus has caught himself a fat, tasty field mouse and I watch him come ambling across the parking lot with the mouse in the mouth, so he can eat it under the rv.  If he catches something he does not like the taste of (such as shrews, or moles) he simply leaves them under the rv for safe keeping.  If he catches more than he can eat, he does the same thing, and then Addy eats it.  Blech.  So much deworming in everyone’s future.

The air quality here is really bad right now, because once again our province is on fire.  It’s been unreasonably hot this summer, again, which I’m starting to think is our new normal – pre-Apocalyptic :(  It’s all smokey and hazy outside, and I am reluctant to run the dogs in it, so I’m glad we went to our Super Secret Swimming Hole a few days ago when the sky was blue and you could see the sun.

Fae, otoh, was not impressed that I suggested she should swim to retrieve the ball if she wanted a cookie, no matter what the weather was like.

A few weeks ago, I photographed a dock diving event, which was awesome … it looked like a lot of fun for the dogs!  There’s some rumour that a dock diving pool might be unveiled ’round these parts soon, and I still think I’ve found a use for Peetie, finally, as while she sucks at pretty much everything, she is really enthusiastic about diving into the water.

…although ….

Crazy Miss Maisie would also make a hella dock diver I think.  I keep trying to shove into the faces of dog dock enthusiasts, but no luck yet.

I actually find her quite pleasant to live with – she’s developed a nice off switch, and she’s pretty easy going in the house, and will amuse herself if nobody else wants to play with her.  Although yesterday I made Winter drop a not-quite-hatched turkey egg he purloined from Off Grid Mama’s abandoned nest and she scarfed it up, maggots and all, and ran away LIKE HER ASS WAS ON FIRE, munching it down the whole time.  Can you bleach the inside of a puppy?  SO GROSS.  So clearly we need to work on “hey, how about you give me the ball of maggots in exchange for this hot dog?” or similar.

Anyway, she’s not difficult to have around, and she mostly listens pretty well, and she doesn’t run away all the time, a la Silly.  Who, by the way, is doing really well in Belize in his new home!  His human recently sent me this:

“My friend and I went to a dog show in the capital city just for fun. Decided to take Hero, Titan and Silly. They asked us if we wanted to enter into it when we were walking around with them. Figured why not? Silly ended up taking first place in obedience and the obstacle course!! I was so scared he was going to get ADD with the obedience cause there was so much activity but he did absolutely amazing ☺️ Not in the country even a week and he’s charming everyone ❤️❤️ so proud of him.“

So how much awesome is that??  I do miss his full body contact hugs though, he was greatly affectionate … but he’s landed himself a pretty cushy life. I’m a bit jealous … I would like to live in Belize, I’m pretty sure.

But back to the beach!  Spring got a cookie for hopping on and off these pilings, because it amused me, and then she wouldn’t stop doing it.  She knows an easy gig when she’s landed one!

She makes me laugh all the time, she is such a ridiculous little dog.

Addy did the piling-jumping once, but even for cookies, it paled in comparison to the satisfaction she apparently gets from digging up wet sand.  She’ll do it for two solid hours.  I love this little skinny thing beyond measure, but I really don’t think there is a lot going on upstairs in tiny-head land.

Then there’s Wootie, who is very very deaf now (whether that’s physiological or willful, only he knows) but can still hear me well enough to give me this look when I tell him I’m going to steal his Wootie Stick and chuck it in the water.

But you can’t really blame him, because his poor nekkid tail looks absolutely ridiculous when he swims.  Like a little, sad, hairless rudder.  I’m surprised he doesn’t sink; I always thought it was his Flamoyance(tm) that kept him buoyant.

And Deafter, who loves to swim…

… but also suffers some “someone might steal my ball” anxiety and spends a lot of beach time hunched over his hockey ball protectively in the sand.

He’s so handsome no matter what he does, even when his stupid tongue is hanging out.  And he’s my go-to posing dog for test shots, from sunset OCF to lavender.  He’s the best.  And he’s going to be – this will BLOW YOUR MIND – nine years old in four days.  NINE!!!!

Love my big guy so much :)

(feeling old yet??)

 

Meanie

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I am the meanest dog owner EVER.

FIRST OFF, Silly was getting on my nerves, so I drowned him.

THEN TWooie was getting on my nerves, so I drowned him too.

Drowned him DEAD!  And waited until his stiff bloated corpse washed back up onto the sand.  And then I LAUGHED!

Then I said MEAN things to Maisie about her parents, like ‘Your mama was a Golden Retriever,” and made her SAD.

Then I started a DOGFIGHTING operation!  With dogs that can FLY!

Or, you know, I took everyone swimming at the slough because it was 8 million degrees outside today and got hotter by 17 degrees each time I thought to myself “wow is it ever hot.”  It’s so hot that I wore SHORTS today.  You may not know this about me, but I **loathe** shorts.  I think they’re an insult to fashion (and I have no fashion sense!).  But I wanted to go into the water too, so I wore boy’s board shorts.  The top half of me is brown as a berry, but the bottom half is white, like TWooie’s corpse.

We like this new swimming place, because there’s usually nobody there except us, and it’s got a sandy beach, and Silly isn’t smart enough to find the path back up to the walkway and run halfway to Alberta before I notice he’s missing.  Win win all around!

Silly is actually getting a lot better about sticking around; we’ve worked really hard on recalls and lots of rewards and he’s finding it more fun to hang out with us than it is to run off to do whatever it is he does when he runs off.  He leaves for his new forever home this weekend, and I am actually going to miss the little (okay, ENORMOUS) booger quite a bit.  Also I am jealous of his new upcoming life in frickin’ BELIZE.

That will leave just Crazy Miss Maisie to find a home for.  Maisie, who has decided to become less and less border collie every day, for some reason.  She remains a super high octane doggie with an NO STOP ONLY GO attitude toward life, but physically she has decided to bulk out like The Hulk and become some kind of mystery mix.

She’s still super cute though.  And lots of fun, though still a challenge!  She is pretty independent minded and sometimes I’ll, say, call her to come and she’ll stand and eyeball me and weigh her choices before deciding whether to come get a cookie or saunter off and find her own reward.  You can actually SEE the wheels crankin’ along in her cranium while she conveyor-belts her options through the decision-making process.  She’s going to make someone laugh a lot in their life together!

And speaking of independent-minded … Mr. Woo has become rather cranky in his old age.  Tonight I asked him to come out of his hidey-hole under my chair to I could put his flea treatment on and he, while staring me bald-faced in the eyeball, refused to come out.  So when I reached under to grab his collar, he decided to snap off two or three of my fingers.  Asshole.  Maybe he’s still ashamed of his sad little penis-tail … which is growing hair and now covered in a very thin and sad little layer of peach fuzz.

He doesn’t have the same enthusiasm for swimming he did in his younger, oranger years, but he can still be convinced to go in for a paddle for his Wootie Toy(tm), provided there’s a cookie at the end of his swim.

I even convinced* his brother to go in for a dip today

(*lured him out to floating depth with a cookie and then gave him a light push, like a floaty toy, and he bobbed away further into the water before figuring out how to steer himself back to shore)

and this is how he repaid me.  He is still, 7 hours later, holding onto about 81 lbs of sand which he intends to shed onto my bed this evening, I’m sure.

Peetie + water = diving.  I should really try dock diving with Slender Dog.

Although I’m not really sure I understand what’s happening in this photo.

I feel confident she too will miss Silly, based on the expression on her face in this photo.

I plunked both Spring and Fae into the water for a swim as well, but since both of them splashed so frantically fast back to shore and I was using a long lens, I have no photographic proof of it.

My neighbour Wendy showed us this to place for swimming a couple of weeks ago.  She has a super cute Kelpie puppy, who doesn’t steal everyone else’s water toys and hoard them on the beach (I’m looking at you, Maisie)

I didn’t get any photos of Dexter today, but this one from a couple of weeks ago is a pretty accurate representation of all swimming outings with Dexter.

And then there is Miss Pants, who is allergic to raindrops, but magnetically attracted to large bodies of water.  She remains a 2D enigma.

In other news, I’ve been invited to photograph dock diving at our local fair next month (I said “local fair.”  I think I officially live in the country now.) which is exciting, because I’ve never photographed that sport before.  Also exciting is that the giant pile of dirt and logs that lives between my Big Tin Can On Wheels and the poultry pen has been almost entirely tractored away, which means I can put up a real fence and my dogs will have their own yard to play in!  Sometimes I remember that I used to live in an apartment on the 11th floor and rolled my eyes when someone said “How do you do it without a yard?”  and wonder if that actually ever was even real.

Now if you will excuse us, it’s back to sitting and sweating …