big air

GOTCHA

March 27, 2019 By The Food Lady 2 Comments

On this day in 2010, a FAT asshole joined the WooCrew. He eschewed the other four legged members of the family, and took out a hit on Dexterpuppy, but took a shine to His Orangeness and that’s remained his MO for the last 9 years. Except he’s much slimmer now.

Happy Gotcha Day, TWooie (formerly known as, *gag* Harley)!!!

It would be so much more satisfying to be able to include his DNA results here, along with the reveal of whether or not he is actually related to his brother Wootie, but those results won’t be back for a couple of months.

For his Gotcha Day he got me yelling at him at 1:30AM to “SHUT UP AND LET ME SLEEP I LET YOU OUT BEFORE BED ALREADY!!” because he had some “bad bottom” and had to go, which he did, allll across the living room floor. Blech. Maybe too many goldfishie crackers?

But you gotta admit that the flying goldfishie crackers make for some super hilarious photos, so … worth it!

I recently got myself a portable strobe in an attempt to up my photo game. I want to be able to light doggies anywhere, any time, and take advantage of locations where extension cords cannot go, like the beach and the mountains and at sunset and sunrise. And also, apparently, in my living room, with the backdrop pinned over the TV slide out, whilst throwing fish crackers at my dogs. And what I have discovered is that most of my dogs suck at catching cookies I throw at them.

Addy is shocked – SHOCKED I TELL YOU – that I would have the audacity to hurl crackers at her.

Winter’s strategy is to entrap the flying fish within Mouth Bars of Gooey Substance.

Wootie confused them with a game of soccer, and tried to head them into the goalie net.

But Dexter, dear, darling Dexter, was the worst of them all. He has exactly zero concept of how to catch anything. At all. Cookies are no exception.

Fortunately, he is very good at other things, like being extremely handsome and – more importantly – stationary, for minutes at a time, while I fiddle with position and power output of my new strobe to get the perfect sunset shot.

He really is such a very good boy. Sometime within the last year, he has unfortunately been afflicted with a nasty, biting parasite :(

Its scientific name is Maisie ChompsHisNeck.

This parasite seems benign … even kinda cute. But it is relentless, and whenever Dexter tries to run, the parasite attaches itself to his neck.

Getting upset with the parasite just causes it to become more aggressive.

Maisie is becoming quite the little pest! When she was a small puppy and I wrote up her adoption profile, one of the things I warned people about was that she had the potential for dog on dog aggression as a direct byproduct of over arousal. The number of applicants who failed to grasp what that could even mean was depressing. The number of applicants who dismissed this possibility as me being overly dramatic was just annoying. I got a lot of condescending nods and discreet eyerolls. And here we are 7 or 8 months later, and when Maisie gets really wound up, she likes to redirect onto one of her playmates and bite them in the neck or face. This is a good place to insert an “I told you so,” I think.

Poor Dexter, for all his creeping around and flashing Mad Teeth(tm) at things, is at heart a pacifist and couldn’t bite another dog if his life depended on it. I’ve said many times that if he had just kicked the living shit out TWooie once, TWooie would have a lot more respect for him. But instead he does the creeping/teeth thing while TWooie snaps and him and pulls out his hair, and never takes it any further than madmouth. He does the same thing with Maisie – as much as he would like her to stop losing her shit and biting him, he doesn’t know how to get her to quit it and leave him alone. So, bless him, he tries to get her to knock it off by using the universal hand signal for STAHHHP.

It doesn’t work of course, and Maisie just thinks he’s boxing with her and gets more amped up. So she is now learning to wear a basket muzzle, so that when we are going for a walk (she doesn’t do this when playing ball, and sticks very diligently to her own ball and doesn’t chase anyone else’s) she won’t leave holes in my poor boy’s neck and shoulders. He used to really love playing the run-and-snap-teeth game with her, the same one he played with Tweed for years, but then she started attacking him and now he’s all huffy about it and doesn’t want to run with her anymore. We’re hoping the muzzle means they’ll be able to play that game again.

She is an awesome puppy in most ways, but she’s kind of a dick when it comes to getting all worked up about stuff. She is also a dick when it comes to her Jolly Rope Ball. Doesn’t matter what other toy she has, if someone else picks up that particular toy, she turns into a raging bitch. Poor Dexter can only play with it if Maisie is on a leash.

Poor Wootie is so scared of her that he won’t even try to play with it anymore, so I had to buy him his own and we only play with it when Maisie is in a crate in the house … otherwise we have one terrified Wootie and one Rage-ie Maisie with TWO Jolly Rope Balls to snarl over.

He is, however, allowed to play with his frisbee unmolested.

And did you notice in the previous photo that his Flamboyance(tm) is growing back in nice and full? Finally! It’s still a pale shade of the gloriousness that it once was, but at least it has some heft and volume again. It’s thicker even than The Flambe(tm) of his brother’s, at last!

Fae Fae (also known by her stage name, Poops On The Floor Every Night While Everyone Else Is Sleeping) is (was) allowed to play with Maisie’s frisbee, mostly because everyone fears her tiny warbly wrath. Until Maisie and her stupid sister Peetie pulled the blue frisbee into tiny rubbery bits by arguing over who got to hold it.

Fae is such a little bag. Everyone thinks she is so sweet and adorable and full of hair, but that’s because they never see her flashing her pearly whites at everyone and stalking around with scorpion tail being a total hag. She won’t even play with Addy anymore, and Addy’s mostly too scared to try to attempt it … though once in a while her silly sighthound side gets the best of her and she gives it a go. They get along fine, they just don’t really play or snuggle (well, nobody snuggles with Fae, cuz she’s mean). Like right now Addy is snuggled up in a dog bed with Spring, while Fae is curled up on TOP of Addy’s snuggle sack in the chair next to me, so Addy can’t use it. Super bitch.

Don’t feel too bad for Addy though. Because she is super spoiled. Since the warm weather beat back the snow (seriously, Mother Nature is on crack … we went from well below zero and two feet of snow to 22+ tank top weather in the space of about 4 days), her frog-shaped splashing pool is back in business and she spends a good deal of time out there yelling at me to throw water with the chuck it so she can chase the droplets, or toss pebbles in the pool so she can try and find them with her little feetsies. And a friend of mine just gave us a second plastic pool shaped like a crab, which we are about to fill up with damp sand, so she can dig in it to her heart’s content. Because she is just THAT spoiled that she gets her own waterpark and her own beach. If I could get her to transfer her love of chasing water droplets and/or wet sand to a frisbee, she would be the world’s most adorable disc dog, but Addy don’t play that.

As I have no disc dogs of my own, I instead did a model call for disc dogs just so I could take some photos of them. Other people’s dogs are just that much more talented than mine. Also bendier.

This one was my favourite. Did so many cool things with the frisbee!

But this guy here, Dylan, I just love. I first met him when I was photographing dock diving last August at the fair. He’s a border collie/whippet mix and he is super athletic, super hilarious and generally just really really nice. One day he might be a daddy, and I’m hoping the timing is right for me to get a puppy from him! I am also hoping that is a long way away, because currently I have 80 million dogs and I don’t need any more.

Photographing disc was a fun way to spend a Sunday. I have never tried disc with my dogs, because I have only a couple of dogs that are leapers and they aren’t the same ones that really like frisbees. Maisie likes frisbee a lot, but she’s more of an on-the-ground dog. I have started doing some agility foundation work with her and she is catching on super quick. I think she will be a nice little agility dog – not crazy fast (or just crazy), like, say, Lavish:

(funny story – I posted this photo on my Big Air page and when I showed it to Lavish’s owner, she said “ASSHOLE” … and I still don’t know if she meant me or Lavish. Either way, I was delighted! LOL)

… but rather I think Maisie will be more like Tweed – reasonably fast, concise and think-y on the course. She is just generally a think-y dog (except when she is being a parasite). I really miss playing agility with Tweed (also I just miss Tweed). Dexter was like trying to stop that train from that movie with Denzel Washington. Spring is like trying to to get a rock in a slingshot without arms, and then suddenly achieving it and shooting it across the planet. Fae is like trying to get a mouse on speed to concentrate.

Mr. Woo was like trying to smack a particularly irritating mosquito. doG love him.

But I think Maisie is going to take her “job” seriously and understand what the end game is. She’s just that kind of dog.

Until then, my handsome Dexter will keep me busy posing beautifully for beautiful photos :)

I’m a lot more chipper these days, you may have noticed. Now that I’m not trapped in 12 freezing-cold square feet without water or a working toilet, with 9 super bored dogs, life is a lot less stressful. Thank you all for sticking with me through the dark times :)

Also, save your pennies because I have some truly amazing themed photo sessions coming up in the next few months, at some truly amazing and STUNNING locations! To make sure you’re kept in the loop, be sure to like and follow my photography page on Facebook. You won’t want to miss these, if photos of your doggos are what you’ve been craving!

Meanie

July 23, 2018 By The Food Lady 3 Comments

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 …

And This Is Why I Hate You

June 12, 2017 By The Food Lady 2 Comments

Dexter hates Peetie because she doesn’t give him a moment’s peace.

Addy hates Winter …

… because Winter would rather play with Spring, and Addy can’t keep up.

(btw, this is my new favouritest photo EVER)

Dexter hates Winter and Winter hates Dexter because both of them are ornery and weird.

Peetie hates my client dog Diezel, because on land

and at sea (aka the waterin’ hole), Diezel won’t leave her alone.

(What’s that Peetie? You find it annoying to be pestered constantly and shadowed around? BOO FREAKIN’ HOO)

My boarding dog Cao hates Peetie

because Peetie climbs out of the water and shakes all over everydog nearby.

Of course, so does Diezel. And he spends a LOT of time getting in and out of the water!

Mini Mama hates me

because I insist on bringing her puppies outside every afternoon for a romp.

ZOMG right? So cute?!?! They turned 4 weeks old on Saturday. I started feeding them mush meals, which they find very exciting, and which I find adorable.

They’re so FAT. I love them!

BTW, in the photo up above, Mini Mama is in the crawl space under my house and staring at me through some weird random little window that exists in the crawl space. I don’t know why she does this – she seems to really like it under there, with what I assume are a multitude of spiders and other creepy crawlies. She asks to go out often so she can sit in the crawl space. The window is like the icing on the cake, so she can sit in there but still watch everything. She’s an odd little dog.

I don’t usually bring my Big Girl Camera on hikes/walks because I feel like it’s more important to keep an eye on dogs that belong to other people than it is to be framing and setting up shots. Also, my camera hurts me/my neck/my arm, because it’s HEAVY. Lugging it around for an hour and a half gives me a wicked head/neck ache and lately my right arm has been going numb. Some people in one of the photography groups I’m in swear by this nifty gadget and I’m thinking I might need one!

I never bring the camera when I do a forest hike, because I think I’d die trying to climb hills with an extra 9 lbs of camera hanging from around my neck, but today was easy terrain and an easy group of dogs (ie, mostly my dogs!).

Also the scenery is very pretty on this walk, which makes for nice dramatic backdrops for portraits.

(This photos makes me like Peetie! Even though she is not wearing a collar in it because she rolled in cow poop AGAIN)

I also brought my camera to Regionals, but I didn’t take very many photos because there’s a professional photographer for the event, and I don’t think it’s cool to scoop her business. However, I also don’t have any spare money, so I was unfortunately also not going to pay her to take a photo of Springles with her ribbon for qualifying for Nationals (did you like that slick segue?)

Yeah, we managed to qualify by the skin of our teeth. Well, actually we had quite a bit of wiggle room, but it was definitely not a podium-worthy performance, or even an impressive-placement-performance. As I went in with no expectations except to keep it fun for her and keep her stress-level to a minimum to prevent poopage (because she hates Thunderbird, if you recall, and every year she shits or pisses in the ring there, and ONLY there) it was kinda fun to just run for the hell of it. But it also meant that I had to not take it very seriously, and I have not found that happy compromise between taking it seriously and stressing out my poor overly sensitive terrier, and having a lark and therefore handling like an idiot. It was interesting to note just *how easy* it is to stress Spring out though … in our second gamble, which she could have gotten (she is a gambling fool), she bounced every so slightly off my foot when I sent her out to the final obstacle, and I’m not even kidding, that slight bounce of her paw off my sneaker was enough to turn her to the right and cause her to take a different obstacle instead. Because the closing gamble is timed, and one tends to get a little panicky, and that may have been the first time all weekend I showed her any kind of stress and WOW, what an effect that had.

I love my Springaling very much, and she has come a long way from the dog that used to stress pee and poop in the house if I left her alone for as much as 45 seconds, but she’s still super duper sensitive, and I am super duper a spaz, so we are not destined to be a super duper competitive team.

As Dexter is pretty much stone deaf, and Fae is The Most Emo Dog Ever, I guess I’m going to have to start training Peetie if I want a new agility dog.

Oh, I also took a photo of Fiona and Rogue on the podium in first place blah blah blah, I should just recycle the same text every year since they win EVERY YEAR pretty much.

Here’s a photo of Addy that I find adorable, because she is obviously smiling in it!

And here’s a photo of Miss Piper because she’s started having quite a bit of trouble walking lately, and I’m not sure how many more hikes she has left in her :(

The Red Puppy

July 30, 2016 By The Food Lady 6 Comments

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)

Unflattering Portraits of What Are Usually Nice Looking Dogs

July 7, 2016 By The Food Lady 6 Comments

You know ‘they’ always talk about the ideal handsome man and his rugged “square jaw?” I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

I realize it looks like a did a really bad job of photoshopping a ball into his mouth, but hand to doG, this is just his face being his face. I have no idea how he manipulated physics to accomplish this. He is an amazing creature sometimes.

Another photo that does not flatter my poor dog. Although you notice that Piper looks EXTREMELY pleased to once again be the best looking border collie in the house.

Piper shouldn’t be too smug though, because when she gets senior-face / the crazy eye, she’s not all that and a bag of chips either.

Winter went through a short-lived phase of deciding that The FaeFae was extraordinarily humpable. It was short lived, because Fae was singularly unimpressed and twice as angry about it.

Is this a dagger which I see before me? The handle toward my hand?

The sheer indignity of the whole situation did nothing for what is otherwise a very adorable FaeFace.

Sister Spring is difficult to take a bad photo of. I mean, she can bend space and time:

and she is incredibly athletic.

But when she sticks her face where it doesn’t belong ….

Oh how the mighty have fallen!

Poor Spring. I don’t know what foolishness she poked her nose into last night during our evening play session, but whatever it was, it did not agree with her! And of course I was out of Benadryl – here is my PSA for the week: do an inventory of your first aid kit and see what’s missing!! I apparently can treat just about anything with the stuff I have on hand, but had run out of Benadryl and failed to replace it. Thank doG for landlords with toddlers, as I popped across the lawn to their house and they kindly gave me a bottle of children’s Benadryl to de-puffify the Springlet. After laughing hysterically and taking a photo for posterity, of course.

My dogs threatened mutiny if I didn’t stop taking crappy / mean spirited photos of them, and mocking them on the interwebz, so I took some nice ones instead.

Oh Peetie Pocket Collie Rocket. So pretty. SO annoying.

We are making some good gains in the training department and developing some drive. But what I have discovered about Peetie is very irritating … she’s just not that smart. She is lovely, and sweet, and cuddly and stuff, but she is not a scholarly dog by any means. It’s been weeks now, and she still hasn’t caught on to simple phrases like “where’s the toy?” I ask, all the other dogs turn and look at the toy like “it’s right there, stupid biped, are you blind?” and Peetie just stands in front of me with her head tilted and a little light bulb over her head rapidly dimming. She has learned some stuff – she now has the most amazing recall, off of anything, that you ever saw – but when it comes to that back-and-forth between dog and handler that I expect from a border collie, I just get white noise. I suspect it’s because she was raised with two little kids who nattered at her endlessly, so she’s not really into conversation.

And she is a Needy Peetie – she is forever trying to climb inside my skin. When I am working at the computer, she sticks her head under my arm a thousand times an hour, and then tries to crawl up into my lap. Ignoring her doesn’t work as I just end up with 30lbs of border collie on my knees and/or stuff on my desk knocked over because she doesn’t really fit up there. Telling her to go away doesn’t work because |blankness|. If I get up and walk away (hard to do when I am trying to get work done) she follows me, licking my hands and then repeats the whole thing when I go sit back down again. Just annoying stuff. And we won’t even talk about how glued to my right arm she is when I eat (also usually at the computer).

So why haven’t I put her up for adoption yet? Good question. I don’t feel like exploring that too deeply right now. And also because:

Pretty (vacant)

OH COME ON PEETIE!!

Oh well, she’s not the onlydog around here that can be annoying. Try and get a photo of another dog jumping for a cookie and you’re bound to get an Addypants in the picture!

These two are the cutest, but also the naughtiest!

Last week (way back when it wasn’t peeing rain) we took a trip to the beach with our friend Claire and her Aussie puppy Paisley.

She rivals the Woo for Orangedness,

Everybody liked Paisley, event bitchy terriers!

And especially big-toothed swamp monsters.

And even Littles thought she was fun!

(There are no photos of TWooie thinking Paisley was fun, you notice. Because TWooie.)

Speaking of the Littles, we really need to go oceanside more often. They are really getting their beach on this year!

hehehe. They look like two tiny little knights singing a drunken bawdy tune after a successful battle.

Addy isn’t a *huge* fan of swimming, and prefers to walk on the water instead if at all possible.

But she does like to chase the spray and droplets she or other dogs kick up!

And since discovering the art of swimming at our previous trip to the beach, Fae absolutely LOVES the water now.

Everyone else had their usual fantastic time.

So sandy afterward. I’m still finding sand in strange places!

This past weekend we went for a doggie walk with friends and Dexter was reunited with his most beloved Ghillie.

(Photo by Corey)

It’s been such a lovely, laid back, friend-filled summer so far. If the rain would just go away, that trend could continue!

Because when the weather is nice, sometimes I just stop and think “Wow. I live here. This is my home.”

Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to walk out of my front door into this every day, my own private playground. I need to remember to be more thankful, more often.

I like you

May 3, 2015 By The Food Lady 8 Comments

I like you …

You like me ….

… we all live in harmo- OOPS

The little dogs are teaching the even littler dog to be a real dog.

She was pretty lethargic and timid when she first arrived, but now she is all busy and active and stuff. It’s pretty damn adorable!

So who wants to adopt this itty bitty bundle of cute?

Or this one? (this is her “I was naughty and barked at someone walking down the road, and I know it was wrong” face)

Still adorable though. She plays with the puppy the most.

More adorable (puppies are sweet and all, but give me a fluffy orange beast any day!): Got Wootie a new Fifa, and he was so happy!

It was a cheapie from the dollar store, so it didn’t last long, but he was ecstatic while it lasted, and beyond.

More adorable still (and a little creepy) is the faces Dexter makes when I let him “get” the ball, even though he is still on leash rest.

Still limping on this left hind leg, so he is in a down while the other dogs play (he would hate this more, but liedown is Dexter’s favourite position). I’ll throw the ball at him periodically to make him feel included.

Tomorrow we go see Dr. Jeff and find out what the f*ck.

In the meantime, Spring will get enough air for the both of them.

and show off her adorable little heiney.

With this new camera and lens, I can finally get photos of Addy running at speed.

She’s adorable in her own way. She has a VERY nice personality, I really lucked out there. Her personality is better than Fae’s, who is kind of a sulky, passive aggressive little shit. But a SUPER adorable passive-aggressive little shit.

They make a good team.

Old. Kinda senile and getting very grouchy. Best girlie. Adorbz.

(Winter and TWooie were hunting wabbits, and declined to participate in photos)

Most adorable of the whole shebang … Mister Will-Be-Fifteen-In-Three-Days-Time.