farm

There’Snow Winter, like A Cold Winter …

February 17, 2019 By The Food Lady 3 Comments

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!

January 6, 2019 By The Food Lady 7 Comments

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

November 23, 2018 By The Food Lady 3 Comments

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!

And Then There Were Eight

April 23, 2018 By The Food Lady 19 Comments

Getting real tired of losing doggos :(

Only a week after I lost my bestest girlie, Mini Momz got herself adopted. I was hoping for acreage home for her because she does so love roaming around rollin’ in things and stealing eggs and getting into little tiny escapades of naughty, and she found that in spades, on 150 acres. Lucky girl!

Going to miss my three-pack of Littles though. They were such an itty bitty force to be reckoned with! Plus Minnie was the bomb at getting other dogs to play with her – Fae and Addy don’t usually play with each other, but both of them played with Minnie all the time. Fae, of course, played with her “in secret” because Fae is a bitch and has a reputation to maintain. But Minnie even got TWooie to play with her, and that’s something special, because I’m pretty sure TWooie is on the spectrum and he doesn’t make friends too easily.

Mini Momz was here for almost a year! Her little puppers were born the middle of May last year in my spare room, shortly after she came into foster care with me … can you believe how fast that time went by?? Remember these little faces?

For a dog who was dumped outside a shelter in a box with her partially grown pups, and already pregnant again (surprise!) when transferred to rescue, she sure experienced a life turn around. I like to think that once we raised those pups right and sent them off to their forever homes, she and I helped her remember what it was like to be a happy doggo and not a puppy-making machine over these last seven months. I sure do miss her.

I like little puppy faces though and fostering that litter was pretty awesome. I like little puppy faces so much that I went ahead and photographed a whole passel of ’em last week! If you follow my photography page, you probably already saw these, but they are so adorable they are worth revisiting!

The Sadist’s wife’s dog Cruz is the Baby-Daddy to this litter, and most of them just look exactly like little Cruzes.

Cruz has a simply *amazing* wiggle bum, so it was only fitting that we showcase his bum genetics* in his offspring!
(*to be clear, that’s “genetics of the bum” and not, like, lousy or “bum” genetics)

What with the lousy month I’ve had, cute puppies was the most welcome tonic! Also, if you want to have some real fun, pick up a puppy and speak these words aloud in the presence of several hard-core Aussie people: “I hope this one’s ears stand up!”

You’ll receive a deafening round of “NOOOOOOOOOS” in quadraphonic stereo. We were in Chilliwack, but I’m pretty sure the audio response was recorded at Vancouver International Airport as a possible earthquake and thunderstorm simultaneously.

Addy, bless her pointy/boney little self, tried to accommodate my wish for uppy ears. She looks so silly!

I took this image last night at the back of the property. Did you know we have a huge pond back there? Neither did Dexter and he was AH-MAZED that this had been under his nose all this time and he had no idea.

We never went back there because to reach it we had to pass through 40 goats and a couple of cows, and a significant majority of my four-legged arseholes lack the self control to safely mingle with anything with hooves and horns that could stomp them into smithereens and then gore their corpses. But the goats and cows have all been sold, so now we can wander around for 6 more days to at our leisure. It makes for some lovely backdrops!

I wish we could have taken advantage of it sooner.

After the first rolling pasture and before the pond is where I took the group photo. Such lovely scenery and light! You’ll notice Silly is not in the photo … partly because unless I’m standing with one foot on his dinner bowl there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell of making him down-stay, and partly because the little (little. HAH!) bugger was nowhere to be seen. Silly has an attention-scan problem, in that he thinks I’m not all that worth paying attention to and he is too busy scanning his environment for something to be reactive to. I in part blame the neighbour’s dog, who likes to instigate an extremely irritating game of run-the-fence with my dogs, most of whom ignore her 99% of the time – but not Silly. Fence running with Sophie is his favourite thing ever. He likes it so much he has expanded the game to fence running with anything on the other side of any fence, anywhere. All the neighbourhood horses hate us, as do their surprisingly foul-mouthed riders. Silly now spends all his outside time actively seeking out fences to patrol so he can yell at and chase anything on the other side of them. And his recall turns to absolute shit when he’s doing this, and I have about as much patience right now as Silly has recall, so long story short – I hate him.

It’s not his fault, he’s a nice dog with oodles of potential. He just needs someone who can put that one-on-one time into him to curb these tendencies and convince him that his person is better than no-climb fencing and the wonders that can be found on the other side of it. I have neither the time nor the motivation to do these things with him, so he is officially for adoption. I think he’s going to be an awesome dog when he grows up, and despite his size, he is shockingly athletic … Deafo Dexter wandered in front of him once when Silly was running full-bore and Silly hopped over him IN STRIDE as though he was’t even there, much less a good 3″ taller than he. I think he’d make a powerhouse of an agility dog. But not for me. I have too much on the go and too many other things to worry about, so Silly needs his own person. If you want a pretty awesome border collie puppy, hit me up!

His ear went back up so they are uppy again (to the disgust of Aussie people everywhere, I’m sure)

Seriously, come get him. But only if you have experience with border collies. I think he could go sour in the wrong / inexperienced hands. He really is a lot of dog. And I really don’t want to live in my car with him, since we are 7 days away from being homeless and still no prospects in sight :( April is my least favourite month in the history of months.

But this is my favourite border collie (now).

I imagine this will be my last blog entry for the foreseeable future, because I won’t have the ability to take, edit or post photos for who knows how long. Hopefully the cute puppy bums will tide you over :)

It’s been great friends! See ya on the other side.

Snow Day Part II

February 24, 2018 By The Food Lady 7 Comments

After we played in the snow yesterday, it continued to dump snow all night long and we had about a foot of snow when we got up this morning. But it stopped snowing and the sun came out so it was clear and bright and shiny and that means it is of course going to rain and ruin everything. So we made time for Snow Photos The Second, since we are unlikely to get snow again, plus it will probably just pee rain until, like, June.

Since my suggestion of a second snow photos post received an enthusiastic YES from y’all, here you go. This time I made sure I got shots of every dog so nobody is left out. We’ll showcase them alphabetically, just for fun.

ADDY has a look of grim determination on her face. Is it because she’s trying to break through snow that’s almost as tall as she is? Is it because The Food Lady forgot to put a sweater on her before we went out and she’s freezing to death? Is she being pursued by bear?

No. I offered her a cookie, and she is coming to get it as fast as she possibly can. It’s serious business, cookies.

DEXTER cannot apparently have a photo taken of him where his tongue is not lolling out of his mouth as though he were a halfwit (*whistles innocently*).

… unless you shove something in his mouth, so I did.

(Peetie ruined the Wootie Toy (surprise surprise) but it still flies straight! It’s a good toy, we’ll have to get another)

Retrieving this toy is FAE‘s version of tap dancing for attention. When she gets it, she does the zoomies with it and flings it around to be sure I have noticed what a Good Retrieving Girl Who Needs A Cookie Or Ten she is before bringing it back.

There are these “sticks” sticking up all over the property. They are the remnants of some dead plants and they plague me. They ruin more shots than I care to count, by virtue of being in the way. I edit them out when I can, but sometimes it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. In this shot, however, there were only two “sticks.” Just two in a vast stickless atmosphere, and MINI MAMA chose to run right between those two sticks. But hey, it worked, and it’s a good photo!

PEETIE has started picking fights with my other dogs. I don’t know why. This morning she decided to kick seven kinds of shit out of Winter, and he wasn’t even interacting with her – he was playing with me at the time, and this apparently offended her. It’s not the first time she’s done it and it’s not just Winter; she has also tried to kick the crap out of Spring for no really good reason. AND she knocked Piper ass over teakettle when she did it. AND she tried to bite me when I hauled her ass out of that scrap. I cannot have this in my household/life … Peetie is going to meet a person this week who is thinking of taking her home. This was a tough decision for me, but I cannot risk her hurting one of my other dogs and for the life of me I cannot figure out why she has taken up this new hobby now, two years into her life with us. If the woman does adopt her, Peetie will be moving to Belize. So not only has she driven me crazy for the last two years, and started beating up my other dogs, and making me feel like a monster for rehoming her, she is also going to have a much cooler life than I do. THANKS, PEETIE.

PIPER is doing much better on the steroids than off, so we are leaving her on them. Notice she doesn’t need to wear her harness anymore because I don’t need to haul her to her feet or help her walk! She can get along just fine on her own, even if her gait is a bit weird, as her right hind leg doesn’t work super well. And she can’t wag her tail anymore (?). And she gets stuck in a left-turning loop sometimes if I am out of eyesight, but less and less often as the days go by. And when she goes outside to potty she gets a bit confused and I have to put on my shoes and a coat to go retrieve her. But all in all, she’s holding it together pretty well, and I am very happy about that.

SILLY needs no explanation. Really.

SPRINGalingaling, while initially pretty traumatized by spontaneously having her ass handed to her by Peetie for no reason, has bounced back and is her very happy self. After all, when she is outside she gets to hunt all the bunnies, real and imagined, that she wants, and inside she gets to share my tv watching chair with me under the heated blanket. Not a bad life! And I love that provides me with “Look ma! No feet!” photos like this.

TWOOIE is becoming lazier by the measurable second. I cannot believe how expertly this dog can conserve energy (and thus body fat. No diet in the world will slim this chunk-o down). The ONLY thing that can motivate him to run is a bunny. Otherwise he spends the entire time we are outside laying down and pretending he’s scanning the property (but his eyes are usually closed) or dogging my heels making his snapping-turtle face for cookies. Deep snow makes him even lazier, if that’s possible. Cold be damned, he’s going to sit his ass down in one place and stay there until he can get back to the sofa.

Poor WINTER who this morning just wanted to play the “Don’t steal my apple!” game with me this morning (I have told you, haven’t I, how every morning he sneaks over to the landlord’s side of the property and steals a single apple from the goats? My landlord says he’ll be drinking coffee and see the goats startle, look out the window and then says “Oh it’s just Winter getting an apple.” He kills me). When he (Winter, not landlord) brings the apple back, I start stalking him and telling him I’m going to steal his apple and he growls at me and gets all hunchy over his prized fruit and then runs away with it so I will chase him. It’s a very innocent game that delights him, so it was super mean of stupid Peetie to attack him mid-game. And hard for Winter to fight back with an apple in his mouth. Winter also is built like a tank and cannot get Spring’s air, but he tries his best, my brave little weird soldier.

And last, but never least, we have WOOTIE. So distinguished, so photogenic, so full of poise and suaveness.

Oh FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, Wootie!!

In other news, if you happen to have a spare washing machine, can I have it? Mine died last week and there is a frightening, mounting pile of dog laundry in my kitchen. It smells bad, and pretty soon it’s going to all have to go live on the porch, which will make me more white trash than I am keen on experiencing. I keep trying to buy a cheap one off craigslist but these things get snapped up like a hot damn, as fast as they are posted! And given how the liquid-iron-I-mean-water here kills appliances, I am not keen on spending a lot on a brand new one. If you have a line on a cheap washing machine I can get my hands on, hit me up!

Dashing Through The Snow …

December 26, 2017 By The Food Lady 7 Comments

This is the kind of snow I like! Sure it’s cold and stuff, but it snowed one big-enough dump to make the world fluffy and pretty, but the roads remain clear and driveable. My landlord plowed my driveway so I can get up and down it, and the dogs have fun in it*, but it has not trapped me on my property. All good things!

(*Addy doesn’t have quite as much fun in it. Yesterday I took everyone out and she complained mightily that despite a sweater AND a winter coat, it was intolerably cold and she was miserable. So I put her back in the house with a chewy which made her happy for a while, but then she decided that everyone was having fun without her and she was intolerably lonely, so she yapped and howled her little head off until I went inside, redressed her and brought her back outside. Lather, rinse and repeat. I love my little fair-weather diva, even if she does turn her nose up at warm clothing, and then turns into a ridgeback when she goes without it. I have no idea how she manages this with no hair!)

I bought her an adorable little turtleneck sweater at the feed store, because it was only $10 and because it was long enough to cover her bum and the neck flips up to cover her throat. I thought she would appreciate the warmth. Instead I just walked past the bedroom and found her naked under my covers (heated blanket is still on!) and her turtleneck in a tiny heap on the floor. I don’t know why she is so allergic to clothes.

But she is not allergic to COOKIES, which is convenient for me, because I did a fun little session with my doggies where I put one in a sit stay and then threw a cookie at them so I could capture the moment before and during the leap for the cookie.

There were a lot of photobombs until everyone figured out they’d each get a turn. But some of them turned out awesome!

I like this one of Wootie; I even caught his curly orange locks in motion just as he was preparing to “leap.” His actual leap was more of a faceplant, but the pre-leap was pretty adorable!

I didn’t get any of his brother, because he would sit and watch the cookie land, then haul his fat arse out of the snow and saunter over to consume it as his leisure. TWooie does not believe in wasting perfectly good energy.

Winter was adorably frantic. The one uppy ear is his anxiety tell. WHATIFTHECOOKIEDISAPPEARSOHMYGODOHMYGODWHEREDIDITGO?WHYWOULDYOUTHROWACOOKIEAWAY???

And then the mad scramble to get the cookie before the snowmonsters gobbled it up.

Springaling looks like a fox pouncing on a hare in a nature documentary.
(Yes her nails are recently trimmed. No, after all these years, I can’t get them any shorter than this! She has the world’s longest quicks)

Fae won the whole day though. As if her obsessive tracking of the cookie’s arc through the air wasn’t adorable enough …

… the “Meercat” pose that preceded it was KILLER cute!

She may be a rotten, spoiled, hateful little beast, but man is she ever cute. I went to my parents’ for Christmas dinner and when I came back home, Fae practically turned herself inside out with glee. She kept trying to scale my body to get at my face so she could lick it, but when I picked her up she was so excited she would thrash around and hurl herself to the floor. I was afraid we were going to end up in the Animal ER if she kept that up, so I eventually just sat on the floor so she could reach my face. Unfortunately, I sat in Piper pee, because old dogs and continence aren’t always super good pals. Merry Christmas to me!

Speaking of cute … a friend of mine is fostering 7 border collie X whippet puppies and asked if I could get some photos of them. So brought the entire pile of the little suckers over on the weekend and I got to indulge in some serious puppy lovin’s!

Look at these impish little faces! Also, look how lovely my landlord’s chicken barn door is for photos!

Also, look how they mob poor Addypants!

Addy’s not stupid though … she indulged in her favourite activity for a while (puppy humping – she channels Puppy Uncle Tweed sometimes) and then her second favourite activity, which is running away from puppies who cannot catch her speedy little self, and then she’d had enough of being mauled by puppies and she led them straight into a pack of Terrifying Turkeys which stopped them in their tracks so she could make her escape.

Our goal was to get individual shots of them and composite them altogether for a group photo. I wish I had photographed them inside, because it was a bright sunny late afternoon and the sun and shadows change so quickly while wrangling recalcitrant 8 week old puppies that it didn’t turn out awesome, technically. There is just no consistent shade on the property for this kind of shot at that time of day. Not my best work, but still really flippin’ cute.

ALSO super cute … Mini Momz! Why on earth has she not been adopted yet? She is such a wonderful little dog. When I woke up this morning she was spooning me, with her head sharing my pillow and her body under the covers with me. She is SO MUCH LOVEBUG. She can also convince ANYONE to play – even TWooie! Even FAE, who has finally caved to her charms and has a good wrassle with her every afternoon. I just don’t understand how everybody could not want her. If I could, I would just keep her all for myself.

This guy is pretty cute too, although I am a little tired of virtually every photo I take of him being this Crazy Face. He used to be such a charming poser when he was a pup … now in his middle age he is like that crazy uncle that makes rabbit ears with his fingers in every family photo.

Although he mostly behaved himself for our group Christmas photo.

And here’s Peetie. I still have nothing good to say about Peetie. The passing months don’t make her any less annoying, and there were no Christmas miracles that turned her into a pleasant-to-live-with dog. At least she is consistent.

Now Christmas is over. Living alone sometimes sucks because I didn’t get anything for Christmas as my dogs are lazy freeloaders without any spending money. Got a little tired of seeing all the fabulous cameras and lenses and gear that people in my photo groups got from their families for Christmas, so now I’m staying away from facebook for a bit until I get over my snit about it. Because inside me there is a 9 year old girl who really, really likes unwrapping presents. What did you all get for Christmas this year? I hope it was awesome!

Terrence got another pardon, so he thinks Christmas is fabulous :)