Wootube!

Dolittle's got nothin' on me

foster puppies

A Beachin’ Good Time

By 3 Comments

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

By 6 Comments

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

By 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 …

 

Oh You Haven’t Lived Until …

By 3 Comments

I’m going to begin today’s blog post by telling you all that Addy was so excited about her dinner tonight that she inhaled it.

Literally.

So she choked.  Her ground duck and green beans went down the wrong pipe.  She couldn’t breathe.  The big old slimy mass of foodstuffs was stuck in her throat but apparently her own gag reflex wasn’t enough to bring it back up to earth (my sofa).  So you know what she did?  She howled.  It was the saddest, thinnest little sound you’ve ever heard.

So you know what I did – I opened her skinny face and jammed my finger down there and dislodged it.  She immediately upchucked it onto my sofa and then cheerfully reconsumed it, lest one of her siblings steal her double-dip bounty.  At least she chewed it this time.

Never a dull moment ’round here.

And as I apparently thrive on chaos, I now have TWO high-octane puppies in my “house.”

The big puppy is on a leash, because he is a naughty ADHD run-away puppy.  The little puppy is the Police and The Discipline of Everything so she routinely makes sure he can’t sneak away by holding onto his leash.  Also, he might run off with her frisbee, and that’s Not Okay.

Meet Crazy Miss Maisie, 15 weeks of DON’T STOP ALWAYS GO.

A very nice lady was filling up her gas tank in Washington on her way home to Canada and some sketchy looking fella shuffled up to her car and asked her if she wanted to buy his poop-covered puppy.  She said yes without hesitation, and brought Maisie home.  But she’s a senior dog person, not an INSANE BORDER COLLIE PUPPY person, so she knew she had to pass Maisie on to someone who likes INSANE BORDER COLLIE PUPPIES and so here we are :)

She is a very interesting little beastie.  Although she is affable with everyone she meets, it also took her about 2.5 days to decide I was worth paying attention to because she is a Strong Independent Woman Who Don’t Need No … human.  She is like the anti-Silly in that she has fairly laser focus (already!) and her brain is constantly engaged in making decisions (Silly’s is engaged in flying unicorns in the clouds over Candystuffiecookieland).  She is intelligent but willful, and I need to show her why she should do what I’m asking, otherwise she just levels me with a stare of mild haughtiness.  She will fetch ANYTHING and forever. She will tug EVERYTHING and a little past forever.  She fears nothing – “dock dives” into the water off the riverbank and beats Dexter to the hockey ball.  Took on a turkey.   Accepts no discipline from the adult dogs when they get annoyed with her, even though she’s the pain in the ass.  Actually, that’s not *entirely* true … she fears Addy’s wrath.  Of all dogs.  Though she be but tiny … I guess this dictate also applies to Adrenaline.

She’s also a demand barker and is constantly telling me off (“come back here!” “give me the Chuck-It” “throw the ball, moron!” etc).  She doesn’t like being on a leash so she tries to tug it right out of my grasp.  Growls when you go near her food, so we’re going to work on that one.

Oh but I like her.  She’s FEISTY.  She is a LOT of dog.  She is going to make someone a killer sport dog!

She’s about the same size as Winter / Spring right now, and the same coloration, so now I can’t figure out who anyone is, especially at a distance.  Auntie Michelle and I took the entire pack for a hike in the woods on the weekend and we just kept saying to one another “Ok I see Dext-no wait, I think that’s Peet-no, that’s definitely Silly.  But there’s Winter-wait, I think it’s Mai-shit, is that Spring?”  Told you – chaos.

The hiking trail was next to a gun range … I was worried about the dogs being startled by the near constant sound of gun shots, but nobody batted an eyelash except Auntie Michelle, who hiked in a state of near-constant certainty that a stray bullet was going to kill one of us.  haha.  The good news is that Dexter is so deaf they didn’t bother him at all.  The other good news is that he is starting to understand that the vibrating collar I got for him means it’s time to check in when he feels it against his neck.  I press the remote, he comes to see what the f*ck I want now, and he gets a cookie, which he likes very much.  I hope this means I won’t lose him on hikes anymore!

Wootie is probably going to need one at some point too, though right now his biggest problem is his sad tail.  He got limber tail a few days ago, no idea why … it’s definitely getting better now.  It was a very sad thing to see The Flamboyance(tm) at way less than half mast.  It’s like it was mourning itself.  But today it’s operating at about 3/4 of full power and he almost wagged it for me.  Of course, he doesn’t need a full Flamboyance(tm) to pose pretty for photos.

Actually he kind of does … it was a bit painful if he sat the wrong way.  It took some convincing to get him to sit for the obligatory group photo.  Notice I got Silly in this one (though he is gazing off into the distance, where he wished to be running), but Maisie is still a work in staying progress.  Maybe next time.

(TWooie also doesn’t hear so well, but he is happiest when plodding along at my heels, so I don’t ever worry about losing him)

These three are very good at entertaining one another at least, which gives me a bit of a break, if not peace and quiet.  Their three-ways are extremely.loud.

This evening I finally put this face, as well as the rest of her, outside with a beef marrow bone so the other dogs could have a break.

Did they take advantage of this downtime to have a relaxing nap?  No they did not … they stood at the screen door and watched her chew on her beef bone, and complained about not having one as well.  Can’t win for losing!

I’ve been working on using my strobe outside, in my quest to capture the elusive perfect sunset shot.  I gave it a whirl with Fae last week – I think I have mentioned before that the sun sets not in the direction of the lovely pastoral vista that I epsy out my window, but rather it sets on the other side of the parking lot, with a background of oh-so-charming portapotties.  But sometimes the setting sun throws very nice pink and orange at the clouds in the other direction, which reflect the colours and it looks quite nice.  I was hoping for one of these evenings, and instead, as I set up my lights and such, the weather snuck in the start of a thunderstorm and I looked up to see a most ominous sky of ragey looking clouds instead of pink ones.

I still think it worked though, and I was pretty pleased with the end result!  Especially as the wind had picked up and was trying to blow my light over, so I did some very impressive yoga to keep everything upright and get this image.

However … I still wanted a dramatic sunset photo.  So it rained for the last week because OF COURSE IT DID.  But then last night Mother Earth smiled on my creative efforts and gave me this.

And I like it.  Some feedback from fellow photographers was that the sky needed to be exposed a bit more, and I get what they’re saying, but I actually wanted it to turn out more in this vein, so I’m okay with it :)  Also I found an errant patch of grass in the parking lot to help me complete my mission,

It’s a toss up between that image and this one for which I liked the best.  I’ve been trying to get this starburst sun image for a while and when I finally saw my opportunity, I made poor Dexter stand still for an obscenely long time until it was in the right position.  He is SOOOO patient.  I am a lucky woman.

Also really glad I got my lazy butt out of my recliner to try these last night, because the sky tonight is cloudless and the sunset far less dramatic.

I’d love to do these for other people, but I am limited in locations by the need for a power source.  “Come to the parking lot!” is not a good sales tactic ;-)

Now it’s time to take this face out for bed time potties.  I will leave you with this parting image so that you can dream about adopting her!

 

 

 

And Then There Were Eight

By 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

By 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!