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Kieren

Why I won’t live past Halloween

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This is why.

This could also be why.

Or this.

But I’m pretty sure it’s this.

Or perhaps I might die of the cute?

This is Holly, my new foster dog.

She’s a 6 month old border collie tres cute.  She came with the name Bonny, but whenever I said her name she cowered and ran away, so I changed it and we’re already making happy progress.

Now she is glued to me all the time, and it’s hard to get rid of her.

She needs some confidence building in the worst way.  But I guess I’ll have time to help her with that, because my beloved Kieren leaves for his new home tomorrow (insert sad face here).

I know he’s going to a fantastic home – I could not have asked for better.  He has big shoes to fill, but if I know my KK, he can step up.

He’s been part of my life for 10 months.  And he’s a treasure.  I will miss him like crazy :(

Good bye, my handsome friend.

Even though I’m sad, this can still make me smile:

Doesn’t Winter look like someone pounded Spring with a hammer a bunch of times?

They are like slightly irregular bookends.

hah!

The Dogs Came Marching Two By Two

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Hurrah, hurrah etc.

Had a nice lie-in this morning (around here, a sleep-in day means we don’t get up until 8AM!) and when we finally dragged ourselves out of our warm beds, we went outside into the Fall’s first frost.  Brrr.  Frosty and foggy both!  Fall’s first frosty, foggy Friday.  Ok, I’ll shut up now.

Had the camera handy as I had it out for trying out the new lightbox I built at work to take better photos of the shelter animals.

I don’t generally work inside, and not in a faux-studio type setting, so I am still working on getting the lighting right and such.  It’s an adventure!

Tweed was my first test subject, and found it boring beyond belief.

So I moved onto cats.

Incidentally, cats are grumpy about being asked to sit in a box.  Unless it’s a box of important stuff you don’t want cat hair in, of course.

I have a lot to learn about this stuff.  Going from black cat to white cat was hard.  White cats become ninjas, and disappear into the background.

In addition to figuring out lighting, I need to figure out how to make all cats look Not Terrified.

Anyway, on our morning walk I brought the camera and whipped off a couple of portrait pairs.

Dastardly Duo

For some reason, these Terriers are not merrier.

Kieren looks afraid, but really he’s just waiting for Dexter to GO!GO!GO! so he can chase him down.

And the old dogs are in love.

And I love my old dogs!

Even though I am full up with dogs and don’t want any more, I am nevertheless currently OBSESSED with getting an Italian Greyhound.  I have been discussing this with Spring, who is skeptical about me getting something that might rival her in the Adorable Department.

So she just stopped talking to me altogether.

Happy Friday everyone!

Another Story By Tweed

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(He doesn’t tell stories very often, but when he does, they generally disparage Mr. Woo.)

The Food Lady says that my little brother Mr. Woo is not stupid, it’s just that his smart is hidden under a layer of lard.  But I think she’s almost as stupid as he is, because she keeps thinking he will grow a brain.

It’s been FOUR YEARS since she first got him a toy like this, and he _still_ hasn’t figure out how it works!

And he likes it soooo much and wants it so bad, and he can’t even figure out what to do with it when he gets it!

The Food Lady says I should be fair, as not everybody else understands the toy either; it’s not just Woo.

But Needle Nose is just a baby, she’s SUPPOSED to be stupid, so it doesn’t count.

Yeah, yeah – Kieren also didn’t really get it at first.

But Kieren is also stupid!  Stupid enough to try and steal the toy from Piper.  

Probably nobody wants to adopt him because he has a deathwish.

Another stupid sibling, although he at least brought it back this way and didn’t just stand there chewing on it.  The Food Lady says he is an Idiot Savant. That means he has a brain the size of a walnut, and can’t play agility.

I am the only smart dog in the whole family.  I’m so smart, they had to put this big cone on my head to keep my brains in, cuz there’s too many for my skull.  That’s what The Food Lady told me, and she has thumbs, so it must be true.

She also said that I have to wear a sock because something called cancer might be eating my feet.  Do you think that’s true?

Nah, it can’t be true.  If there’s eating going on, I’M going to be the one doing it!

Hey look!  Numb Nuts figured out the toy.  I guess he’s not so stupid after all.

Yeah, look how “stupid” I am Tweed.

Thanks for the story Tweed.  You are a super genius indeed.  And we’re all hoping you don’t have cancer.

Our Facebook fans know that this week I found another tumor on Tweed’s foot, on the toe next door to the original growth.  This laid to rest the plans to chop off his bulgy digit, as while he may not “need” that out toe, he definitely needs the one next to it.  And Dr. Bowra wasn’t about to start slicing him into pieces one toe at a time.

So yesterday Tweed went under sedation and Dr. B. removed as much of each growth as he could, and sent the samples off to Histovet in Ontario to see what they are made of.  His lymph node on the same side was swollen :( so they did a fine needle aspirate of that as well and sent it off.  Now we play the waiting game until the results come back.

Dr. Bowra didn’t want to say it IS cancer, but he couldn’t with any confidence say that it’s not either.  At this point, what we are hoping for is of course that they are benign, but if they aren’t our next big wish is that it’s a slow growing kind of cancer that he could live with for some time to come.  Because the Doc couldn’t get it all without cutting off his toes.  And quite frankly, even if it is something dire, I don’t think I want to chop off any more parts of him.

I’m not sure how to play this yet … but whatever the lab results say, I’m determined not to be sad.  When I am sad, Tweed is worried – and Tweed has been making me laugh for a good many years, too many years to make him worried at his end.  He’s a damn good dog, and I owe it to him.  We’ll celebrate him while he’s here, and I’ll mourn like fuck when he’s gone, but I’m not going to make him sad or scared.

Keep him in your thoughts, friends.

How Low Can You Go?

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Dexter can go pretty low.

Although Tweed, who is the Boss Of Everything (he’s 13.5 years old, he’s allowed), would like him to go lower.

Dogs can go pretty low.  People can be a lot lower.

So, you know how when you decide to broker some puppy mill puppies online as a money making venture, and one of your adult dogs tries to rip the face off one of your cash-cow puppies, so you take it to the local animal control shelter and pretend you “found” it that way so you don’t have spend money on it / take care of it?

Yeah, me fucking neither.

Say hello to Martine, a 12 week old rough collie puppy who has had a rough week.  First of all, some assholes were trying to sell her and her sisters her on an online auction site for a few hundred dollars.  Then one of the asshole humans’ asshole dogs decided Martine would be more interesting WITHOUT HER FACE and tried to tear it off.  So they wrapped a sock around the gaping flesh and dropped her off at my shelter, claiming they found her that way.

However, there were some things they didn’t count on.  They didn’t know that my receptionist called in sick, so I was covering the front desk the day they brought the puppy in.  It probably never occurred to them that maybe The Boss/Food Lady monitors that auction site.  Never in a million years would it have crossed their minds, I’m sure, that The Boss/Food Lady REMEMBERS EVERYTHING SHE READS and also BURNS INTO HER BRAIN the faces of shitty brokers selling their collie puppies online so that she RECOGNIZES THOSE FUCKERS from the photos of them holding the collie puppies!!!

(!!!!)

TFL is also handy with a screen capture, and is quick to capture the part of the auction where the brokers post their full names, phone number and home address so she can give it the SPCA to follow up on.  Oh hellz yeah I did.

TFL is also a sucker for a sad puppy, so after sending the sad puppy to the vet to have layers of flesh and muscle sewn up around two drain tubes, she brings her home and cuddles her and listens to her gurgle as she tries to breathe through the fluid in her nasal cavity because of the trauma to the bone.

There are no sad emoticons that are sad enough.  My heart hurts all the time in this job.

When some macho creep calls me a bitch because I won’t give him back his roaming, intact, aggressive Presa Canario for free free, I wonder how am *I* the bitch?

When some lady tells me I have “no sympathy” because I won’t put her at the top of the list for a dog she wanted to adopt after she didn’t call me back for 4 days, 4 days in which that dog sat in a cement kennel waiting for her or anyone to make up their mind about giving him a home, I think “how can you even say I have no heart?”

I have a heart, it’s just breaking into smaller and smaller pieces every time someone hurts a puppy, or abandons it in a park to fend for itself.

The good news is that Martine is a better person than I am.  She has already forgiven, and moved on.  She holds no grudge against people or dogs, and is a lovely, social, brave and wonderful puppy.  Her drain tubes came out today, and she’s healing.  And she’s healing me too.

She’s a very good girl.  So smart!  She knows her name, she comes when she is called, and she is almost housebroken already.  She is the POLAR OPPOSITE of Shut The Fuck Up, who thinks her name is “What The Hell Are You Doing NOW??”, runs away when I call her and pooped on my living room carpet not 5 minutes after we came in from an hour’s play outside.

STFU is leaving for her new home tomorrow, I think.  She’ll have her own stay at home mum, and a big ole Lab to boss around.  Fingers crossed for a successful adoption please!  Because, you know, 10 dogs in my house.  Yep.

In other adoption news, I have finally listed Winter for adoption.  What with the chicken killing and all, he should probably find a home of his own.  I suspect he’s going to be a hard sell though, because he’s had to go back on the Zylkene … he started peeing in the house again recently, and has escalated from stealing a single sock and sleeping with it to gathering up all my clothes that he can reach and making a nest of them, to stealing money off my desk, presumably so he can try to buy my love.

I don’t want to keep Winter (or Kieren) because I don’t want this many dogs.  But I admit I am having a tough time even thinking about letting Winter go.  I will miss photo ops like this for many more reasons other than they are HILARIOUS.

Sometimes it’s hard to be me.  But not, I imagine, as hard as it is to be Dexter.  What with the wheels-spinning-in-mud-in-place-of-thoughts and all.

I expected very little of him from the trial last weekend, and I was not disappointed.  He was 0 for 3, crashing through jumps with his face or just running around them altogether.  Dexter is now my “class” dog, who will no longer trial because it’s like wiping my bum with fistfuls of cash.

Spring, OTOH, was marvelous and had two clean runs out of three, and has moved up a level.  She should have gotten a Steeplechase Q, but she was too busy visiting the judge and ring crew, so we are now practicing focus and not being so social when we are supposed to be ‘working.’

And by the way, if you are looking at her toenails and wondering whether or not to point out how long they are – don’t bother.  This photo was taken a day after nail clipping day.  That’s as short as they get!  She has the longest quicks EVER.

Lastly, for no real reason whatsoever, chickens.

I Want To Believe

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I want to believe.

I want to believe all kinds of things.  FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY Dexter was born, and I wanted to believe I was getting a superstar agility dog with a big brain and a superfast body.

Well, he’s fast all right.  And most of him is big (ears, legs, hugs, LOVE), but not so much his brain.  I feel like I am living with an alien sometimes, as we so do not speak the same language (I speak English – usually angry – and he speaks Crashing Cutlery and Burning Rubber).

I want to believe that at the ripe old age of 4 years, he’s on the cusp of a breakthrough (his brain will evolve, or come out of hiding or whatever).  Agility class last night proved me wrong.  For the record: THERE IS NO FIRST WEAVE POLE IN DEXTER’S WORLD.  It’s not his fault, the thing just does not exist on his dimension, so suck it judge.

He’s a lunatic.

I love him.  I hate him.  I’ve never had such diametrically opposed feelings for the same creature at the same time as I do for this dog.  I cannot imagine life without him.  I cannot help but imagine what life would be like if he had two brain cells to rub together.

But one thing I am sure of; he’s my family.  He’s part of our whole big retardodog soup.

Happy Birthday Dexter “Long Stride” Morgan.  If you do not put me in an early grave (fists clenched, mouth for eternity screaming a long “WHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!”), I raise a frisbee to another 14 years of crazy making together.

There is no Winter in this photo because he was hiding from me beneath my truck.  He was hiding from me because he was afraid I was going to chase him around the acreage hitting him with a dead chicken.  This is not because we have turned to vaudeville as a way to amuse ourselves, it’s because the f*cker killed one of my chickens this morning and I tried to beat him into mangy goat meat with the corpse.  Alas, the chicken was very small, and Winter is very fast.  Foiled again.

Anyway.  We’re baaa-aack!  You missed us, apparently, judging from all the posts and emails.  My apologies for disappearing from the face of the earth … I just was not feeling the blogging thing.  For no real reason other than my job consists of me training, exercising, talking about and writing about dogs.  When I come home, I scowl menacingly at my own crew and don’t want to train, exercise, talk about or write about them or any other dog on the planet.

I’m too vested in my job, maybe.  I don’t want to analyze it.  Shut The Fuck Up.

No no, I wasn’t speaking to you. I was speaking to her.  “Her” being Shut The Fuck Up.

She is my latest “I take my work home with me” project.  About 3 months old, she was found locked in the fenced ‘Small Dog’ dog park one morning by a woman when she went to take her dog for a romp.  All by herself.  No other dogs or humans in sight.  I toyed with calling her “Coyote Bait” instead of Shut The Fuck Up, but then I tried to put her in an XPen and leave the room, and the set o’lungs on her sealed her name fate.

At work we call her Hopscotch, and my boss says I am NEVER EVER ALLOWED TO INTRODUCE HER TO CHILDREN because I might say the wrong name by mistake.

Can you guess what she is?  I mean, besides an Olympic gymnast.

Or the Terrier’s Plaything.

Maybe she is your next little agility dog?

Don’t be offended by her name.  She was almost “Pisses On Dog Beds.”

And speaking of next agility dogs, I guess Kieren is going to be mine.  I had three – count ’em, THREE – applicants for Kieren who vanished into the ether halfway through the adoption process in the last month, so I have effectively given up on trying to find him a home.  He’s still listed as available, in case a MIRACLE happens and someone actually comes along and adopts him, but in the meantime, I have started training him in agility, so that he’s not rotting away in the back of my SUV.

The Satanist has dubbed him “The Better Dexter” which tells you all you need to know about the trajectory of Dexter’s agility career in the years to come.

In other news, someone put a hole in Wootie, but it healed itself.  The hole probably vanished into the HUGE LAYER OF FAT that he is sporting this summer.  The older he gets, the lazier he gets, so the fatter he gets.  He’s going to be 100 lbs by the time he’s a senior.

His brother suffers from the same affliction.  But he’ll have to get fatter at Auntie Jen’s place, as that’s where he’s going to live for a while.  He bit Dexter the other day, so The Rage is intensifying (although what I erroneously interpreted as Dexter being trapped under the bed turned out to actually be a contest for who could claim Under The Bed rights first, and whoever gets under there doesn’t want to leave lest their nemesis plant their flag in that spot.  It must be the coolest spot in the house, because now that the weather is not so smoking hot, the contest to claim it has abated somewhat) and I am sending TWooie away to give Dex a break from being bullied.

Piper is going bald.

Had her first ever hot spot last year.  Got another this summer.  No idea why.  I got ahead of this one quicker though, as I was prepared for it, so I didn’t have to shave her whole back end like I did last summer.

And Tweed’s having his toe removed :(

His cytology came back as nothing alarming, just inflammation, so we did a second round of powerful antibiotics in case it was a foreign body that didn’t get expelled the first time.  No dice.  Then the good Dr. Bowra wanted to do a biopsy, just in case.  But after some thought, I decided that if the biopsy DID show something and we had to remove the toe anyway, I was paying for twice the procedures AND he would have to go under anaesthetic twice, something I am a bit loathe to do in an old man dog of 13.  Plus, he will Not Leave The Growth Alone and he keeps making it bleed, so I am going to bite the bullet and just sacrifice the toe.  And my credit card.

The good news is it hasn’t slowed him down any!

Hopefully the same will be said after he is short one digit.

Even when it’s boring around here it’s never boring!

Vacation ends (sad face)

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Watching my precious one week of freedom coming to and end, kind of like the ball that is about to hit TWooie in the face.

And what a glorious, hot, sunny week it was.

We did a little of this:

And a lot of this:

Quite a lot of this:

We even did a tiny bit of this:

That’s not Kieren, that’s Ghillie, who was adopted from me.  Keiren did some sheeping too, but I have been too lazy to upload his video.

I did make a short video of Dexter’s third (and probably last!) time ever on sheep, since his constant snapping and Ugly Facing at the sheep amused me.  The video is not very fancy, as I lack both the skill and patience to make quirky movie making software do what I want it to do, but you’ll get the idea.

The music is kind of sporadic as the stupid program would only let me use three songs.

The nice lady who tried our dogs out for us said “Dexter is afraid of the sheep.”  No, really?  Hah!  And of her, and of her rake.  Although this time he didn’t clamber out of the pen, or sit at the door with his back to the sheep staring at me to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF DOG LET HIM OUT.  Also, he was only scared of her in the pen – after they left the pen, he gave her a great big hug (“thanks for believing in me, sheep lady!”).  He’s such a weird, strange dog.

The trainer thinks that in a bigger field with lots of repetition, Dexter can get over his fears and work.  I think that at $25 a pop, Dexter can find a different (cheaper) way to get over his fears!

Kieren did very nicely – his tail was up much of the time, but he was super keen to please and a very sensitive guy, and really wanted to work the whole group and not peel anyone off, or go in for a cheap shot, or (*ahemDEXTER*) make Mad Teeth™ at them.  This is all good news, as I have someone who is interested in him for working her sheep on her small ranch.  If it pans out, I will be very sad to see him go, but the reality is that no matter how good he is on sheep, I cannot afford another hobby, so he should go to a home where he can do what he loves to do.

So … a wash out on sheep, and not so awesome at agility … it’s a good thing Dexter makes nice photos!

And nice smiles too :)

I’d love to stay and babble some more, but I was depressingly uninteresting for my whole vacation, pretty much.  I didn’t get my deck built, or my house painted, or my garden planted.  I didn’t even go very many places or do very many things to photograph/blog about.  I am a boring person!  Plus, SOMEONE would like me to throw the ball some more…

Piper gets what Piper wants!