2011 June

Leave ya’ll alone for a week

Jun 29 22

and you let me come back with a borderjack???

A shelter up North in BC was looking for some help with some of their residents, and I happened across a crosspost from an all-breed rescue on Facebook, and offered to take their border collies. There were two.

Tripp, an 8 month old puppy, whom we decided was a borderjack based on this photo:

and Vaeda, whom was listed as an “Italian Greyhound mix.” We all had a good laugh about that – I mean look at her, she was obviously a smooth coat border collie bitch:

So this morning the shelter put them on a plane, and I zipped over to the airport to collect them. I was most unhappy about this, it being my first day off in the last 7, and I had planned to sleep in really really late and then be really really lazy. And because they arrived rather suddenly (didn’t know they were coming until last night!) the only foster home I could line up for Tripp the borderjack was in North Van. Which meant doing that commute for the EIGHTH day in a row. Gah.

You’ll have to imagine the look of shock on my face when they were wheeled out of the cargo terminal, and Tripp turned out to be a 45 lb border collie X labrador retriever puppy – a great big goofy giant pawed puppy.

And Vaeda, the smooth coat border collie bitch?

Yeahno.

She’s a whopping 15 lbs and looks like – as my boss so eloquently put it – a greased weasel. She makes the WooTWoo look big! She could be an Italian Greyhound mix, but I’d bet a large sum of cash on her being a borderjack.

I tried to get a to-scale photo of her with another dog so you could all see how SMALL she is, but I had some difficulty getting her to stop standing on my feet or hugging my thigh. She’s not at all nervous (she is actually really outgoing and sociable), just seems really grateful to have a human of her own to bond to and reluctant to let me out of her sight.

Of course, she may also have been looking for protection from the Devil Dog that was shooting her malevolent glances out of the corner of his eye.

Despite her glued-to-me-edness, I left a leash dragging just in case she decided to bolt, a la Poutine. Fool me once, etc.! And she is fast like stink, so there’s no way I’d catch her if she decided to run.

But it’s okay; Woo’s got it covered, and isn’t going to let her go anywhere.

The other dogs aren’t sure what to make of her. They have experience with Jacks, and borderjacks, none of it good. The thing that tells me the most she is in fact a borderjack is that they all immediately gave her a wide berth. At one point I was giving Tweed a cookie and she jumped up, put her paws on his head, and stole the cookie right out of his mouth – and he did NOTHING. That never happens.

Dexter thinks she is fun for like, a minute, but then she’s too slow for him and he’s bored of her. For as fast as she is, nothing can keep up with the world’s speediest giraffe.

TWooie and I have practiced a lot of cookies-whenever-the-new-dog-is-around and he was mostly doing really good, but he occasionally requires a firm scolding.

And Piper’s taking it out on her hockey ball.

I have 4 days off, so I’m looking forward to getting to know “Bounce” (her new name, as she does that a lot). Unless you can think of a better name for her … I was also toying with “Spring.”

I am also looking forward to firing up my new gas weedeater and taking on some of the property. For while the season of buttercups is coming to an end, the season of daisies has arrived.

And if you’re interested in Bounce / Spring … she’ll be up on the website soon for adoption, so watch for her!

Is he famous now?

By The Food LadyLeave a Comment

Jun 23 13

I keep forgetting to post this little surprise we recently received…a woman I know ordered a tunnel from NTI Global and when it arrived, she thought the dog on the label looked *mighty* familiar, so she saved the tag for me.

How cool is that? *chuffed*. Of course, they couldn’t have chosen a dog with more athleticism, more poise, more grace …

(DexTER, you’re embarrassing me!!)

Much better.

Actually we’ve been doing lots of agility practice lately, because while (as you can see) the buttercups have returned with a vengeance:

and I’ve not had time to mow, the rest of the property is 1000 times worse. It’s a jungle full of dog eating plants.

Did you say DOG EATING plants?

Yes, Tweed, dog eating plants.

Well don’t just stand there, help me!!

We tried to go for a walk on the back of the property today and this was all I could see in front of me.

I imagine it to be absolutely teeming with spiders and other unpleasant bugs, so I just can’t convince myself to fight through it. Worse, it’s chock full of grass seed right at nose level.

When the dogs go crashing through it they come out looking like this:

Walking seed pods.

And all that plant life rubbing up against them might explain this:

That’s Dexter’s chest and legs, missing a lot of hair and looking very raw. And this is a week after I discovered the oozing hives, and treated it with a liberal application of cortizone cream and a jaunty pink sweater from the donation bin at work to keep him from licking and scratching at it. My poor little guy :(

It’s a method I also intend to try on TWooie as well.

No you won’t. I won’t wear clothes.

And, of course, Wootie is bleeding copiously from the ears, hunting as he does in the pokies.

…with TWooie barking away merrily behind him.

It’s getting almost impossible to find anywhere to take photos these days. On Tuesday it was a brilliant, warm, sunny day and we went to the beach with Auntie Fiona, Rogue and Tempus … and I forgot the memory card for my camera. What a rookie mistake! :( So there are no photos of that. There are also no photos of me chasing a coyote across the acreage in my pajamas from earlier this week when she came up to investigate my chickens at 11pm. Nor are there photos of my landlord pissing himself laughing as he watched me racing across the acreage in houseshoes and polka dotted flannel pajamas yelling my head off at the poor thing. And for that I am grateful.

I am also grateful for Tweed, and his mad posing skills :)

I am about to do a crazy long stretch of working days, so wanted to get in a last post before that happens. Also, it’s Dexter’s 22nd month birthday today. In two months he will be two years old. I cannot even begin to believe it … how did that happen so fast?!

Happy 22 month birthday Dexter Morgan!

He’s sure come a long way from this, huh?

(2.5 months old)

Popping in to say hey ya’ll!

By The Food LadyLeave a Comment

Jun 20 20

Farmer Food Lady has not been taking many photos lately. Mainly because I have nothing to take photos of … the grass etc on the property has grown so tall I can’t even see the darn dogs!

Our pathways around the farm are overgrowing themselves.

But you can see where the coyotes are traveling, because they leave Woo-size holes in the undergrowth. They don’t help me get through though.

So rather than taking photos, I’ve been keeping busy puttering around making things. Like the new chicken enclosure, which TWoo assures me he is NOT trying to get into.

I worked really hard on this enclosure – I even built the gate myself! My landlord helped me by using his post pounder to get all the fence posts firmly in the ground. But I put up all that fence on my lonesome … it was hard work, because giant roles of fence are incredibly uncooperative, and have loads of sharp sticky out bits.

I still have tons of fence left to do at least one of the yards though, so don’t forget about my upcoming fence building party!

I think the chickens like their new pen, which is about 50 feet long and 30 feet deep. It’s difficult to tell if chickens are happy though, because they always look pissed off anyway.

It’s been good for my poor Ameraucana pullets too, because before I built the new large enclosure, they wouldn’t come out of the henhouse. The other chickens are very very mean to them, and every time they ventured out they ran a gauntlet of Mean Hen Pecking and would race around the perimeter once and then hide inside again. Even the polish hen was mean to them; you’d think she’d remember the bad time she had integrating with my other hens, and cut them some slack! Anyway, now they venture out from time to time, which is nice to see.

They now spend a lot of time hiding UNDER the hen house, even though in the new enclosure they have lots of room to escape the other hens. But I guess it will just take time for them to be comfortable. Now that I can see them periodically though, I notice that one of them has gimpy feet – her toes are all pointed every which way other than straight. She gets around just fine though. I can’t wait until they start laying purdy blue eggs!

Now that I’m over admiring my own handiwork, I am tired of looking at the pen which sits pretty much right in my eyeline from the living room sliding door. I was thinking of planting large shrubbery around the outside perimeter, so the chickens would be semi-hidden behind a garden of sorts. Alas, when I went to the garden store today I realized that option was so out of my price range. Short of digging up big plants from public parks in the middle of the night, which would be WRONG (yes TWooie, I know it’s wrong, I just said it was wrong!)

I’m ashamed of you

I’m not sure what else to try. I did pick up a couple of packets of wild flower seeds at the garden store today, and the clerk assured me it’s not too late to plant them. Do I need to till up the grass to throw that seed down or can I just hurl handfuls of it at the ground?

If you let me come in there with you and the chickens, I’ll tell you the answer!

The dogs have managed to keep themselves busy whilst I putter. Yesterday TWooie chased two different dogs up on the road, so I tied him to a post for the afternoon and he’s been pretty good ever since, because he HATES being tied to a post. Heh.

Piper passed on the secrets of Mad Teeth™ to her brother Dexter