Missing French Bulldog Alert & Support Frenchies on Valentines Day!

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Bella

Bella is Missing from Coffeyville/Montgomery County, Kansas

 

Lost/ Picked up in Montgomery County Kansas, 1 Mi. South of HWY 166 & Dearing turnoff intersection.

Five month old French Bulldog pup, white with large black spot on rump. Speckled ears. Fourteen pounds last week.

Went AWOL while outside on potty break with our other dog, a Lab. Lab came back without her. We searched woods and pastures for hours, which turned into days.

Went missing Thursday, Jan. 24th, 2008. We are 1 mile from the Oklahoma border.

REWARD!

Please call 620-948-6249 or email seegedo@aol.com .

HER FAMILY MISS HER!!

ps: Please cross post, if you can. Such a tiny puppy, to be out in such terrible weather all alone.

 

Support French Bulldog Village with a Virtual Valentine!

Frenchie Kisses CardNone of us need another box of Chocolates this Valentine’s Day, and paper cards are so 2001, so send someone special your love with a virtual Valentine, from the French Bulldog Village!

Pick a chocolate kiss, a classic Valentine, a Frenchie Kisses Card, a candy hug or kiss, dedicate a custom framed Frenchie valentine, or choose one of the fun, animated cards!

Go here to send someone your love, or to show your love for your Frenchie!

Each and every penny you donate supports FBV and the Karen Krings Memorial Fund, which allows them to help dogs like lovely Lulu.

Lulu

From the FBV site:

Poor LuLu! At just eight weeks old on September 1, she is struggling to adjust to her new foster home. Her new foster parents, two teenaged boys, and the resident dogs are all trying to make it easier on her, but she still wakes up in the dark and screams her little heart out. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t recognize the voices around her or the hands holding her.

It’s always dark when LuLu wakes up. Before her eyes even opened, a severe infection took away all of the vision in her right eye, and most of the vision in her left eye. Faced with a blind puppy, her breeder decided to turn her over to the French Bulldog Village so that this little four pound baby could get all the special attention that she needed and have the best possible start on what we all hope will be a healthy long life.

Learn more about Lulu here.

How could you say ‘no’ to giving just $5 to help a dog like Lulu? (Shameless guilt tripping – I’m perfectly OK with it).

Beautiful Bullies, "where's yer Willie?" and Frogs Needing Homes

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On February 9th, Bullies from across North America will be congregating in Long Beach, California, for the 4th annual ‘Beautiful Bullies‘ competition. For the first time ever, Frenchies have been welcomed into the competition.

Do you think they realize how totally and utterly Frenchies are going to dominate this competition? Go team Frenchie! If you’re in the area, stop by and check it out.

I’m spending this coming weekend in lovely Wiarton, Ontario, where I’ll be anxiously awaiting the predictions of Wiarton Willie. Will it be six more weeks of winter, or an early spring? We’ll have to wait for Saturday to find out.

Wiarton WillieWillie’s weather prognostication career has been sadly marred by scandal. In 1999, the long lived original Willie was found dead, and festival organizers were unable to find a replacement in time for the weather prediction. Instead, they marked Groundhog Day by revealing “Willie” in a coffin. He had been dressed in a tuxedo, had coins over his eyes, and a carrot between his paws.

A scandal ensued when it transpired that the real Willie had in fact decomposed, and the body in the coffin was that of an older, stuffed groundhog. The Associated Press was obliged to issue a retraction on its wires.

There are numerous other weather predicting groundhogs across North America, although Willie is the only albino.

Wikipedia lists:

If you can’t make it Wiarton, or to any of the other February 2cnd groundhog day celebrations, you can check out the live WillieCam – http://www.wiartonwilliecam.com/

They’ll be broadcasting Willie’s predictions live on Saturday morning, bright and early at 7:00 am eastern standard time. Sean and I will be there with the dogs, so if you are planning on attending, drop us a line!

Side note: a friend of ours on the upper east coast of the USA has suffered a family emergency. Due to this, they are placing several lovely teenage French Bulldog puppies, and a few retired show girls. If you are interested in learning more about these avail-a-bullies, please email her directly.

What is a 'working' dog?

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I spent most of last week flat on my back, sick with the flu. Thank God for Jane Austen novels and French Bulldogs that love to snuggle, because they are the only thing that can get me through a week of enforced bed rest and computer abstinence. There’s something about a snoring Frenchie warming your feet that speeds up the healing process. I know I’m not the only person who feels that way, either. Years of doing therapy visitations has taught me that few things can cheer up a sick, lonely or isolated person faster than a lap full of Frenchie.

None of this should really be too surprising to us, when we consider what French Bulldogs were originally bred for. Unlike Border Collies or Jack Russell Terriers, Frenchies have only been designed with one ‘job’ in mind, that of being a companion.

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Bad Weather = More Movies

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Pool House with SnowMy internet connection has been up and down all day long, due to the absolutely unbelievable amount of snow we’re getting. When the snow piles too high on the satellite dish, or the weather conditions are anything less than perfect, I lose my internet signal. Sweeping snow off the dish sometimes helps, but not always, and not today.

Little puppy, big snowSo, what to do when you can barely even get your email to load?

Yup, it’s time to shoot more videos of Solo.

Take a look here —

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN9EbN9ipKA


Or watch the embedded video after the cut.

Oh, and I managed to get this entry, and the videos, uploaded by the simple expedient of starting the process, then leaving for a few hours to go shopping, meet a new web client and have some lunch. After all that, most of the first video was almost done loading.

Whee! Country living is great.

Embedded video after the cut.

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More Solo Photos & Some Experimental Video

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It amazes me sometimes how many tricks and features my lovely Mac computer has that I remain blissfully unaware of.

I only discovered Boot Camp (the utility that allows me to partition my hard drive and run either Windows XP or Vista on the second partition) after watching a Tech show on TV, and I know for a fact that I’m still not using a quarter of the features available to me in iPhoto. I had started out using Mac computers almost exclusively, but I then spent almost 15 years working in the clunky, non intuitive environment of PCs, and the learning curve of the Mac operating system had left me in the dust in the intervening years.

Other than my graphics and web design software, the bundled program I use most on my Mac is definately iMovie. Faster and more fully featured that Windows Movie maker, it takes all of the guess work out of making small, simple web friendly movies – perfect for the dog hobbyist who, like me, has a video camera addiction.

Over the weekend, I made a new movie of Solo, which I linked to in an earlier entry. Intrigued by the shutter delay feature on my XTI Rebel camera, I threw in some gratuitous stop motion still shots at the very end of the movie, and started toying with the idea of doing more time lapse videos. Hey, who doesn’t like seeing big chunks of time compressed into a single minute? The problem was, I had no intentions of standing in one place for an hour so I could take a billion photos, and I’m too impatient to take a single dog photo a day for the next ten years. I decided to go looking for hardware that would let me accomplish the same thing, and discovered that for just under a thousand dollars, I could get a camera remote with a timer.

Umm, maybe not.

I then discovered that I could get a nifty piece of software that connects to my camera via USB and collects timed still images that can be knit into a movie. Perfect! But it only works on Windows.

Another hour of googling, browsing, downloading and being disappointed, and I finally stumbled across Mac Docs link that pointed out that iMovie came with built in time lapse photography capture.

Oops. I guess that’s why we’re supposed to read the manual.

Anyways, I spent some time this afternoon capturing video of Solo, and of the bed area where my dogs spend most of their time. It’s in front our family room bookcases, and nicely close to the fireplace, so they sleep, roughhouse and stash toys there, making it a good place to shoot time lapse.

You’ll find links to both videos below, and embeds after the cut.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XwTAHMkbtM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVepFq5D4Kw

I also shot some new pix of Solo playing with Dexter. It’s so nice to see that he finally has a buddy to spend some time with, and Dexter is being so gentle with Solo that I’m well and truly impressed.

Solo with SnugglePuppieSolo has another new friend – his SnugglePuppie. Solo’s friend Judith sent it to him, because she is obviously powerless in the face of his ESPP. The SnugglePuppie has a heart beat, and can contain warming packets. You can even insert a bottle into it, and let the puppy nurse directly from the toy, in a way that more closely simulates natural nursing.

We put Solo on his new best friend just after lunch, as soon as we’d unpacked the SnugglePuppie and set it up. He literally did not move from it for the next four hours. He’s usually a restless sleeper, but sleeping next to the warm, beating presence is obviously soothing. Thanks so much, Judith! Here are some pix of Solo and the SnugglePuppie, sleeping the sleep of the content.

Embedded video after the cut.

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