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Weekend Update

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I am SO FAR BEHIND on email that it’s not even funny. I swear I haven’t even looked at my inbox for a week, since I am having a really hard time juggling working ‘outside’ the house with web stuff. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to keep up with your email when your job consists of sitting in front of a computer for ten hours a day. It’s not so easy when your job involves working for someone else – someone who might object to paying you a salary while you surf the web and answer emails.

All of this is in aid of saying “I know I owe most of you emails!! I know that people want to know more about the Jamboree (I’m meeting with them on Wednesday – more details, including final rates and a code to use when booking your room, will be posted on Friday). I know that people have emailed with questions about puppies. I know, I know, I know! Bear with me, I’m getting to them all a bit at a time…

Last night, I let Paris jump up on my lap, and recoiled in horror when she promptly deposited a puppy sized clump of hair on my shirt. She’s in the middle of a shedding cycle, big time, likely hormonal since I doubt that the freezing weather has kicked her into shedding her winter coat.

I decided to take her into the dog room and go over her with the furminator, and after 20 minutes of grooming, using everything from the furminator to the shedding rake to the curry comb, this is what I ended up with —

For the final touch, I went over her with the shop vac – seriously. She’s such a good girl! She just stood there while I sucked the rest of the loose hair out of her coat. I can finally touch her without a giant cloud of hair floating up into the air, although I’m sure she’ll need another go over tomorrow. Bear that in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that Frenchies don’t shed.

When we moved to this house, we relegated all of the crappy pine furniture to the basement, on the theory that we don’t really care if puppies gnaw on it. This includes the Leksvik coffee table, which has since become a great favorite with every single puppy that has come through our house.

In my opinion, the puppies haven’t really graduated from cute kids to budding junior trouble makers until someone makes it into – and then through – the coffee table. It tends to happen all at once – one minute, the table doesn’t even register on their radar, the next minute, puppies are tumbling through it like lemmings over a cliff. This weekend, Heart suddenly decided that the table was her FAVORITE THING in the world, and she was followed quickly by Jellie Bean, who also decided it would make a wonderful place for naps.

Butters followed Jellie, although Jellie Bean seemed less than thrilled about sharing her new ‘special place’. As usual, it was inconceivable for the puppies to use one of the other openings in the table – no, they have to be in the same opening that the other puppy is inside of.

An hour later, as I went to put the puppies away, I had a hard time finding Butters. She turned up inside the table, passed out and sound asleep, and looking pretty comfortable. I didn’t want to wake her up, but this photo was just too cute to pass up.

The rest of the photos are over on Flickr. OK, back to email catch up…

Crazy Puppy Dinner Time

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Feeding time is fairly hectic with six puppies to wrangle at once. We have it broken down into a fairly regimented routine — clean pen of the nine million pounds of accumulated poop, change pads, put down pans of food, clean up more poop immediately after the finish eating, watch as they burn off crazy dog energy.

The pups eat Honest Kitchen ‘Embark’ in the morning and the evening, split into two shallow foil pans. It’s a given that, however many pans I put down, they’ll all try to eat out of the same pan at the same time, on the theory that whatever the other guy has got must be the best. At lunch, the pups eat soaked kibble, and they usually get a small handful of dry kibble before bed as a snack.

Butters and Jellie are thorough eaters. Both of them finish off the leftovers by standing right in the middle of the pan of food, and licking all around the edges. This inevitably results in little green dog food foot prints on the other puppies. For some reason, Pixie gets most of them.

Immediately after eating the pups usually have about twenty minutes of ‘crazy dog time’. That’s where they all run around the pen at full speed, smacking into each other and having periodic wrestling matches. In mid play, they’ll usually stop for a poop. We’ve learned not to put puppies out into the play pen until well after we’re sure everyone is (literally) all pooped out.

Crazy time is followed by sleepy puppy time, aka “quick, take a picture while they’re sleeping time”. Lately, it’s the only chance I get to take a photo of Heart, as her usual reaction now on seeing the camera is to lunge for it and bite at the lens.

Rumble, on the other hand, has decided he’d like to become a male model when he grows up, and greets the camera with an instantaneous, rock solid pose, complete with soulful expression. Pixie’s reaction to the camera seems to be “Jeez lady, get a new hobby”.

The rest of the photos are below, or over on Flickr.

Food for Friends and Monkey Faces

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Hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving – at least everyone here in Canada.

I’ll be cooking a full on Thanksgiving dinner, like I do every year. I admit it, I go a bit overboard when it comes to feeding friends and family. I suffer from famine cooking syndrome, the fear that if I don’t cook ten times too much food, someone MIGHT. STARVE!!

This year, it’s a locally smoked ham, which Sean is refusing to let me honey glaze, since he thinks glaze is the devil’s way of messing up good meat. Instead, I’ll do a dry mustard rub, and sneak some demerara sugar onto one side of it. For sides – sweet potato casserole, garlic mashed potatoes, brussel sprouts with chestnuts, dinner rolls and turnip. For dessert, pumpkin pie of course, with a chocolate truffle cake on the side for those idjits (cough:sean:cough) who can’t see the intrinsic beauty that is pumpkin pie. It’s a vegetable. It’s a dessert. It’s BOTH!

A few puppy faces to keep you company are over on Flickr... and my favorites are below.

Peek a Boo Pixie

Peek a Boo Pixie

Snuggle Butters

Snuggle Butters

Emo Rumble Does Album Art

Emo Rumble Does Album Art

Bath Day

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The puppies aren’t speaking to me at the moment, as I had the temerity to decide that they were a pile of stinky heads, and desperately in need of a bath. This relatively simple activity was made more complicated by the fact that they all seemed to have calcified pablum deposits encrusted on their little chins. They weren’t thrilled by the part where I had to almost chip off to get rid of it. Maybe now they won’t do any more face plants in their dinner bowl.

After toweling them off, we placed them into a pile of beds into which we’d tucked warming pads and hot water bottles. They, being the stubborn little bulldogs that they are, promptly marched across the pen to the one bed that wasn’t full of warmth, and placed themselves into a pile. The only smart dog in the bunch was Thor, who stretched luxuriously in the middle of his heated bed. Ms. Jellie Bean Parfait, like the true budding Diva she is, wandered back and forth from one location to the other, torn between the warmth of the bed with the heating pads, and the thought she might be missing on something over in the puppy pile up. It’s hard to be a Diva, and this fact made her vewwy sad 🙁

Hopefully they’ll forgive me in a day or two – I might have to bribe them with hoofies to help them all get over the trauma.

Photos below, or on Flickr.

Heart Explores Her World

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Heart and her Daddy
Heart Meets Her Daddy

We started putting Heart out in the playpen in the family room — it gives her a chance to interact with the other dogs, see people, and experience more sights and sounds. So far, she’s enjoying it. What she’s not enjoying is weaning — why should she, when she lives with a walking dairy bar? We’re going to let her take it at her own pace — Tula is spending time out running and playing with the dogs while Heart is in the playpen, so that should make her a bit more motivated to cut off the milk train.

Here’s a video of Heart in her playpen – as always, you can see it full sized over on Blip. Oh, and in case you’ve never noticed, there’s a little button on the bottom of the video that looks like a video monitor. That lets you view the video full screen. On my 24″ monitor, the resolution is pretty good.