The race for the prize....

The "prize" varies from day to day, today it's a blue rubber bone. (Try to overlook the lawn that is way past due for mowing!). Kylie and Harley have a way of convincing each other that THEY have the best toy, and whomever is the most convincing manages to get the other to drop whatever toy they have and then the game of keep-away is on!


The referee..........










And the winner of "this" round....Kylie!




This is THE best toy in the world! ('cause "I" have it!)- Kylie

I Feel GOOD!

Sheba, my Akbash, is getting up there in years (at least for an Akbash), she's 8 and not prone to outbursts of happiness anyway. She has always been mostly stoic and takes her guardian position seriously. Yesterday, however, she got a wild hair and I was able to catch it with my camera and thought I would share. :) Notice all the fluff from the latest "de-fluffed" bed which I am convinced they use them more as large toys, than something to sleep on. spread about the lawn.




Whew! That outburst should last for another year or two.......

I just wanted to thank everyone at this time for their thoughts and condolences on the loss of my Mom. I can't tell you enough how much I appreciated it. My blogging friends are the best!

Memories......

My Mom is in an Alzheimer's unit in Eugene,OR. I try to visit her as often as possible. She is at the stage where she doesn't remember me or my sister....the funny thing is she remembered Finn, my Border Collie when we went for a visit.



Finn is a funny dog, where most dogs love children, Finn loves the elderly. He will seek them out of a room full of people. He loves to snuggle with them and lay his head on their knee. Every chance I get I take him with me to visit my Mom and her "roomies". It takes a while for me to make it from one end of the building to the other.

Up until my Mom was really having difficulties we would take trips together every year. These are the greatest memories I have of my Mother. We took trips back East to visit family and to see the leaves change in the Fall, a trip up to Nova Scotia to visit a part of the world neither of us had seen, and to the SW to visit the Grand Canyon one last time (even though it was fogged in....we laughed and recalled memories of having seen it before). We visited a pueblo and one of the old Zuni women clasped my Moms hand (not seeing many elders she could identify with that came to visit the pueblos) and didn't want to let her go. I wish we could have stayed for a longer visit they seemed to understand each other even without speaking the same language.

One of the things I received from my Mom were some old pics of when she was little. She has been a dancer since she could walk and taught dancing (ballet, tap, jazz, hawaiian, tahitian, etc) for most of her life. I thought I would share some of those pics with you. She is old enough that she was actually part of the Ziegfield Follies as a child.

I apologize for the lousy pics of her photos, I just can't aim my flash.
One set is titled Heaven and Hell...



I just know this one was when she was a "little pony" this one was my favorite as a kid....

And these are the others, I have them all on a wall in my hallway to the office.





I wish I had taken the time to talk more to my Mom about all she had experienced in her lifetime. We covered quite a bit on our trips, but probably one of the saddest things for me was when she didn't recognize any of the family in the photos she had taken throughout her lifetime.

The Oldest and the Youngest.....

I thought I would share some professional photos I had done of my oldest and my youngest dogs. (As always you can click on the pic to make them larger....)

The sitting fee was donated to dog rescue and the offer came up in a timely fashion in that I had been thinking about the mortality of my dogs.

Finn, my Border Collie, will be 12 this Dec. and while it's possible that he may surpass the oldest any of my dogs has ever lived, 13, he does have a heart murmur, failing eyesight and hearing. He is still one of the sweetest dogs I have ever known.

Kylie, my Belgian Tervuren, turned a year this last March. Just after turning 1 years old I almost lost her to Pyometra.

I had taken her into emergency one evening because she was just not acting right. I had taken her temperature which was high. They did blood work and x-rays, said they weren't sure what it was and sent her home with antibiotics. The antibiotics seem to work and she was more herself. But the day after we finished the antibiotics she didn't seem well again. I stayed home from work and took her into Pilchuck Vet (the emergency Vet that I had previously taken her in to) seeing as they had seen her previously and had all the blood work, etc. I left her with them and continued on to work.

I received a call saying that they needed to do an emergency spay as she had full blown pyo and even the horns of her uterus was filled with pus. (sorry if that grossed you out.....). They started to tell me how much it was going to cost (like that would make a difference??) and I said please get right to it.

It was expensive, by the time all was said and done it was close to $2,000. But to me she is definitely worth it. I love all my dogs, but Finn and Kylie are both those once in a lifetime dogs and I happened to have them both at the same time.

Anyway, it made me realize once again how precious life can be, so I paid for a sitting for both of them.

Please excuse Kylies skinny look, she had fully healed from her surgery but it took awhile for the hair to grow in along her chest and belly. Finn wasn't too thrilled about getting his picture taken but he was a good sport for a couple of shots.






I call this one her "old lady face" :)








The quote that appears at the end of every e-mail I send is dedicated to these two...

"He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion." – Unknown

The landscape construction...er....destruction crew

Here they are, the finest landscape destruction crew around. Let me introduce you. There's Finn, a 11 year old Border Collie that you would think would be past his landscaping days.....


Sheba, the 6 year old Akbash, a Turkish guardian dog that thinks cars driving past the property are more of a threat than any 2 or 4 legged predator.


Harley, a rescued Australian Cattle Dog, that's other favorite pastime is shredding anything the UPS man drops off on "his" side of the gate.


And last, but definitely not least is Kylie, a 1 year old Belgian Tervuren who I had to fence my pond off to keep her from swimming in it 24/7.


I'm curious, can anyone out there tell the difference between the following trenches dug.....why one would be more comfortable than the other?


























Here is a work in progress, with two workers and a supervisor....






Sheba enjoyed the fruits of her labor....though it was only for a few minutes and then she wandered up by the house and thought this:
was more comfortable....why all the excavation work, if you're just going to lay on the asphalt anyway???


Kylie dedicated herself for a good 6 months into biting hard into the lawn and yanking, thus pulling out a lovely, round hunk of sod. What's this? dirt underneath? OH! that need some added dirt removal. Our lawn looked like a mine field....it's starting to recover. Hopefully she doesn't decide it needs some "touch up."





















Now if only I could teach them to pull weeds.......