If you are a regular reader, you will know that a while back my dog sired a litter of nine purebred australian shepherds. The stud-fee we agreed on was one puppy, which we had planned to give to my wife’s sister’s family. All the puppies came out looking beautiful and are clever and friendly. My kids have been visiting them on a regular basis for the last few weeks. I get over to the neighbor’s house once every week or two.
As my wife and kids visited the puppies they began to get attached to a little black and white one. (Who can see what’s coming?)
So we decided to keep it. Based on everything I had read last year, when we got our first australian shepherd, Peterman, I had understood that puppies are normally removed from their littersafter eight weeks of age because before that they are still learning how to be dogs from their mothers and they aren’t really ready to be away from them yet.
Well, here it is seven weeks after their birth and we’ve agreed to take our two puppies home. “Meggie” will go to my wife’s sister and “Buckaroo” will stay with us permanently. The woman who is has the puppies now is keeping the mother separated from the puppies for most of the day. She only spends five minutes a day with them or so. After five minutes of being with the puppies she howls to come in and then howls to go back out. It sounds like the poor dog (who’s a super dog, by the way) is having a tough time of it.
We feel like it won’t be a problem take the puppies a week early partially because they will have each other and also because Peterman will be there to continue teaching them how to be a dog. They will also be welcomed in to our Solomon-pack and will get lots of good attention.
So the puppies come home today! They get their last set of shots this afternoon and I will go and fetch them after dinner! Isn’t that great?
It is.
We’re very excited about it. Liz has a really good/attractive gate to go across the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room and we will use the same pen for Buckaroo that we used for Peterman last year.
So this is very good news.
Sphere: Related Content1. I neglect my king
2. I move my queen out too early. Generally speaking, I need to stop moving her out in the first five or ten moves. I keep losing her becasue I have so many pieces on the board and I forget about her. So she gets taken too early in the game.
Grrrr…
Sphere: Related ContentThe weekend was ok. It wasn’t spectacular, but on the other hand nobody broke a bone.
One has to take their successes where one finds them, right?
I got some video of the puppies. We borrowed two puppies from the litter - one is bound for New Jersey in about two weeks. “Meggie”, the one with a tail, will be given to my wife’s sister. The other one is black and white and we’ve named him “Buckaroo”. I think we will get the puppies from our neighbor on or around August 23rd with my in-laws coming up the following weekend to fetch their new friend. The point of this event was to introduce the new puppies to our current dog, Peterman. He’s also their sire. He was funny. You can watch the video and see his reaction. At first he was quite put out. He yelped and barked and paced rapidly back and forth in front of them. They liked him and eventually walked right up to him. Meggie even started trying to play with him by nipping at him! She’s a bold little thing! Buckaroo was very friendly and you can see his stump wagging in excitement and he walked right up to the kids and Peterman and I think he’ll be a great dog.
On Sunday I finally managed to get around to cleaning up the dungeon. After the oil tank was removed we had a lot more space so I got a pair of heavy duty plastic storage shelves and now we have shelving along the whole length of the wall. I also knocked down an ancient 2×4 that had been cemented to the floor. I vacuumed and cleaned and all kinds of stuff. During the day I also managed to get three loads of gear from the storage unit.
We got a pair of replacement dressers for the boys from the same people who made their bunkbeds, the girls’ bunkbeds and the girls’ dressers. Sunday was a state sales tax-free day and we saved a few bucks going then rather than any other day. Ben went to a Laser Tag birthday party for a girl named Kaitlyn. Gabriel went to a birthday party (held at a movie theater) for a boy named Ethan. Chloe and Grace just tagged along. I did a lot of little things during the day and although I was productive and everything it didn’t really feel that way. I think I did so much shuttling of people back and forth that I never did feel like I got anything done.
Ben is going to be working on his requirements for his Webelos Handyman badge. Like last week, I sent him a list of things I wanted him to start on. It was a short list, but I have few doubts that he will not do them. Its not that he doesn’t want to do them - its just that he would prefer to do a lot of other things first and then he forgets about them.
I’ve been looking forward to this badge, because its the one where he can wash my car and check my oil and tire pressure. It will be actually be a fun one, I think.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Fix | Salon Arts & Entertainment
Paris Hilton spent a few hours in the hospital early Tuesday morning after her pet kinkajou, Baby Luv, sank its teeth into her arm. Like the heiress, the wound was only superficial…
HAHAH!! Good line! I’m not laughing about the “pet attacks” tragedy but the line was hilarious.
It reminds me of a line out of a Bad Religion song, “Social Suicide”:
Sphere: Related ContentLike you, perserverence is a useless tool
Ford GT40 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last weekend Ben bought a model of a Ford GT50 — its not EXACTLY like the GT40, but its red and has a high-end sports car shape like a ferrari. I never realized Ford made a series of cars like this, but the photos are beautiful.
Ben and I sat down and started making the model together last night at the dining room table. The cement wouldn’t adhere to the pieces that were already painted or had a chrome-like coating on them, so I used a knife to scrape off the paint or chrome from those pieces while ben put everything else together.
He’s finishing his “fitness” badge for cub scouts and three of the requirements are talking with a grown up (that would be me?!) about the hazards of alchohol, drugs and tobacco:
* Tell an adult member of your family about the bad effects smoking or chewing tobacco would have on your body.
* Tell an adult member of your family four reasons why you should not use alcohol and how it could affect you.
* Tell an adult member of your family what drugs could do to your body and how they would affect your ability to think clearly.
So while we put the model together we talked about smoking and an old friend of the family who had his voicebox removed and spoke with one of those weird voice synthesizers. We covered alcohol an smoking pretty thoroughly, touching on dipping and chewing tobacco. We would glue a little and talk a little. Scrape a little and talk a little. It was a pretty good way to have that kind of talk. We had something we could focus on (the model) while we kept coming back to this weighty topic.
Then I went downstairs and installed Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 - it is video editing software that’s often bundled with Elements 4.0, which I bought last year. I wish I had bought them together now and saved some dough. The software that came with my video camera sucks. I took some footage of the puppies playing and I wanted to edit it and send it down to my brother-in-law, who is getting one of them. See, it turns out that I’m not a very good videographer — I produce movies that couldn’t hold your attention in a bucket. They’re dull. Deathly dull. So I had about 30 minutes of footage, of which, there’s probably two good minutes. But my computer kept hanging up whenever I would try and edit the footage. So decided to junk the free stuff and go with something more reputable.
It took a long time to install and by the time it was finished I was tired and felt like vegging for a while, so I will be able to look forward to fiddling with that tonight. It comes with some video tutorials on how to do some stuff and I think it will be very handy because there are a LOT of feautres on the desktop/work-area of this program!
I still have a lot of things to do on my honey-do list before I can get to it though. Gabriel would like to build the model air plane he got last weekend. I think he got a Corsair. The bent wings stick out in my memory of his plane. But I thought it was a P-51 Mustang. Did the P-51 ever get bent wings and fight in the pacific? Anyway, I need to help Gabriel with his model. I need to vacuum the dungeon and rearrange some of the storage shelves in there to accomodate all the crap I’m bringing back from the storage unit we’ve been renting. Why are we renting it? We were going to sell the house this past spring and needed a staging area - some place just to put some stuff to make the house seem less cramped. Its not really cramped, but we wanted the extra space. So we rented a storage locker and its time for me to bring the stuff back. I guess that will be my big chore over the weekend.
Chloe is finishing her last week of YMCA Gymnastics camp. She loved it. She’s pretty easy that way — she has a good time at all kinds of things. The kids have next week “off” and then they have another week of day-camp. Grace goes to a half-day camp run by the same YMCA and she’s had a super time.
We’re thinking of sending the boys to sleep-away camp next summer. We haven’t made any commitments on it yet and I think it would only be for a week. We might do two non-consecutive weeks; one at the beginning of the summer and one at the end, but I’m not prepared to send them away for two whole weeks.
I better get back to work: these pencils aren’t going to push themselves!
Sphere: Related ContentI’m listening to the album “Creator” from The Lemonheads and there’s an interview at the end of it which is pretty funny. There’s a Dutch woman interviewing the band and at one point she points out that a lot of people have compared their sound to “early Husker Du or early Replacements”.
HAHA!! Funny! I’ve always liked BOTH those bands! I never got to see The Replacements — they broke up before I was old enough to go. But I did get to see Husker Du at The Roseland in New York back in 1992 I think. Anyway, the similarity hadn’t occurred to me — but maybe there’s some truth to it.
I’ll have to look in to this some more.
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