Happy 3rd Birthday, puppies!

Three years ago today a magical litter was born.

My dear friends Jim and Sue let their wonderful Maggie Mae come and stay with me long enough to give us eight darling, precious gifts!

Happy birthday to (top L to R) Topper, Lindy Loo, Emmett, Nearly and Rexie,

(bottom L to R) Katie, Champion Simmer, and Elijah.

Yup, Simmer finished her Championship last week, handled to every single point by her owner, Laurie. (Same Minnesooooota Laurie who's taken all these magnificent photographs.) Here she is nowadays

Congratulations to Laurie and Simmer, and thank you to every wonderful puppy home! YOU are all champions in my world.

hug my babies for me today, please!

Separation Anxiety

Tomorrow begins a new chapter in my life.

I'll be working a twelve hour shift at one of the hospitals in town. I'll be working three of those every week. The first eighty hours will be for free; the mandatory clinical preceptorship portion of the review course. But I'll be working on the same floor where I'll be after the eighty hours are up.

I'm comfortable with my skill level. (I passed my RN boards in 1983, so I've got some experience.) If anything, my age has improved my judgement, if not my memory! I'm concerned about my feet. My knees. But the whippets have kept me in pretty darn good shape. We walk from 2.5 to 7 miles a day.

We did. Until tomorrow.

And that's my fear. I've been surrounded by a happy pack of whippets 24/7 for the last seven years. And since 1993, I've had a dog next to me while I worked. At our old office (Bill is an MD) the whippets came, too. They decorated our front office. Patients would check out and ask, "How many dogs are in there?" There were beds under the desks, next to the chart racks.

They would stay up front, unless a patient needed a therapy dog. Then Giacomino would come back and work his magic. Sam I Am wasn't born yet.

But starting tomorrow, I go off to work alone. Isn't it ridiculous? I'm fifty-frigging-five years old.

And I have separation anxiety.

Hug your hounds!

*** Bill is home all day for the dogs; they are in good, loving, whippet-spoiling hands***

Dog Bloggers Beware!!!

Sammy and I were tooling down the road, windows open, A/C on high, feeling fancy free on the way to our Agility class last night. Of course we had the radio tuned to National Public Radio.

I heard a story that got me thinking. (That happens a lot when you listen to NPR.) It was about Mommy Bloggers. You can hear or read it HERE. Apparently those Mommy Bloggers are sneaking PAID ADVERTISEMENTS into the text of their blogs and not informing their readers.

In fact, they are compromising their integrity for a buck, and they are drawing the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

Can you imagine what would happen if the Dog Bloggers got bought off? Oh my. The whippets suddenly endorsing ...



Or...

As we were on our lovely walk, we happened upon a stupid, ugly, stinking err... love ... choke ... lovely city squirrellie that we chewed into bloody bits who looked like he wanted some Corn Pone For Squirrel Enemies Friends! You can buy Corn POISON Pone at your local store.

No, I don't think that would work at all.

Dogs can't lie.

Hug your truthful hounds!

The Cancer Dance

My sister Martha is in the hospital again. She was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer on March 24. That she is still fighting, (with all her strength, I might add), is proof of her superhuman courage.

She inspires me. Ha. That's an understatement from the Hyperbole Queen.

Last night I was able to make her laugh and laugh during our daily phone call. I told her about my adventures playing kickball (for the first time - why yes, I'm 55, why do you ask?) yesterday at the Summer Festival. I took Bill's dad's old cane to the game and limped up to the plate with it.

Martha hasn't been home since March 24. She has gone back and forth between the hospital and the extended care facility. Her superfriends have literally gutted her house: new paint, new carpet, new furniture. Martha has gotten to see it on a day trip, but that's all. I encouraged her to remind all of her medical team that she wants to go home. She'll get re-admitted; that's a given. Where's the harm in letting her go home for a little bit?

Anyway, one of my favorite blogfriends is battling his own cancer, and one of his commenters posted the following video. I just had to share this dance!

manda 8 @ Yahoo! Video

I know I haven't been too clever and funny lately. My readership is shrinking like a slug in salt. I'll have funny stuff to write about again.

Extra thanks to those of you who are hanging in there with me.

hug your hounds, and think some good thoughts about letting Martha spend a couple of days or a week in her own home

What Do You Love To Do?

(Emmett at practice a couple of years ago)

I don't want to begin this post with a poor me litany, but I need a preface for the thing to make sense.

Let's just say that since March, I've have more than the usual opportunities to build my character. Way more.

Last night I was calmly listing the factors involved in creating the sensation that my head was screwed on too tight. You know, the feeling that your eyeballs didn't fit in your skull anymore and at any moment they would go *BOING* and pop out on cartoon springs, while your ears flap like two flags in a hurricane. Bill listened, and agreed that events over which I have no control were standing in a long line to whack the snot out of me.

"All you can do is take it as it comes and do what you can to get through it," said my wise and wonderful husband.

That conversation happened while I was packing up Swede William and Lindy Loo for their weekly handling class (practice for dog shows) at the Kennel Club. I would pick up Emmett on the way. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to get up the energy to go.

An Afghan hound breeder and I share the teaching duties. She's been wonderful about taking up the slack when I can't be there. Plus, she's a talented handler. I learn a lot just by watching her.

Last night I wanted to work with Emmett. He needed more one-on-one than I'd been able to give him. Vicki kindly put her own dog away and let me be a participant.

Nothing earth-shattering happened. Emmett did great. I watched other dogs improve. We laughed. We encouraged each other. We celebrated Esther's wins with her Shar Pei puppy - her first ever wins with her first ever show dog. I fed my soul with forkfuls of a silly happy whippet standing like a champion race horse. Wearing a look of eagles and then dissolving in goosey wags.
Oh. Wait. Something earth-shattering did happen. My headache went away. The knots in my gut relaxed. I forgot that I was worried. I played with dogs.


I just played with my dogs. And that is what I love to do.




hug your hounds

Sunday Silence

Every one in this house is asleep, except me. It's nine o'clock on a cool, grey Sunday morning.

We got up, as usual, around six and had our breakfasts. Bill didn't sleep well last night, for no particular reason, he said. I know when I got up to let a dog out - was it Fat Charlie or Easy, I can't recall - he was reading in his recliner. It was somewhere around two, chilly and pitch dark out.

"Can't sleep," I asked?
"I'm coming back to bed now," he answered. And he did.

I'm trying to switch the dogs to raw food. It's not working. I've tried before. It didn't work then. Isn't the definition of insanity to attempt the same behavior and expect different outcomes?

I didn't walk the dogs this morning. That is a radical departure from our normal routine. After coffee and the paper, Bill went upstairs and reclined in his recliner. I bought it for his birthday several years ago. He loves that chair. Mama Pajama and Delia keep him company on the day bed.

I poked around on Whippet World and Facebook. I let the gastric-ly upset dogs out again. That's going to be tough to scoop, I thought. I truly don't want to share that with my neighbors on walks, I thought. I poked around some more on the computer. The dogs went to sleep. Sound asleep. No lobbying for walks. We gave up or maybe gave in and went upstairs.

This town is quiet. The windows are open. It's crazy cool. Often this time of year the temperature never gets below eighty. It plummeted down to the fifties last night. The quiet blows in the windows on the breeze. I didn't even hear a church bell; maybe they gave in, too. Not a single car has passed. The whole neighborhood is a church this morning: empty, that feeling of a sacred chill, old, beautiful, at once familiar and aloof.

My front door opens like the heavy, antique, creaky mahogany doors of the Immanuel Episcopal Church in a tiny town in Maryland. Swede William ambles out. He stretches, yawns. The sun has decided to absolve us after all. William arches his neck. I am fascinated by the absolute, raw beauty of this dog, in its soft, satin paradox of art deco curves and Tour de France muscles.

The sun feels friendly. Time to walk.

Hug your hounds

Stupid and a Half!

I'm a jumpy sort of person. Just born that way.

I avoid scary movies, dark alleys, sudden loud noises. The Fourth of July is not my favorite time of the year.

Fireworks are legal in these parts so my city has been exploding for two weeks. BANG! POP! TZZZZING! POW! With every cherry bomb I jump. Then I'm grateful that there are currently no thunder-phobic dogs here. Oh dear, then I miss the two recently departed thunder phobes. It's that breath taking moment of empty arms.

At last, the seemingly endless supply of explosives has been exhausted. The neighborhood noises have returned to the norm: softer booms and bangs of home construction; the high whine of the tuck-pointer's saw; the train a block over.

We walked extra early this morning. It's getting hot again. The geriatric crew, Fat Charlie, Mama Pajama, Easy, and I were enjoying the barely dawn quiet. We greeted a few other early morning walkers, folks in uniforms, carrying lunches, headed to the bus station to catch a ride to work.

It was peaceful.

And then, out of nowhere, THWACK! Something made a loud CRACK on the sidewalk just five feet in front of the dogs' noses. We all jumped and I let out a little shriek!

"AAAAH!"

I've been walking whippets since 1992, so any sort of shock causes my hands to reflexively tighten my grip on the leashes. That's a good thing because the cause of the THWACK was the King of the Stupid City Squirrels who had fallen out of a tree right above our heads.

Think of it. You're a big fat Stupid City Squirrel. You're sitting in your tree thinking of ways to torment dogs and their humans. Oh, look, here come three dogs with mouths like alligators. Wouldn't you hang on to your branch a little tighter? Nooooo, you do a Stupid City Squirrel nanny-nanny-boo-boo dance, blowing raspberries, and fall out of your tree into the pack of dogs!

I've been extra jumpy today.

Lord knows what will fall out of the sky at us next.

hug your hounds