Happy Leap Day!!

Beckett and Keltic love to leap and wish it was leap day every day of the year!

Phod SPCA Fundraiser

Help Phod raise money for other shelter dogs and celebrate his birthday at the same time!

You can hop right over to Phod's Birthday Bash to read all about how to help out.

Wordless Wednesday

I Jinxed It

I jinxed it with my post about where is winter. Well, it came with a record breaking snow fall for a single day.  It took me two and half hours to get home; it normally takes an hour. And I still had to park out on the cross street and walk home. I went and got the car later after I had done the driveway and the road at the end of the driveway too.

2 February 2016

Can you see Beckett in the picture below? When I finally got home I let the dogs out, Beckett is the black blob down by the fence.  See the wicker deer, you can just see the back of the feeding deer.

16 February 2016, 2:30 pm

16 February 2016, 2:30 pm

Keltic did not want to make trail, he tried twice to go down to the back of the yard but then did his thing right where he was.

16 February 2016, 4:30 pm

The snow kept falling and at about 4:30 pm you could no longer see the back of the feeding deer. I figure that's about 2 to 3 inches in a couple hours.

This morning I went out and did trails for the dogs. One good thing is that this snow was all powder and there wasn't really any wind to compact it so it was pretty easy to snow blow. Keltic tried to make a trail to the fence himself but only got about half way there.

17 February 2016, 10:30 am

 See the height of the walls on the trails, compare that to the first picture.  It's been a crazy winter.  And it's supposed to get warmer and rain on Saturday.

17 February 2016, 10:30 am

Gryffon

This is Gryffon, my first bi-black Sheltie. He was a ball hound, just an absolute fanatic about them. He also loved water but didn't like to swim.  From the first time I saw him, he was mine.

But I lost Gryffon at just 7 and half years old. He had been treated for a gastrointestinal infection, bladder stones, ulcers but it turned out after exploratory surgery that he had an abdominal wall infection. He survived the surgery but not the post operation period.

Gryffon was very shy with people but of all my dogs, I always thought he was the one who would have protected me. After he passed, this song There's a Hero by Billy Gilman became Gryffon's song.

There's a Hero

I'm sure Gryffon was hero, even if he didn't show that to most people.

Three Day Quote Challenge - Day Three

Our journey with dogs, any animal I guess, has us having to go through the cycle of loss and grief sadly too frequently.  My quote for my last day is on my blog.

"Love knows not it's own depth until the hour of separation"

- Kahlil Gibran


This is an excerpt from the book The Prophet and, believe it or not, I have several excerpts in my journal. It is a wonderfully thoughtful book about life.

You think you know how much it will hurt to lose someone, a family member, a friend, a pet but I don't think you really do; not until it happens. And each time it is different, when I lost my Ceilidh to cancer it was the first dog that I have ever been with for the euthanasia. It surprised me that I wasn't more upset at the time but what I found was that afterwards the cycle of loss seemed to take so much longer to get through. Does it mean I loved her more, I don't think so, I just think her loss was more personal because I was there.

Ceilidh passed over to the Bridge in May 2010, the song Let Her Go was not released until July 2012. The first time I heard that song on the radio I was in tears, everything about Ceilidh's loss came back so fresh in my mind.  Songs have for me always held an association with each of dogs I have lost but I was surprised that two years after her passing this one touched me so deeply. It is now connected to the memories of my Ceilidh girl.

Video link to Passenger's Let Her Go

I guess that's life though and as the song says, you only know the highs when you're feeling low. We wouldn't know the exhilaration of those highs without the comparison of the lows.

Three Day Quote Challenge - Day Two

Today's quote you can file under the heading of "Things my Mother Told Me". When I was much younger, we kids would always say, I wish it was summer, I wish it was Christmas, or I wish I was old enough to drive and my Mum would say, "Stop wishing your lives away; it will fly by when you are older. Enjoy your youth."

"Stop waiting for Friday, for summer, for someone to fall in love with you, for life. Happiness is achieved when you stop waiting for it and make the most of the moment."

I found the quote when looking for one to capture that idea of what my mother told us so many years ago. It sounds simple but it is pretty hard to do; don't we all just wait for Friday. I know I find it hard; especially now that I have completed 35 years of military and civilian public service time. I've paid all that I can into the pension but have two more years to do before my civilian pension is not penalized. That combined with the Rhine River cruise that I'm doing in September with two of my sisters and one of my brothers-in-law has me wishing it was already summer and wishing I was already retired.  That would be two years of my life gone, think what I might have missed. I'm going to try and take my own advice and enjoy each day.

All Things Collie is also doing the challenge if you want to read their quote of the day.

Three Day Quote Challenge

I wasn't challenged but I decided to go ahead with this challenge anyway, probably because I wasn't challenged to do it.

If you want to see where I got the idea, hop over to Dakota's Den.

I used to keep a journal when I was in my teens, where I wrote down, by hand, poems, quotes and sayings that touched me in some way. One quote that is in my book, yes I still have the book although it's been many a year since I wrote in it, is:

"The main issue in life is not the victory but the fight, the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well."

In my journal, I have no author of that quote recorded so I did a little Google search and I found it is attributed to Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the Modern Day Olympics.

I think this quote has great meaning for most of us. So very few of us achieve great victories but that doesn't mean we can't take satisfaction from taking part and doing our best and we certainly can all enjoy our small victories. I'll never be a great athlete but I can take take pride in setting goals and achieving them.  For me, those goals are in dog agility. And to reach them I have to work (struggle) to develop a close partnership with my dogs. I find it so rewarding when things all come together, the journey there (the fight) is certainly as rewarding as the victory (the ribbon or qualifying score).

Where is Winter?

February 2016

 Not that I want to jinx it but we've been having quite a weird winter. We had no snow in December at all, then January was quite reasonable in terms of the temperature and the amount of snow. I only had to use the snowblower three times so far this winter, although I did shovel a few times too. Last week we had temperatures that reached double digits 11C (that's nearly 52 degrees F) so most of the snow we had melted.  After the  picture above was taken we had rain and then freezing rain so it's pretty slippery out. Now when we go for walks we have to stay on the sidewalks and roads, no more Frisbee in the field until there's some soft snow.

January 2009

The second picture is from 2009, the deck is somewhere under all that snow. That usually is pretty much more normal for the amount of snow we would have by late January or early February.

Beckett playing Frisbee

Keltic watching the fun.

RIP Joker

December 20, 2007 - February 2, 2016

Another of our area agility dogs has been taken too soon because of cancer. Joker was in remission since last spring so his family was just starting to think they had beaten this awful disease but it reared it's ugly head once again and, this time, they had to let Joker pass over to the Bridge. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him but no one will miss him as much as his Mum will miss him; he was her heart dog. And to make matters worse, her husband is also fighting his own battle with cancer.  Cancer just sucks.