It’s a Dog’s Life

My sister and Harper visited last weekend. Juno loves having Auntie Karen and Harper around as long as Harper understands that the people belong exclusively to her.

Nick stopped by for a brunch visit while Karen was here. The night before, he and Megan had been at a camp-themed party for one of her housemates who was going away. Not camp as in tents & sleeping bags, but camp as in the style, like Lady Gaga or Cher.

Bill and Lorrie hosted another pet pics with Santa session this year.

Daisy is a classic introvert. She likes to play with Juno but ignores most other dogs. Given the choice, she’d rather cuddle with her people. She wasn’t thrilled to have a dozen rowdy dogs tearing around her backyard. As someone said, “She’s like the host of the party who doesn’t drink.” Juno, on the other hand, is definitely a party girl.

Ray, Bill, and Bill’s truck, went to Georgetown for a couple of days to finish emptying Ray’s mom’s house. They called it Ray & Bill’s Excellent Adventure. Much of the emptying had already been done by other family members, but the big challenge remaining was how to remove the extremely heavy piano that had been in the basement since before Ray’s family moved in 43 years ago. With a bit of help from our former neighbour Wayne and Ray’s nephew Curtis, they got the job done. I’m not sure I’d call it an excellent adventure – I mean, they were basically cleaning an empty house – but they got to use power tools to tear apart a piano, and sleep on the floor, and drink beer in Wayne’s basement, and do all that male bonding kinda stuff, so I guess that counts, especially during covid times.

Before I started doing Agility training with Juno, I thought it was mostly about the speed of the dog. I’ve since learned that it’s as much about the handler as it is about the dog (probably more, actually). It’s pretty easy to get a dog to go over a jump or run through a tunnel, but getting them to go over the jumps and tunnels you want them to, in the order you want them to, is much more difficult. Our training has been chopped up because of covid restrictions, but we’re making progress. We’re still at the jumps and tunnels stage, but in the new year we’ll start working on the contact equipment (the teeter, the dog walk and the A-frame) plus, the hardest to train, the weave poles. I have no idea if we’ll ever compete, but for now we’re having fun with it.

I mentioned in my last post that Ray’s started carving again. This is his latest work. He started it quite a while ago but put it aside for a while and just finished it up this week.

Karen and I commissioned Nick to do a painting for the door in Josephine’s residence. Josie fed several generations of raccoons in her backyard and daisies are her favourite flower. Nick delivered this to us last week and said it was pro bono as his Christmas gift to her. He used to call her the ‘huggy lady’ because she’d whoosh him up in the air and give him big hugs when he was little.