Rough Spring

Once again the weather is not playing nice.  Not that we can complain legitimately, since other than a few heavy storms dumping inches of rain on us, and the prevailing cold and chill, there hasn't been anything catastrophic, and there have been entirely too many tornadoes and the like recently.
Still, for me cold is painful and it keeps me from moving.  My joints literally freeze up.  That means grumpy person for the dogs, and not enough walkies to make them happy.

So the dogs make the most of every walk that I take them on, after bundling up, wearing gloves and having dug out my winter coat (which I had optimistically washed and put away for the warm season).  Decibel has energy to burn, and burn it she did, which caused her to tumble into a spectacular looking somersault, after which she was limping a little.  We checked everything, but I think she pulled a muscle, or the like.  It seems to be in her shoulder.  She forgets and races off, then limps again.  Well, rest and some anti-inflammatory meds should do the trick, only rest isn't really something in her vocabulary.  Slow down, she doesn't understand either.

Immediately thereafter, she started winking at me.  Now what?  My girl has big brown eyes, and doesn't squint.  Naturally these things happen on the weekend, so Monday morning I called the vet, convinced that Decibel was going blind.  In addition Skeeter had a big lump on his shoulder, so he was turning into Quasimodo.  Dr Ann found pus in the lump, and declared it an abscess, so after a course of antibiotics, Skeeter will be right as rain.  Decibel's eye was stained with dye, and showed a little ding on the cornea, so she had poked it.  Eye-drops for her.
They have both recovered from their "ordeals".  I'm so glad Dr Ann doesn't charge extra for hysterical owners.

Now if we only could keep Decibel from being turbocharged.  Of course I could put her on the leash, but that would be cruel.  After raining all day, there was a short spell for me to run up to the barn and feed the horse and donkey, and the chickens.  Decibel splashed through every puddle twice, raced through the pond overflow, almost got washed through a drain pipe, went for a swim, and managed all this without a limp.  Maybe she's on the mend.

Decibel stole this ball from Ralph.  Hers is still round, thus no fun.

After a swim in the pond... mud is good for the complexion.

Now, if only there were some serious global warming.  This is the third - no, forth year in a row with a cold wet spring.  At least we didn't lose all the fruit this time (not yet anyhow), but the grass is not liking this cold, and the cows will be unhappy.

Cinco de Mayo!

This is what we did one year ago:

We picked up Decibel from the airport.  She has been here a full year now, and it has been a good year!

Decibel is our second purebred Briard puppy, and this past year has been about the joy of raising her, and remembering Barley as a pup, and how unique they all are.  

To me Barley will always my perfect dog.  He lived to teach me the meaning of joyous, joyful.  He never needed to learn 'come' or 'heel', since he never left my side.  He was always within reach.   Barley always took the time to smell the flowers

 And he would patiently wait for me to get the chores done.

Oh how Decibel differs there! 

She is apparently teaching me the meaning of exuberance.  She certainly had to learn 'come' and is still working on 'heel'.  But with her it is a success story when she comes, or walks nicely on the leash.  Unlike Barley, she has no trouble at all jumping up on people, and we are still not done teaching her that this is not allowed.  

She is independent, to the point where she will be the only dog lying outside the door to the living room, while we are all in there watching TV, and there is even room for her on the couch.  But she needs her hugs and smooches too, and the morning cannot start without her snuggles and sloppy wet kisses.  

She is extremely smart.  Where Barley was an easy boy to train, simply because he didn't do much wrong, Decibel is fun to train, simply because she learns fast, and likes to be right!

Like Barley, she has some typical Briard traits:  She likes to goose people, walk up behind them and poking them in the butt, which can be quite a challenge to explain away with guests.  She uses her paws for attention, and she likes to sample food.  She doesn't wolf anything down, she will beg for it, and sniff the morsel offered before gently nibbling at it, then smacking her lips, and make a production of chewing it.  Like Barley, she loves playing with the bite sleeve and accepts the strict rules that go with the game.  

 Both love tearing the stuffing out of toys:

And no matter how much I miss my old boy, Decibel has made his loss bearable.  

 

Farm morning, the walk

So I was still hopeful to get a few good pictures of Decibel, when she is running along at full speed, or trotting in that easy lope that she has.  After all, the light was good, the camera charged, and...

Damn, those dogs are just too fast.
I was smashing the button down, but the camera was doing all sorts of technological wonders, like adjusting for motion, autofocusing, getting a GPS signal, and all that, and I kept missing the shots.

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.  Oh, that's right, they already did.

Damn technology.  I was better with a SLR with manual advance.  At least I would get some good shots.  Here... nothing but blurs and scrambled electrons, and dog butts, after the cute stuff was over with.

After a while I noticed that the camera was set to flower.  It is a setting for extreme close ups, of stuff that just sits there, like a flower.  Okay, that might have been some of the reasons... I switched it to children, which is the setting for fast moving creatures. Not really any better.

Dog stuck in mud, is the action level that my camera can focus on.  

So I gave up trying to take good action shots, and decided to do a documentary instead:

The dogs have been gnawing on deer bones, that Maggie supplies.  She won't tell us where the stash/skeleton is.  She just disappears for a moment, and comes back with another piece of deer.  It is a deer by the way, since there were several of the little hoovies attached to some bone, and so at least they are not eating some missing person.
Anyhow, the rule is, no bones in the house.  The dogs have to drop their bounty when they come in.  They can pick the bone back up on the way out.  This rule insures that we don't have gross bones in the house, or worse, a reason to fight over a bone, and that the dogs will come, because I don't actually take the bones away, they can get them back.

So in the action series documentary, you see Skeeter come, drop the bone, then Decibel come, sniff the bone and leave it, and enter the house.

Skeeter is "carrying"... Drop it!

the bone

Hey, cool, a bone!  Oh, Mom says, Leave it!

Sometimes they are ALL GOOD DOGS!

Farm morning

I thought it would be ever so nice to get a few shots of Decibel with her 'smelly naked dog'-friends.  The pigs are still small enough, and they have settled in and gotten friendly, so that is the perfect time.

It started out rather promising:

Then all I got was this:

Clearly Decibel was mostly interested in the pig droppings.  

Yeah, just great, girl.  Oooh, I just love a dirty girl!  

This is clearly not working.  

Okay, let's go for a walk instead.  Ralph?  What are you doing?  

He is stealing Ruby's feed.  It won't hurt him, it is just alfalfa pellets with corn, but he'll poop green for a bit.  Darn thief!  So much for cute pictures.

Demanding Customers

After only a few days the pigs have become used to the routine in the barn, and are very much demanding their milk.  They used to get the milk in a rubber tub, but there was not enough room around it, and at times one of the pigs would be nosediving into the milk, which is amusing, but can't be comfortable.  So now they get to drink out of the trough.  I wasn't sure if they could reach, but I worried needlessly, they manage just fine.

Here the pigs meet Slash, the Jersey Angus cross, that promises to be good eating in a year or so.  The picture was taken through the window, thus the droplets.  But wait, where is Ruby?

Aha, she is getting ready to milk.  Let's make some noise, gang!  (And they do, squeal and scream, when ordinarily they are calm and quietly snuffling and grunting.)


Ruby was good in spite of the flash photography.  It probably helped that the dogs stayed in the house that time.  I already got one bucket full, for us.  Sometimes the pigs do have to share.

 Almost done milking...

To the trough, boys!  Hey, move Slash, we want milk.

No room at the trough for late comers.