Monday, December 28, 2009

Second Christmas

Yesterday we celebrated Second Christmas over at Ruth and Stacy's with their dogs as well as the welcome addition of John and his dog Kaya. Second Christmas runs pretty much along the lines of First Christmas. We snow shoe with the dogs for a bit which we then use to justify the hours of over eating and imbibing to follow.


I know, what a hard to look at view - living out here is rough...




Boy dogs.

Flying dogs.

Tall and small dogs.

Covered in snow dogs.

Enjoying the view dogs.

Whole lot of happiness and joy dogs.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Bruce doesn't like herding sheep

He likes HURTING sheep.



Being a young Border Collie, Kate can get a little grippy too.


But mostly she's really good with the sheep.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas

I had plans for a great Christmas blog. Something creative, touching, tug at the heart strings all warm and fuzzy...

Or something like that.

However, we woke up this morning did sheepy chores and then headed over to the neighbour's for the traditional "Non traditional" Christmas snowshoe and potluck. After a great morning of tromping around in the snow followed by stuffing ourselves it was off to my parents to spend the rest of the day hanging out with family and stuffing ourselves again.

And now it's late, and we are STUFFED and it's definitely time to settle in for a long winter's nap. So here are a few recycled pictures of the dogs enjoying the snow - much like they plan to for the rest of the holidays as well as my favourite Christmas poem.



“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons.
It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

Dr. Seuss



Monday, December 21, 2009

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

In a weird, twisted way, this may be one of my favourite days of the year. Today - or maybe tomorrow, now that we have the internet and too much information things can get a little confusing - but TRADITIONALLY today is the shortest day of the year. Up our way there is about 10 hours difference between the longest day and the shortest day. That's a lot of daylight. So when things start getting dark and miserable around here I start looking forward to the winter's solstice - now that's a holiday worth celebrating!

As much as I can whine about the lack of sunlight though, I really feel for Travis.

Here's a picture I took at 8:20 this morning after Travis left for work.


And here's a picture I took long before he got home from work this afternoon.

To work in the dark and back home in the dark - it's a great way to live if you're a vampire or mushroom. Official sunrise today was 8:55am and sunset was 4:08pm, however there was no real sunrise or set here today because it started snowing first thing and still hasn't stopped - so no sun at all.

However I did take these pictures the other day while the weather was nice.


It was probably about 3:30pm - pretty!

Here's to 6 months of more sunlight - that's way better than thinking about 2 more months of REALLY cold weather! For those of you WAY south of us, yes I realize that our winter is longer than a couple more months and that it actually goes on for another 4 or 5 months, but that's one of those "out of sight, out of mind" things. To actually think about 4 OR 5 MORE MONTHS OF WINTER....LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA!

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

I have no control over what I blog about.



What I intended to blog about - I won't discuss because I still expect to blog about that in our near future. When you're working with subjects with brains that function on most likely ( I say most likely because I'd hate to ever admit more...) the same level as your own and you don't all speak the same language (as in, they sure have picked up a whole lot of English but I can't say that I'm fluent in Dog yet) you can't always guarantee that everyone is on the same "blog" page.

So, we went from "that" blog to the "new camera" blog. I got a new camera. It is the same as my old camera. God rest her soul. While our relationship was short (2 years), it was full, but her life was not easy and apparently a point and shoot can only be hauled around in a pocket through oh so many days of minus 40, pockets full of snow, pockets full of hay, pockets full of dirt, pockets full of dirt, pockets full of dirt, pockets full of you're starting to get the idea, did I mention pockets full of dirt and days of minus 40...a moment of silence dear bloggers and bloggees for the cameras who bring those pictures to our screens...

Today I hauled around the new camera in the same pocket, warmed with my notcurrentlyneededgloves - never the two cameras shall meet lest they share stories...

This blog was going to be about shots like this


Little Hopey (godilovethatdog). Usually the pictures of him are suitable for SPCA ads, but now given that the new camera has 10x optical zoom instead of 6 I'm able to leave him more comfortable while I take pictures.

or shots like this
nothing particularaly special. Just the three dogs stopped, in focus and pointed in the same direction.

But no. Bruce hijacked the blog with this.

in case you don't get the "feel" of this shot

here's some more.

Brucie shaking the heck out of something living, once living, hopefully never living...who knows, possibly just shaking the heck out of himself because it feels good.



Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Snow shoes


Brucie's, in case you're wondering.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

But it's a dry cold

It's minus 40 this morning (supposed to be colder tomorrow - can't wait!) and Travis continues to take flattering pictures of me.

I'd like to point out that Travis was very much inside wearing PJ's when he took this shot. One of us has our head on straight.

Friday, December 11, 2009

This is not a foodie blog

Although I know that I AM a foodie. There are plenty of great foodie blogs out there. I've been known to read a few of them.

No. This is a tale of " Junk Food Friday" gone bad. Tonight I attempted to make gluten free (those of you who know me know I'm "high maintenance" and those of you who don't yet - well now you know, I'm hard to feed therefore high maintenance) fish and chips.

Travis cleverly took a picture of me as I privately said "this is a complete disaster - I believe I may have been saying "Ahh shit" to myself . You're right, the apron does nothing for me but there was hot oil involved. Hot oil and a completely disastrous fish batter.


"Nope, not going to be able to come up with some story that this is an ethnic dish. "


How is this dog related - The usual subject of this blog? It was so bad I couldn't imagine feeding it to the dogs.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some... more room for popcorn tonight!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Long winter nights

lead to hibernation.



I stayed up long enough to blog. Good night!

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

My new best friends

I bought a couple of high tech pieces of farm equipment this week to help me out this winter.

Item 1.

My big scoop snow shovel. It moves WAY more snow than a regular shovel, which is great when it comes to digging out gates, filling waterers (I dump snow in them to fill them up and then the heaters melt the snow - heck of a lot easier than hauling buckets), and clearing paths.

I stuck Hope by shovel to give an idea of it's size. As you can see - Hope is not impressed. He's actually shivering like a baby. It's minus 25 which is balmy compared to the minus 37 we've been living with this week, but Hope doesn't see it that way. If he had his way he wouldn't go outside till about April.

Bruce on the other hand, thinks the weather is just perfect. When you're built like a musk ox you look forward to the cooler months.


And Kate? She seems to be blowing raspberries at the weather gods. Careful Kate, we don't want to upset them.

My second piece of equipment is my new sled. It's a heck of a lot easier to move straw etc., by dragging it behind me on top of the snow, than by carrying it.

Yep, moving on up in the farm tool world...

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The reason for my technical difficulties

are not related to my previous blog of last week. The sheep porn did not burn my laptop's little circuits. The google police have not shut me down. The RCMP have not knocked on my door...yet.

No, my technical difficulties are related to recent "upgrades" made to my laptop - affectionately known as Daisy (I used to have a PDA named Hal - you know from 2010 A Space Odyssey. Hal sings " A Bicycle Built For Two" while he's being shut down/killed. I know HOW GEEKY of me ).

Anyway, my Tech Support (read Travis) decided that I needed Windows 7. Windows 7 is leaner, meaner, and faster....unless your laptop is older than dirt. Daisy is. Microsoft can't believe that anyone would keep a laptop longer than two years. Daisy is almost 5.

So far the other geek in the house has managed to fix all the little "hmm, didn't know that that would be a problem" problems that came with the upgrade. Apparently he has also figured out the "your laptop doesn't seem to know that it has an SD slot problem too. We'll see when I blog next.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Technical difficulties

I'm not able to upload pictures at the moment, and a blog without pictures - it's just not the same. My tech support assures me that he'll have things up and running again very soon. In the mean time picture this loyal blogger waiting patiently beside her laptop. See, it would be better with an actual picture... ;-)

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The following deals with mature subject matter. Viewer discretion is advised.

We put Gordon in with girls today. While there aren't many sheep on the property right now, putting Gordon in with the girls involved seperating him from the wethers, seperating the ewe lambs from the ewes and putting everyone in their new "homes" for the next few months without mixing the wrong crowd up. I was planning to use Hope, because it's just habit. Travis talked me into using Kate, and what a good idea that was. She did a great job and I was really pleased with her - sorry Hope, maybe next time. I didn't take any pictures of her when we were sorting because we were busy sorting, but I did get some shots when we were done and she was putting Patch and Sue (the ewe lambs) and Buy Low, Extra and Save On (foods) the wethers away.



Good job Kate!

As for Gordon and the girls? They were very happy to meet each other...


Hey babe...

How YOU doin...?


Cue Barry White music.

Let's get it on...

Friday, November 27, 2009

Don't strain yourself Antonio

with all that... breathing.

in...out...in...out...in...out

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

One last kick at the can

Maybe.

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems that winter is upon us. Which means that pretty soon the snow will be too deep out in our pasture to work dogs. Both Kate and Hope are working really well right now so it's hard to think about quitting for a few months. Yesterday was gorgeous so we went out to just goof around and I took a few pictures of the two of them so that I've got something to look at in February when I'm completely depressed about not working dogs.

Kate has really come along this summer. She's well on her way to being ready for Nursery next spring.





As for Hope (and Kate as well), we've been playing around with new skills for me. I'm working on finger whistles. So far the upside with finger whistles in cold weather is that I don't have to worry about my whistle sticking to my lips. The downside is cold fingers I guess, as it's hard to whistle with gloves on. Hope is catching on although the first day was a real riot as it seemed that he thought it must be someone else whistling in a different field - definitely not Lisa and definitely not something he needed to pay attention to!