I just love this picture of flyball practice. I am still on my cruise… LOL but I queued this post up so Tip Tail still has some activity! This is our team, Thunder Paws, here in Utah, practicing Flyball. We practice on Sundays usually. And we practice for 2 or 3 hours, with the new dogs being first and the experienced dogs going last.
Flyball is fun!
Oh, and Happy Halloween!
Well, while I’m gone on my cruise I didn’t want to leave this blog idle… so here is a cute picture of Levi’s but at the park when we went this summer. 
He loves the park. He is so good there now. He used to be a terror! When he was young we’d let him off leash and he would run around without listening for a good fifteen minutes. Kinda like Tatum and Muffit do now!
But he liked it, and now he comes back and hangs out for treats. He is a great boy.
So… I’m taking a cruise! I’m leaving on Saturday! I am so excited. Nervous as heck.. but excited too.
I am probably not going to be access this blog from the ship. Maybe I’ll post on Saturday from the hotel room, and hopefully I’ll post a bit tomorrow, but after that I may not post. I’m going to try to queue up some posts with fun pictures to show when I am gone, every other day or so, but it won’t be live postings for a week. I’ll be back on November 2.
I’ll need some serious weight loss pills after I eat myself into oblivion on the cruise. LOL. But I’m excited, it should be a lot of fun!
I hope to post updates and pictures about the cruise on my other blog, Luna Tail. So if you want to see what I’m up to check that one out.
Bye!
So for a night we have the privilege of having a house guest! And as you probably can guess, this is a recipe for lots of fun and play. Of course Chase and Levi are banished to their Dad’s computer room, but the rest of the dogs are nice and are happy to have Sadie visit.
I actually thought Tatum would be the main player… but it seems Muffit is instead. Sadie and Muffit have been having a great time this morning playing, barking, and making a lot of noise. Tatum is, of course, joining in as she can.
I snapped these pictures early this morning as I’m working from home and the dogs are being nutty. Though as I type this now, they have calmed down and are sleeping again. I guess they got their play out of them. Sadie actually started it. She brought me a toy even. And she is a snuggly and a love bug. I’m already in love with her. Isn’t she pretty? She is so soft, too, and such a doll.
It makes me happy to have a foster again in the house… but at the same time, my heart melts, and I wish we could keep her. What has happened to me in my old age? I thought I was supposed to get tougher and more callus and not fall in love with the fosters so much. But the opposite has happened and I love them more, and wish I could keep them all. Well, that’s why we ended up with six dogs.
But Sadie has an awesome foster home with Christy, and she’ll go back there today. And Chrisy is so good at finding homes for her fosters, so Sadie will find a great forever home.
I just have to say thank you thank you thank you to those of you who have emailed with me who have, or know about, Tatum’s siblings. In rescue it’s just so rare to actually know where litter mates have gone. I guess in a situation like a collector it might be more common. But I don’t know the siblings or history of any of my other rescues, I’d need to have a Garmin GPS to even hope to find any of them, and so it just overjoys me to know, and talk to, those who have Tatum’s relatives.
This picture is of Tara, one of Tatum’s sisters. Isn’t she a doll, and doesn’t she look just like her? I’m going to have to get some similar pictures up of Tatum, her sisters and her brothers, to show how similar they are. Of course we are not 100% sure these are her littermates, as records were not kept, but they look and act so much alike that it’s amazing. Unfortunately Foxy, one of Tatum’s sisters, passed away a few weeks ago. We miss her and love her even though we never met her.
I’ve been slacking lately and haven’t replied to emails or posted pictures… probably because I’m PMSing and I usually like to cave up and hide when I am. But I’ll work on it tomorrow. If I don’t spend all day practicing agility and flyball. Ooo but that sounds like lots of fun too!
So last night as I’m online and fighting with the wireless router to get more bandwidth from my husband… he, my husband, says I have to go into the computer room and have a look at something. I was hoping he wasn’t gonna yell at me for stealing bandwidth, lol, but I went anyway and this is what I found. My husband said he was looking and looking for Muffit and couldn’t find the goofy boy, until finally he saw his head sticking out of the laundry basket.
I had to laugh so hard and try to keep myself from laughing at the same time, because I knew Muffit would get up and come to me if I was too vocal or silly. LOL but look at this goofy boy, all snuggled into this nice laundry basket bed. He is such a super sweet cutie boy. I adore Muffit. He’s too needy, and insecure, for sure, but we are working on that. He is very cute and sweet!
I have been doing some mat work with him lately and I think it’s working really well. He is so bouncy when I work with him that he doesn’t know that he can be calm. So we are teaching him to realize he can be calm. And he’s a good boy, he learns fast.
It’s interesting to watch Tatum and Muffit learn. I’ve been working with Muffit on the same things I work with Tatum. Why not, I have all the stuff out, including a dumbbell. Tatum is a very cautious learner. She is very smart, and once she knows something it sticks. But at the beginning she stands there and looks at me and it just seems like all these thoughts are going through her head. Like “I really want that squeeze cheese and maybe if I go around the Mum she’ll give it to me” or “Hrmm I know I can get that doing just exactly what I want to do” and maybe “if I divide the square root of twelve by thirty to the power of ten…” LOL it does seem like she’s doing the math sometimes.
Muffit, on the other hand, is eager to try anything with me. But he’s so frantic about it that he forgets, it doesn’t stick, or he just has blonde moments. But in the end I think Tatum and Muffit learn at about the same rate, they just get there differently. I love knowing how they learn, it fascinates me.
We have a bunch of.. well, tomatoes left over. They didn’t all turn red before picking time, and since it froze last weekend we wanted to try to salvage them for later. I do love my tomatoes!
We have them laid out in our spare bedroom so they will ripen. And Angel just thought that was the coolest thing, a whole scattering of green toys!
She loves to steal things and get chased. She’s our only dog we do this with. We don’t play ‘chase the puppy’ with any of the other dogs, because it can be so rewarding to them that they don’t want to come!
Anyway, if you look closely you’ll see that Angel’s green ball isn’t, actually, a green ball, but a green tomato. She was so excited to get it that I just couldn’t take it away from her. So I chased her around the house and out the dog door a few times. I love when she gets happy being chased! She gets all goofy and squiggly. And I have to make sure I run slowly, acting like I run fast, so I don’t actually catch her.
Well, it’s a rainy day today. Flyball practice is even cancelled for tomorrow since it is going to rain, and probably even snow. There is snow in the mountains up near us already. I guess this means winter is coming.
You can see in this picture I have halloween decorations up in the windows. Muffit and Tatum, the only dogs to follow me upstairs, didn’t want to come outside in the cold. It’s only about 44 degrees outside, it’s really not that cold yet. It will get much much colder around here. Our winters are way too long, our summers much too short. But we have some plans of what to do this winter in the dog training area!
I have flyball jumps in the house, and 2×2 weave polls. I can work stays and waits and dumbbells. No room for english saddles storage with all my dog stuff! I need to work Tatum’s stay. And I think I’m just going to do with Muffit, everything I do with Tatum. Why not. I was working Tatum and the dumbbell yesterday a bit between cooking soup for dinner. Simple so far, just lick squeeze cheese off the dumbbell and get clicked for it. Actually, she was offering licks without the cheese, and then I’d click and put cheese on. And the same for Muffit. They both did well. Getting them to mouth the dumbbell is tricky, though. It’s a big step for a dog and we’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, I’m just being a bum and doing some small training this weekend. yay, I like being a bum!
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