Henry the Leaphound

New Bed(s)

2010-12-11T07:28:00.001-08:00

Today I nipped out and bought Henry yet another new bed. This is the fourth new bed in two months that I've invested in. I say invested because the last time I bought dog beds was 1994, a very sound investment indeed as they lasted until 2010, right up until Henry decided to embark on his dog bed chewing phase at the age of about three or possibly four. The first one was chewed not long after we lost Badger, I put that one down to poor Henry missing his friend. The second one went not long after, I put that down to the same problem.

Then we had a lull, no chewing, nothing. Then he started chewing his cage - yes poor Henry in a cage, in a rented house we had no option. So the cage has somebent bits on it, but he does seem to have stopped that now after we realised the cage was right next to the cupboard containing the dog food......not sure how we didn't spot that sooner.

So, we needed new dog beds, off to Pets At Home we went and promply fell on the floor at the price of dog beds. Thinking back, I spent about £45 on the 1994 dog beds so in reality they have stabilised in price still being on average £45, the trouble is that £45 back then was considerably less to me than it is now. Then other half had a brain wave. The dog bed covers were less than £20 each, why didn't we buy two of those (less than the price of one dog bed) and then trip over to Asda and buy two Smart Price duvets to fill them with. Total price £50 for two spanking new very country life type dog beds. Henry and Molly love them, they hardly gave other half the time to make them up before they were laying upside down on them. Good dog bed investment.

So, the new dog beds weren't going to go in Henrys cage, no way. So I bought a dog cage pad type of bed, total £18. He loved it, he snuggle in it, laid on it,Molly went in the cage and laid on it, refusing to get out, it matched the carpet so lessening the impact of a giant dog cage in the living room, it was great.

Five days on he chewed it.

Two months on from that I have bought a new one, I dog bed watched for a couple of weeks and there has been no chewing at all, lets hope this time Henry's cage stays nice and smart from now on.

Next I suppose we should get new coats for them, the current ones also survive from 1994...

I've Missed This

2010-12-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone,
I've missed blogging so much. Having said that I only realised after the blogs I follow and have negelcted over the last few months and felt how great it was to follow the lives of other people who I don't know but love to see on the web. Gosh that sounds a bit stalky dosen't it? I mean it in the nicest possible way though.

So, what has happened since I last blogged? Quite allot. After almost recovering from dislocating my knee I found myself moving house to a fab pad halfway up a mountain, the reasons for the move weren't very nice and I'll not go into it here but I found myself in absolutely lovely house, super modern and open plan - all things I thought I hated but after three weeks I loved it, super modern is super easy to clean. The dogs loved it, we were right on the doorstep to the most amazing walks at high altitude and I was out with them every night after work. Our routine had changed considerably, from being self employed for 7 years I was suddenly working for someone else - scary but quite cool, no supplies needed just turn up, do what you're told and go home. You get your pay and don't really need to worry about the tax man.

Then after a couple of months I was offered another, better job and decided to take it, we also decided to move over towards Edinburgh as we;'d both be able to get to work without spending hundreds of pounds on fuel every month, so no sooner had we unpacked than we were packing up again and moving on. This was when Badger stopped eating. We thought it was due to the move, so we didn't worry too much. Two weeks into the new house he was still bouncing between being the wonderful mad Badge and a quiet sleepy boy that we weren't used to. We wondered if it was a growing phase, he was only 18 months at this point, but after he was sick several times in one day we took him to the vets. They ran some tests, but couldnt' work out what was wrong. They kept him in, we all stayed quite positive. Until I got a call at work fromt eh vet to say his kidneys were in a bad way. I had no idea what this meant but had a fabulous explanation from David the vet. Basically, he had to undergo another test with twom possible results, one meant medication for the rest of Badgers life and the other basically meant no hope. What an awful situation! Poor Badge was on a drip in a cage and the vets told us we could visit him as ofen as we wanted to so we did. It would take a while for the results to come through so I decided to visit Badge in the early afternoon, he was very ill and wouldn't eat, I sat on the floor stroking him and trying to tempt him to eat but he just wouldn't, all he wanted to do was sleep. I started to cry and he lifted his head and licked away my tears, you couldn't have made that up, even though he was very ill he still cared, as you must have worked out by now the results weren't good, basically the vets were keeping Badge alive, there was no hope and it was the end of the road. Really there was no desicion to be made, so we lost him....

And so we continue. Henry suffered awfully after Badge died. He ended up on doogie valium, I think i needed it too as I had moved house, started a new job and lost a member of the family all in a week! Molly was fine, she seemed to have accepted that Badge wasn't coming back and just got on with the new house, she is so cool!

It took about a month for Hen to settle down and in that time Molly went from being the serious matriarch ton a playful nutcase of a greyhound who now shoots around the house like a mad thing and seems very happy, maybe the responsibility of being above a mad saluki and a border collie had got to her? Anyway life has calmed and we are looking forward to blogging again and following everybody else. x

Spring Has Sprung

2010-03-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Just to prove that Spring has sprung Henry decided to do a bit of springing himself....

Please excuse the messiness around the trampoline, It's one of those corners that just won't be neat.

Busy Time

2010-02-21T00:34:00.001-08:00

Goodness it's been mad here. First off I thought I could dance. Oh dear, despite having attended and won several awards and medals at Len Goodmans Dance School in my far off youth I seem to have lost the touch as I managed to dislocate my kneecap in the process of trying to jump and twist at the same time. Not only did my kneecap end up round the wrong side of my leg but I managed to break a bit off the bottom of my thigh bone in the landing part of the move. Absolute agony but I still managed to put the kneecap back myself without passing out.
Being super cool I decided to wait until morning to go to casualty, after all it's 30 odd miles away and it was getting on for 10pm so I'd not have arrived home until the early hours so Other Half and me splinted it up and off to bed I went. This was a completely mental set of things to do as by the morning my leg was incredibly painful, very very scarily swollen and just basically agony. So off we went to the infirmary and got it sorted. By sorted I mean I have some fabulous painkillers which send me off on a trip, a massive leg brace, a pair of crutches, a tubi grip and regular two week appointments with the bone man. I'm not sure what's going to happen about the odd bit of bone that's floating about but for now I'm concentrating on getting the rest of the knee fixed.
So, in theory I have lots and lots of time to myself while I lounge on the sofa, lay in every morning drinking tea, be pampered by Other Half.........ha! Not a chance! Within four days I was taken to England for the day to do a felting course with two friends, a great day and some fantastic results, this is something I definately want to do again. Then I came down with that dreadful Scottish Winter sickness bug, I felt so ill I wondered if I was having a stroke as my head was pounding. I also had a million phone calls to make and return, this is the kind of stress that you don't really need but no-one else could do this for me.
Then, when things started to settle down, I decided one afternoon this week to play on the Wii, a very underused piece of kit that Other Half bought for Christmas that I love but forget is there. Badger is very concerned about the Wii. He is worried as we appear to be throwing things but not actually letting them go, this frustrates him beyond belief so he spends the time we are on it trying to round us up and get us to sit down and stop playing it. This particular day I was attempting to play bowling whilst laying on the sofa, a bit odd I know but I needed to rest my leg. Badger was doing his normal stressing and decided to take matters into his own hands, or should I say teeth and tried to grab the controller out of my hand sinking a large canine into one of my fingers in the process.
He didn't mean to do it! Not the biting bit, but boy it was sore, right on the tendons and a very deep albeit small hole. So off to the surgery for a tetnus jab. Thankfully the doctor was very sympathetic and placed it in my arm as it would have been cruel to put it in the usual place. The only trouble was I had a very sore finger on the end of the sore arm and it was really not helping with using my crutches. I did laugh throughout the whole thing though as looking in from outside I'd have found it really funny if it had happened to any one else.
Then a day or so after that my washing machine broke down again. This was dog related. Other Half took the ash tray from the log burner out to be emptied and trod in a dog poo in his slippers. I put said slippers in the washing machine where they promptly fell apart and I discovered they were mostly made from cardboard. Oh dear.
Being the eternal optomist I decided I could fix the machine myself, and despite having my leg in a brace I managed to get it out of it's compartment, turn it round tip it over and take the panel off. I then removed so pipes and discovered I couldn't actually physically get to the pipe I needed to get to as I couldn't bend down because of the brace on my leg. I actually stood and cried. This was no good, I need a washing machine and I couldn't fix it. I also had no money to call an engineer and in any case no engineer will come out this far into the wilderness to fix anything which was my dishwasher was still broken a year after as noone will come. What was I going to do?
I decided to text a friend who is married to a shepherd further up the track, she has a washing machine so some one must fix it for her if it breaks down.. It turned out that someone did, her husband. Brilliant! So she sent him down and he fixed the washing machine within ten minutes, what a bloody hero! I could have cried with joy. But it gets better, not only did he fix the washing machine but he fixed the dishwaher too - mega, bloody, fantastic, brilliant! I'm so happy!

Badger the Hoover

2010-01-29T00:02:00.000-08:00

Right now I'm sitting in the kitchen catching up on blogs and emails and having a nice cup of breakfast tea. This is my morning routine, it would possibly be better without my lovely wee netbook as company but that's a habit I just can't break and it is pretty much the only time I go online these days.

Badger also has a morning routine. He leaps from his bed as soon as I come downstairs, runs out the back door for a wee, runs back in for his breakfast, bombs around the living room with Henry and then joins me in the kitchen while I have my porridge. This is the bit I never realised was happening until I actually watched him this morning. He walks around the kitchen floor with his nose almost on the floor, as he does this is is audibly sniffing for anything vaguely edible. When he finds that vaguely edible thing he either licks the floor or gobbles it up and goes on his way step by step. It's one of those things that you don't really notice as it's a pace here and a pace there and he's very quiet while he's doing it, today I only realised as he was licking a patch of sticky sauce that had gone on the floor for ages. It's really quite disgusting but there is an upside to it, there is never a reason to ever sweep the kitchen floor, Badger eats every crumb that lands on it so I only ever have to mop it - Badger the self cleaning dog in more ways than one!

Badger the Chicken

2010-01-23T23:25:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting here eating my breakfast and reading blogs for half an hour or so, enjoying the peace and stillness of the early morning. Well maybe not so still, after a while I became aware of constant movment from accross the kitchen. It was one of those vague movments and sounds that is constant and your brain cancels out until it begins to irritate you. So I looked up to see Badger with his head in the chicken feed sack tucking in to mouthfuls of organic mixed corn!

Why?

First Henry and now Badger. At least Henry had the sense to stop immediately and close his mouth and pretend he hadn't been raiding the food, Badger just carried on regardless trying to scoff as much as he could.

I'm sure mixed corn is not the sort of food dogs would naturally eat so I can only assume this is a case of dog in a manger as all the dogs know the chicken feed is for the chickens and follow me out every morning to feed them so I think they are on a mission to eat all the chickens food just so the chickens can't eat it.

Dogs eh?

Completely mad.

Free and Simple Pleasures

2010-01-19T02:22:00.000-08:00

Inspired (stolen) from MBNAD's blog here are my top ten free and simple pleasures.
1. Laying in bed first thing in the morning or last thing at night and listening to the sheer and utter silence here. It reminds me of when I used to wake up on my first morning on holiday in Scotland and feeling that exquisite peacefulness and total escape that only this place can have.

2. Lounging on a comfy sofa reading a book, magazine or watching telly with a dog curled into you, bliss.

3. Laughing at and with your dogs, especially when they know they are being funny and they are grinning at you.

4. Radio 4. All of it, except the comedy in the evenings with the exception of Count Arthur Strong.

5. The expectation and running around getting the house ready and making up rooms for people to come and stay.

6.Realising how much I love my collie dog, even though I never expected to have a third dog.

7. Spending an afternoon in the garden doing non back breaking stuff with Radio 4 on and hearing the birds.

8. Sitting outside in the balminess of a summer evening.

9. Absolutlely loving my car when I've spent half a day cleaning and polishing it and realising how great it is depsite it's age.

10. Being happy with me.

There you go, that lot made me feel good just typing it. I think I could go on and on though as there are more than 10 free and simple pleasures to life, like getting all the laundry washed and ironed, espeically if it's been hanging on the line, going for long walks with the dogs, going for a trip back south to see my folks, growing plants, making compost, sweeping paths in the garden, listening to my chickens clucking when they are happy, basking in the sunshine, being warm and toasty indoors when its blowing and rainy outside, and probably one of the very best, looking at dogs layig about exhausted after they've had a long happy walk.

Mad Dogs

2009-12-09T00:53:00.001-08:00

There has been much hilarity in this house over the last few weeks, mostly caused by the dogs, Henry and Badger being the main suspects.

Firstly though we had yet another episode of the toe, I took Badger for his one year check up and innoculations and we discovered two lumps in between two toes on both front feet. Not good. Still, I felt optomistic, surely the vet could just remove them and although the prospect of driving back and forth to the vet with a sore poorly dog for a couple of weeks wasn't a great thought at least it would get it sorted. The trouble was it turned out not to be quite that easy, Badger went in for a couple of X-rays and it turned out there were five or six little lumps in both front paws and this might mean having more toes amputated and it dosen't take a rocket scientist to work out that a dog can only have so many toes removed and then it would have to be a leg removed and if that's going on in both front feet then removing both front legs just wasn't an option, I'm sure you can work out what that option would be.

So we got referred to a specialist way up in Fife, to cut a long story short the fantastic lovely amazing specialist vet said that the lumps were something that happen in puppies and once they are past 12 months they should cease to form or grow and everything in Badgers feet had most probably stabilised. However they did find an absess in his foot where his toe was removed in the summer so they sorted that out, gave me some anti biotics and sent us on our way. I could have cried with relief, I honestly wondered if I was going to be bringing him home.

Since our visit to Fife Bdger has become the most happy, friendly and affectionate wee pup. He had turned into a grumpy, growly, bad tempered dog who no longer wanted to go in the car, had stopped us stroking him, would completely freak if we tried to touch his toes or legs and it was beyond me what to do with him. I think I'd describe him as smiley now!

On to the hilarity, since Badgers trip up north he has become more mischievous and has joined forces with Henry to create as much havoc in the house as possible. In order to keep this contained I've dug out lots of toys from Ferg and Bons days and Molly, Henry and Badge are like little children in a toy shop with them.

The first toy was a ball which you put treats into and it has a recordable switch where you can put your own voice and talk to the dog every time it moves the ball to get the treats out. Molly had played with this a couple of years ago but I took it away when we got Henry in case they fought over it. Amazingly she remembered what to do with it straight away, never underestimate the power of a greyhounds brain! When Molly stopped playing with it I turned the sound bit on and Henry really freaked, it was a recording from my ex and Henry never liked him much and so he pounced on the ball, it flew up in the air and the recording bit flew out accross the room and hit the wall. you couldn't have made it up in a film, you could say we won't be hearing from my ex again hahaha!

The next side splitting event came from Badger, he has a football which was an outdoor toy but has made it's way inside and Badge has slowly chewed a massive hole in it. He drags this ball around all over the place, putting it on your lap when youre wearing nice clothes, bringing it upstairs and placing it gently on your pillow and waits patiently for you to play fetch the moment you wake up and are faced with a slimey big thing right in front of you. Last night he discovered that the hole is now big enough for him to madly shake the ball and have it slap all around his head. How he does this and stays standing up or even concious I've no idea but once he'd done it the first time he kept on doing it, adding wee extras like slapping it against your legs or climbing up on the back of the sofa while youre watching tv and suddenly shaking it against your head to make you jump.

The ball got revenge though as mid shake it went right over his head and suddenly we had a football headed dog running about the house, attempting to look as though he really meant to have it on his head while trying to work out how to get it off before bumping into anything. It was so funny that we couldn't help as we were laughing too much which is probably a bit bad but it was so funny that even the though of it while I'm typing this is making me laugh.

So that's the madness for now, will be back soon with more...

Timberdogs

2009-11-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

Today I decided to chop some of the logs that I bought a few days ago. If it's a nice winter or autumn day, chopping logs is quite a nice occupation, it's all sort of rustic and homely and gives you an immensely good feeling when the logs are all stacked up by the fire. Strangely, when I have lots of coal, lots of logs and lots of oil in the tank I feel quite wealthy, it's a good feeling, no matter how much money there is in the bank.

So, while chopping the logs the dogs have to of course get involved. This means hanging around me, sniffing logs I'm picking up and then progressing to sniffing the big log that's used for chopping on and then even more dangerously, sniffing the log that is being chopped. They then all hng around me while I piled as many chopped logs into my arms and took them inside to stack beside the fire. Whilst stacking them, all three dogs watched intently as every log went down and the next was places beside it. I was then followed back outside to start the process all over again.

It's funny how dogs watch your every move with such instense interest sometimes. I was once told that although us humans spend quite allot of time watching and learning about our dogs, we will never equal the amount of knowledge the dogs have about us, they watch us all the time and know our every move even before we know it, that's how while thinking about taking them out for a walk as soon as you've finished washing up will mean that you'll come accross the dog bouncing about wanting to go out as soon as you've pulled the plug. Dogs are fab, really fab and although mine sometimes drive me nuts they all look angelic laying in front of the log burner which is currently roaring away with the chopped logs and a bit of coal inside.

Chicken Feed

2009-11-06T01:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday while cleaning out the chicken house I noticed Henry was being unusually quiet. Whenever I do anything with the chickens they tend to hang around me like a big chicken gang which Henry really wants to join.

After half an hour I went back into the garden to do something else and saw Henry emerge from the store where the sack of chicken corn is kept. What made him look so suspicious was that he was trying to keep his mouth very still while little bits of corn fell out the sides! He honestly looked like a wee boy who had been caught eating sweets and was trying to look like he wasn't eating anything. When I went into the store he'd tucked in to about an eighth of a sack.

Now why on earth would a dog want to eat chicken feed? I do feed him honest, even though he is a skinny dog, but chicken feed? I just can't see anything remotely attractive in it for a dog apart from the fact that the chickens eat it so therefore Henry wants it.

What I do know is that this is going to make for some interesting poop scooping later...

Blog Holiday

2009-10-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've not posted anything for so long. It's been a mad few weeks and it was quite nice to take a blog holiday, until yesterday when I decided to catch up on all the blogs I followed and I realised how much I miss this and all of you.

On the toe front Molly has recovered very well. It wasn't an easy ride, she couldn't go out for three weeks and Molly is the kind of dog who watches the clock for the minute she is going for a walk and then leaps up and bugs you until you take her. However we made it through and she is now on shortish walks that are getting longer so very soon she will be up to speed and back to normal.

Over the last few weeks Henry's sense of humour has increased greatly. I had some shopping delivered one day and while putting it away I went to answer the phone, once off the phone I put some washing in the tumble dryer and carried on putting the shopping away. It wasn't until later that day that I discovered the bread wrapper, a container for a ready meal and a packet of toilet rolls at the bottom of the garden.

Then last week I made a chocolate cake, this is a rare event for me and I'd made it really chocolately and put lots of chocolate findant icing on the top. While waiting for the icing to set I put it right at the back of the kitchen work surface - this is somewhere that is relatively dog proof, until now - and went off to do something else. After a couple of minutes I heard a crash in the kitchen and shot through to see what was happening. Henry had climbed on one of the chairs, knocked a load of plastic containers off the work surface and pulled the cake to the edge. Not only that but he had licked the lovely fondant icing completely off of one half of the cake. Needless to say the cake ended up being a dog treat over the course of the next few days, I'm not sure what this teaches them but after all that hard work I wasn't going to throw it in the bin!

On a good note, Henry has stopped barking madly at the chickens. I can't remember if I said that I got four lovely Lavender Araucana hens, they are very beautiful and posh, in fact they are too posh to lay an egg so have become more pets than functional. For the first few weeks Henry barked at them non stop but thankfully now he has begun to get used to them and only barks if they are right by the fence. I think there is no doubt he'd have a chicken dinner if he could get through the fence but at least the barking has stopped.

Badger is doing well too, he had a bath last night which is a major event, but he is now adorable and fluffy and so cute looking. He's still a pest though with all his collie-brained habits like never ever keeping still but at least he is a clean pest now!

Well I'd better get on and go to work and I promise not to take a blogging holiday again for a while.x

New Arrivals

2009-08-24T23:46:00.000-07:00

Henry, Molly and Badger have four new friends, they are one hen, one bantam hen and two bantam hen chicks. All the bantams are beautiful lavender aracaunas and the hen is a white aracauna. I've been after some aracaunas for about two years as they are the chickens who lay blue eggs which you very occasionally find in Tescos for an extortionate price and of course if I see them I have to buy them however much they cost because they are so lovely to look at. Aracaunas are also very hardy which is handy as it's very bleak here in the winter and you'd need to be a tough bird to withstand it.

So off I went at dusk last night to a wee small holding to collect my birds and instantly felt very bad as all the chickens there were housed in deluxe coops, one even had double glazing! Our coop is small and basic but I suppose it does the job although I think a few alterations might be in line before the winter comes in. After we'd caught the chickens, well, after I'd watched the lovely lady who I bought them from catch them, I trundeled home with them chirping in a box in the boot. It was such a lovely noise and quite funny as every time I hit a bump the hens made a sort of egg laying noise.

Once I got home I then had the tricky job of getting the birds from the box into the coop without any getting out to be lost into the night, this was harder than I thought as they refused to move and due to space restrictions I couldn't really get hold of them properly. However after a while I had them all locked up for the night.

Then this morning the alarm went off. I lay there groaning that it was early and decided to treat myself to 15 more minutes and after a couple of those minutes suddenly remembered the chickens. Oh no! Who's ridiculous idea was it to get chickens? I'd never get a lie in again! I dragged myself out of bed and still in my jammies pulled on a big fleece and wandered outside, all three dogs following and wondering why they weren't getting breakfast yet.

As soon as I opened the coop door out popped all the birds and they started pecking at the food I'd put down while making satisfied chicken noises. I have to say it was such a nice noise and a lovely sight to finally have chickens here that it was very worth while loosing that exra 15 minutes in my bed.

I shall of course report on our first egg.

Well Done Badger

2009-08-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to the local agricultural show. After some thought I decided that Henry and Molly would be better staying at home but that we'd take Badger as he hasn't been anywhere in the car since his multiple expeditions to the vet which have made him hate the car - can't blame him really as every time he went in it for two months somebody hurt him at the other end.

We dosed him up with anti-sickness/nerves pills, took them all for a walk to wear out Hen and Moll and let the pills take effect for Badge then off we went. Once we were there I realised this was the first time Badger had been anywhere with crowds and lots of noise so I was a bit worried it might not have been the right thing to do but he coped with it as if he goes off to agricultural shows every week.

We wandered around for a bit to begin with and then started to meet people we knew, in fact the whole day turned into one big social event as everywhere we turned we bumped into someone else we knew and it was great having a good catch up with everyone from the village and surrounding farms.

Then there was an annoucment about the dog show and I suddenly thought why not enter Badger? So off I trotted, paid my 5op entry fee and stood in the middle of the field with Badger in the puppy class trying to look as though I did this sort of thing all the time (ok I know I did it a month or so ago with Hen but that was the first time since I was about 14!). Badger took an instant dislike to a very beautiful blue coated, blue eyed dog who was fairly close to us so I edged away before anyone of importance could hear this lovely cute pup growling like a wolf.

The judges made us walk round and round the ring and then run up and down - this was the hard bit as Badge pulls like a train when he's on the lead and I've got a dodgy knee so it could all have ended up in the infirmary. Then we had to stand in a big circle while they decided who had won, and guess what? It was Badger!!! So I guess that means we officially have the best pup in the area so I'm busting with pride for him, and this makes up for all the problems and stress we've been through with him in the last few months.

Well Done Badger!

Second Day Off

2009-08-14T03:12:00.001-07:00

Well I have another day off today hurrah! I woke up at 7am, well actually Molly woke me up with her teeth chattering and dancing around next to the bed, being very insistant that I get up, so I got up and Henry and Badger instantly sprang to life like a switch had been switched and we all bumbled down the stairs. I say bumbled as Henry shoots down the stairs as if they don't actually exist, Badger somehow slides his front paws down the stairs while his back legs propel him and Molly makes both front paws step on each stair in turn while her back paws step on every other stair. In the middle of all this is me clambering down while hanging on to the banisters for grim death hoping I wont loose my footing - yes I have tried to make them all go down in front of me but they wouldn't listen.

After letting them all out and waiting for them to come back in I promptly went back to bed. This is very rare for me, once I'm up I'm up but today I decided to treat myself to an extra 3 hours of sleep, bliss. Even more bliss was having Henry curled up beside me, a practice which is banned when Other Half is in. Molly eventually decided that lazing around in bed was not good enough and she shot up the stairs and jumped on me to wake me up, she also tries to paw you when shes being very insistant so I scrambled out of bed trying to avoid getting clawed in the head while both Molly and Henry barked at me, I was certainly well awake by then.

So what will I do with my day off? I think I'll see if my friend fancies a walk around the castle grounds with our dogs, her dog is coming to stay on Saturday which will mean four dogs running around the house. Her dog is Badgers sister, Rosie and she is lovely, very different to Badge, shes more sleek and has pointy ears and she's wriggly and affectionate and very fast!

First things first I'm just going to move very slowly and enjoy having no rush to get anywhere or do anything, after all I'm back to work tomorrow and Sunday when all of you are lazing around...

Lovely Day

2009-08-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

It's been gorgeous here all day. Just the sort of day to wear summer clothes, an event which if you live in the far north dosen't happen very often. If actually coincided with the unveiling of a spray tan that I had done during a girls night at my friends house last night. I came home thinking I looked all tanned and glam only for Other Half to burst out laughing at me. Rather insulted I trotted off to the bathroom and got an almighty shock, all you could see were my teeth and eyeballs standing out bright white against my somewhat Irn Bru'd skin. It did look rather funny I have to say, but thankfully most of the colour was the bit that washes off after the chemical bit has cooked you so I look far more normal today.

As well as sunshine, it was also my day off so I've spent it working in the garden, mowing the lawn three times as it's not been done for over six weeks due to rain and work stopping play, I also did some work while sitting at the garden table, again another rare occurence due to low temperatures, rain, wind and midges, thankfully none of them were around today.

Molly lazed on her bed outside all day long, alternating between the sunny bit and the shady bit as she got too hot and Henry and Badger spent most of the day wrestling, playing tug of war with bits of rope, play fighting and generally acting up like two little boys, oh and Badger decided to spend the entire time I mowed the lawns trying to round me and the lawnmower up, then when I spotted a long lost bone and flung it out of the way he decided the lawn mower was actually trying to eat his things and decided to attack it at every opportunity, not the best pastime for a puppy so I had to do a bit of shouting, then while I was distracting the boys, Molly snuck off her bed, grabbed the bone and took it back and guarded it for most of the rest of the day, good on you Molls!

Then early evening I took the dogs for a stroll along the lane while drinking in the niceness of it all, the farmer is mowing the silage, and still is at nearly 11pm and the swallows were singing as they flew about. I made two new discoveries this week, I didn't realise that big beech trees had blossom on that smells heavenly, nor did I realise that thistles smell lovely when they come into bloom. Usually I'm walking too fast or am contemplating too much to notice these things, or Henry will see a hare and start his howling barking and dancing around to try and get to it.

Now all the dogs are lazing around the living room, jostling for space in front of the log burner or takign up far too much of the sofas. A good day had by all I think.

Dog Stress

2009-08-05T00:50:00.000-07:00

Well what a few weeks we have had here.
Poor Wee Pup Badge has been in the wars.
First I thought he had something in his pad and it was causing it to swell and be a wee bit sore. Then the pad looked a bit 'wrong' so he went in to the vet to get it looked at a bit more closely. That meant a biopsy but best be safe than sorry. The biopsy came back saying that although it wasn't anything sinister, he had a calcifying lump in his pad and it would be rather painful and the best solution was amputation of his toe. Well this was rather a shock to say the least, strangley though, there was a three legged dog in the waiting room of the vets and he seemed to be ok so I guessed three toes would be a walk in the park in comparison.
So that was the first 10 days of visits to the vets every couple of days to get dressings changed, and the walk in the park was begining to turn into a long distance trek.
Then we discovered the same type of lump in between his pads on the other front foot, oh no! But the vet said she could take them out without any amputations required and I asked her to do that at the same time even though I knew it would be hard going for a few days but at least it would cut down on the number of operations Badger had to have and hopefully shorten the recovery time.
So off we went to the vet one morning about three weeks ago and I went off to work. I then whizzed from work to the vet to pick Badge up and he was quite rightly feeling very sorry for himself but everything had gone to plan and he would be alright, huraahh!
What I didn't bank on was quite how much hard work getting Badge back to alright was going to be, especially when I've been quite busy at work. Every two days I've had to bomb home from work, then bomb down to the vets to get his dressings changed. This in itself doesn't seem so bad but put that together with Other Half being away at the time and me having to do everything around the place and look after three dogs as well as work and work being ten miles down winding twisting roads in one direction and the vets being 18 miles down winding twisting roads in the opposite direction things start to get a little complicated and exhausting, not to mention somewhat expensive when the petrol station is 10 miles in an entirely different direction.
Anyway, we are finally through all of that and I will come back later and tell you more but Badger has finally come out of his bandages, and last night got all of his stitches out (and there were loads) and he is now on the road to recovery. It will be a long one as he has become a bit tetchy and growly and has even tried to bite the vet on several occasions all of which I'll have to sort out while he is still (just about) a pup so that he dosen't grow up into a dodgy scary collie.
The maddest thing about the whole episode though is that even despite everything he has been through he still drags me INTO the vets and greets everybody he sees in there as if they are his long lost friend, even though just about every time he sees them they do something to hurt him - amazing!

Well Done Henry!

2009-06-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

I decided to enter Henry into a local dog show, I had absolutely no idea how we would do but as Henry is such a fun dog I thought it would at least be a good time out with him. And guess what happened?...........

He won Best Lurcher, and came second in Best Rescue and Most Appealing Eyes. I honestly can't believe it, and I certainly can't stop smiling for him. This makes it all worth while and I'm so pleased I have him.

To celebrate Henry did a super fast circuit of the garden with Molly.

On a different note, whilst eating my breakfast this morning, I look out of the window to see this:

Other Half invested in an inflatable hot tub and I think Badge was after a quick dip!

Puppy Dog Tails

2009-06-22T01:41:00.000-07:00

Dogs. Don't they do the most disgusting things sometimes? I've just watched Badger eat a slug. It took me some time to realise that it was a slug and by the time I worked out what it was he shlurped it up and it was gone. Eughhhh!

Today Badger is beautiful, his coat is lovely and shiney and clean, in fact very clean. Probably the cleanest it's ever been. That's because he has had three baths since last Tuesday.

The first bath was just routine maintenance, Badger spends allot of time rolling around on the ground with Henry and then as much time as possible relaxing on the furniture. This means that half the ground ends up on the sofa so a bath was in order.

Badger likes a bath which is a good job really.

The second bath was on Saturday. We'd been out to the zoo in Edinburgh and left the dogs in the house, Badger in his cage where he always goes if we go out. Coming home is always interesting since we got Henry as we never know if he has left us a welcoming gift on the carpet so we always enter the house with our noses first.

When we got in, we detected the signs of a bad smell, but we couldn't find anything. Henry and Molly bounced around and shot outside into the garden. As we went into the living room the smell got worse and once I let Badger out of his cage it became apparent where it was coming from. It turned out he had had an upset tummy and had an almighty accident in his cage.

That was not good, as he'd tried to get rid of the poo by digging up the fleecey blankets which sort of spread it about even more. It also meant he got poo on his paws and as he spends quite allot of time scratching, he'd got it all over his coat.

I don't know if anyone reading this has been to Edinburgh Zoo but it's basically build on the side of a mountain. It's exhausting. Honestly, if it wasn't for the animals it would be a day spend climbing. So coming home to a dog cage full of poo wasn't ideal.

So poor Badge ended up in the bath again.

The third bath happened the very next morning. By this time we realised that the new food we were feeding the dogs wasn't really agreeing with them, except Badger was sleeping in a confined space so yet again we had a rather smelly mess to clear up and yet again an even smellier dog to bathe.

We've changed the food back and all three dogs systems seem to have recovered, so I can only describe this as a lesson learned in buying different dog food, shampoo, conditioner (yes honest, he's very hairy is Badger) and disinfectant.

Oh and my legs still ache...

Good Boy Badger!

2009-06-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased with Wee Pup Badger.

Last night I took him to Henry's dog training club for the second week in a row. Henry wasn't very pleased about this as he adores going to dog club, its like a dog social club and very friendly, all the dogs get to know each other and all the humans talk about nothing but dogs, that to me is great.

I decided to take Badger as he is getting increasingly wild. He's only 8 months but because we live on a farm in the middle of nowhere he rarely goes on a lead, has absolutely no traffic awareness cos he never sees any, he also never sees any other dogs apart from Henry and Molly and the farm dogs. He spends his days rolling around play fighting with Henry and ignoring me. I decided it was time to take him in hand and add a bit of training.

So last week we went along and it was a nightmare. As we walked into the hall Badger started growling. He didn't stop growling until we got into the car to come home. It was terrible, he was grumpy and determined not to do anything I asked, I think this was made worse by him being on a lead for the whole hour. Still, I didn't give in, I eventually got him to walk to heel, well just, and when it came to the fetch excercise he came into his own and loved it. By the end of the hour I felt we had made a eeney weeeney bit of progress which was confirmed by Badger as he howled in the car all the way home!

Badgers exploits in week one made me all the more determined to have a well trained dog so off we went again last night. To my amazement as soon as he got out of the car Badge dragged me to the door of the hall! He went in full of gusto with no growling and said an enthusiastic hello to a puppy labrador. He also tried to jump all over the labradors owners but we are moving one step at a time here.

In the class Badge struggled a bit with walking to heel due to wanting to desperately speak to the dog in front, but we actually managed to get him to sit at one end of the hall while I walked nearly to the other end and called him, and just to add some icing to that one, instead of running straight past me he actually sat in front of me when he came! Brilliant!

I can't say how pleased I am, I had begun to worry a bit with his growling and rebelling but I thnk with a bit of practice and persistance he will be ok.

The only problem is that I think he has adopted me as his owner, he lays on the floor by my feet while i'm on the computer and every evening he snuggles up with me on the sofa - Other Half isn't happy, but then he isn't the one taking Badge to dog club.

Oh and he howled in the car on the way home again last night, it's so funny!

Blogging is good for the soul

2009-06-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

I've decided to have a post in order to entirely agree with MBNAD Woman. Blogging is great. Since I've been doing it I've found a network of other peoples blogs that I've realised make me feel happy, serene and like I've just spend time with a fabulously good friend.

Yet I have never met anyone else who blogs. Mad isn't it?

I love Mad Again. It's become a fascinating story like a wonderful novel that you can't put down but can't read more than a page every few days. MBNAD Womans other blog, Mossie, had me hooked about her tales of a gorgeous Collie-Wobble way before I unexpectedly ended up with a Collie-Wobble myself. She also seems to be a lovely person, just the sort to go on seriously long dogs walks with.

Thanks to MBNAD Woman I've added a new blog to my list of daily reads, Dagenham Dave. What can I say? I sat with tears pouring down my face when I read the first post of his blog. It took me straight back to being a child and all the mad practical jokes my brother and me used to play on my poor parents who always took it in good humour. I then went on to read about a Robin Reliant tipping over with it's two occupants still inside and had great difficulty in staying upright on my chair. I was also late for work that day from being glued to his blog, thank you so much for the best laugh I've had in ages!

Cupcakes at Home is wonderful. Tracy not only lives in the most beautiful house, it's also in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland. Add to that her collection of absolutley delicious whippets and deerhound and you've got total canine heaven for me. Wee Pup Cricket is so lovely I could eat him! I'm also in love with Tracy's crafts, and of course envious that I never find the time to make things myself.

Back Porch Musings and Our Creative Life are two blogs from America. I stumbled accross them while looking for inspiration for my house and I'm constantly amazed by the wonderful decorative ideas these two really nice ladies have. Thanks to them I actually decorated my house for Halloween, something I've never done before but actually it was brilliant, it took away the drabness of mid Autumn and filled in the gap to Christmas. Thanks for the inspiration!

Catherine Holman paints the most wonderful folk art, I've tried this myself in more arty moments but I think I'll leave it to her, her paintings are gorgeous and so is her blog.

So that's my regular list of readings, in no particular order but one thing I can say is that reading them is a bit like going to a spa for an hour or so and coming out and feeling all happy and refreshed, thanks everyone.x

2009-06-11T01:13:00.000-07:00

If you look very carefully you will see a lesser striped Henry Hound blending in with the trampoline, whilst basking in the sun
Please excuse the mess of the garden, it dosen't look like this in real life, only in photographs for the blog, anyway, here is another one of Henry surveying his estate with his land agent Other Half. As you can see, Other Half is listening intently to his masters instructions about building a luxury summer house for him to lounge in on cooler days, a heated pool and a dog treat dispenser...

It's been so long since I last wrote anything about Henry's antics, that's not to say that he hasn't been up to anything. On a daily basis he waits at the bottom of the garden for Mr Hare to come out of his den and stoat about in the field completely safe from Henry on the other side of his Henry-proofed-fence while Henry does his very loud howling bark at him. Mr Hare of course is completely oblivious to it all and just carries on eating grass and hopping about.

We've reached another milestone with Badger, he's not such a wee pup any more and I decided to allow him to sleep outside of his cage at night. So he slept in it with the door open instead. Oh well. He did attempt to sleep on the bed with me but having a collie bum planted in your face at 2am led to a very hasty expellation of a collie onto the rug on the floor.

Molly has been great, she's always great, very quiet and well behaved, I think she needs a bit of madness in her, although the other day she shot round the garden like a tornedo completely out of the blue and when we all looked at her she suddenly stopped so I think she does this quite allot only in secret!

2009-05-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

Please excuse the ridiculous underlining, I've been doing a bit of tweaking and can't work out ow to stop it. Anyway, I can't resist posting this photograph, if you go from left to right you have a caravan with a trailer wedged underneath and then a trailer with a Henry wedged underneath.....

Trampoline

2009-05-21T22:32:00.001-07:00

I've been trying for ages to get a picture of Henry on the trampoline but it's been almost impossible as he moves so fast that by the time I've got the camera he is off doing something else. However the other day I happened to have the camera in my hand and here is is:

I couldn't get any more because he wouldn't stay on it, as soon as he realised I had the camera he shot off down the garden!

Henry Says Hello

2009-05-20T00:50:00.000-07:00

Relaxing

2009-05-20T00:34:00.000-07:00

Henry takes relaxing very seriously

Very seriously indeed

After all, he needs to re-coup all that engery for more bouncing tomorrow

Chickens or not?

2009-05-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

I have a dilema.

Should I get chickens.

I promised myself that I'd get chickens the minute we moved into this house. But the move was so exhausting and getting a new kitchen installed within 24hrs of walking through the door and similtaniously getting the flu for three weeks put it on hold as all that delayed the unpacking.

Then followed the decorating, very slowly. The house was fine when we moved in so there was no urgency to change anything except maybe lighten it up a bit and of course tackle the diy artex that had beaten the previous two sets of residents.

Weeks turned into months and months have turned into two years and still I have no chickens.

I do, however, have a rather deluxe chicken house and a run but it is empty whilst I think about this.

To be honest, although I'm quite a busy, motivated person, I am also one for paring things down to make life as easy as possible. This is one reason I had for not giving the dogs breakfast, it's just one more thing to do (they ground me down on that one though).

Everyone I have spoken to with chickens says they are no trouble, that they look after themselves and cause virtually no problems. Hmmm, they must demand some sort of attention surely?

The big problem is the letting them in and out every morning and evening. It's not a huge job to do I suppose but it will HAVE to be done whether I like it or not. We dont have a problem with foxes round here but the chickens WILL have to be let out of their house in the morning, and what if I forget? I'm not likely to but all eventualities have to be explored.

Maybe I'm thinking too much, after all I'm all set up for chickens, they have a house and a run, and they are going to be able to wander around one half of the garden and out into the track and fields if they want to. I've even sorted out seperating them from the dogs, the garden is conviniently seperated into two even sections which willl ensure the chickens safety but I keep hesitating.

I think it's the thought of just one more thing to do each day....... hmmmmmm

Perhaps an automatic chicken house door closer would be the solution, they do them for cat bowls so why not chickens?

Hmmmm I'm not sure.

But I'll keep you posted.

Sunshine at last

2009-05-12T00:47:00.000-07:00

It has been sunny here for two whole days.

Now I had typed a whole lament on how despite it's beauty up here, the weather is bloody awful and the orchards, fields and lanes of Kent are very appealing when I'm trying to battle 70mph winds to get to the car but I accidentally hit the wrong key and it all went which is probably just as well as Other Half is likely to walk into the kitchen at any moment and him being Scottish and all that wouldn't make a good start to the day.

So, as I said, it is sunny, and still, yes no wind in the windy valley. The birds are singing and the lambs in the field next to the house are bleating and running around.

It's lovely.

2009-05-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

MBNAD Woman tagged me, now I've never been tagged before but here are mine and Henry's replies - hope that is what you are supposed to do.

1. What are your current obsessions? Me: Same, getting more miles to the gallon in my large 4x4, so far by driving like the middle aged person I really am I have acheived 100miles more per tank. Cant work that out in mpg. Henry: Hares. Spending ages looking out the window scouring the landscape for them and barking madly at them when one appears which it always does.

2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often? Me;Waterproof windproof weatherproof coat, even in May. Henry: My collar and my harness.

3. Last dream you had?Me: That I was in Kent in the sunshine and waking here to the rain on the roof.....Henry: Hares.

4. Last thing you bought? Me: a bag of coal. Henry: He didn't buy them but it was tripe treats which he loves.

5. What are you listening to? Me and Henry: Radio 4

6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be? My god/goddess education went amiss somewhere so I don't know.

7. Favourite holiday spots? Me and Henry: Currently the Solway Coast.

8. Reading right now? A Home for Rose about a collie pup in America.

9. Four words to describe yourself. Me: Laughing, smiling, relaxed, slightly, mad. Henry: Mad, Fast, Funny, Lovely.

10. Guilty pleasure?Me:The Archers. Henry: Stealing food and not getting caught by Other Half, laying on the bed when Other Half has gone to work.

11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak?Me: Watching Henry and Spending time with my parents. Henry: Life

12. Favourite spring thing to do?Me: Walk the dogs in the countryside in the still, warm air, looking out for the first swallows Henry: Look out for Hares

13. Planning to travel to next?Me: Nowhere cos of my knee Henry: Up the track to look for hares

14. Best thing you ate or drank lately?Me: Truffle oil at work mmmmm Henry: Stolen butter tub, it was so good he got it all over his head.

15. When did you last get tipsy?Boringly I can't remember, dosen't mean I've not drunk though, it's just the age switch that comes on to tell me I've had enough (this dosen't work under the age of 35) Henry: Hopefully not tipsy but he does always have a tipple of beer or wine whenever I do.

16. Favourite ever film? Madness of King George for the beautiful bell ringing scene.

17. Care to share some wisdom?Wisdom?Me and Henry: Smile, look up and always be optomistic.

18. Song you can't get out of your head?Me: Neopolitan Dreams (Surf advert)its happy and nice and I downloaded it onto my phone.

19. Thing you are looking forward to?Me: Sunshine, gardening, family and friends visiting, lazing with my dogs. Henry: the first hare of the day, breakfast time, dinner time, walkies time, laying on the bed after Other half has gone to work.

20 If money were no object, where would you choose to live?Here, or here further up in the Highlands.

As you can probably tell, I'm quite a happy optomistic, smiley soul, ready to laugh at the first funny thing. Henry and I go together rather well I think.

Normal House with no grumps

2009-05-05T02:36:00.000-07:00

Other Half is at work.

It was very quiet.

For a while.

Until something woke Badger in his cage, this in turn woke Henry, Molly and myself.

I chose to stay in bed, I dislocated my knee a couple of weeks ago and should be re-cooperating but theres been little chance of that since I did it so this morning was the first that I thought I'd laze about and read some of my book before breakfast, a rare luxury.

Henry however had other ideas, whatever it was outside was causing him to be very concerned and it meant he had to jump on me in my bed several times to get me up. I did try to put up a bit of resistance by hiding under the covers but with a four stone dog leaping all over you and a dislocated knee I decided that there was a good chance I'd end up back in casualty so I got up.

Usually I let the dogs outside when I first get up. The run around the garden, look through the fence and over the wall, do what they have to and come back in for breakfast.

This morning though I decided to look out of the window first (I've no idea why the type has gone slopy sorry) and looking back at me was a sheep in the front garden.

So that was what all the comotion was about.

Oviously I couldn't let the dogs out into the back garden as they would run down towards the front garden and scare the sheep and all the sheep here either have lambs or are about to have lambs, the absense of a lamb with this sheep made me decide that it probably was about to have a lamb.

The sheep kept looking at me and me, Henry, Molly and Badger looked at the sheep through the window as I wondered about phoning the farmer to tell him one of the sheep was out of the field.

As we stood there pondering the farmer came along with a sheep trailer and expertly sent the sheep inside. He then explained to me that the sheep had run off from the herd as he brought them up the track and had planted (not literally) itself in the garden and wouldn't come out.

So drama over. I then let the dogs out and they all sped down the bottom of the garden to look very hard at the bit of the front garden where the sheep had been standing.

After a bit of rough and tumble in the living room between Henry and Badger they are now all asleep, Molly on the sofa, Henry on his bed and Badger somewhat bizarrely on the cold hard tiles by the back door.

It's peaceful and quiet and nothing like it is when Other Half is here.......

Grumpy

2009-04-18T02:21:00.000-07:00

It's spring! And everything is springing around here, plants are springing out of the ground, calves are springing around their mothers and Henry is springing everywhere.

The best thing about spring is that the garden dries up a bit and the dogs can run around outside without getting completely covered in mud which inveriably ends up in the living room.

This morning I got up first and let the dogs out into the garden and went out there to sit on the bench with a cup of tea. Molly joined me by climbing up on to the bench and we watched Henry and Badger play fighting all around the garden.

It was really nice, the sun was shining and the dogs were happy and barking and running about. Everybody was happy.

Then out of the upstairs window comes a loud bellow.

Other Half, trying to have a lay in is completely offended by the barking and happiness in the garden.

It's not that early, just half past nine for goodness sake!

I try to quieten the dogs down even though I don't really think they are being that bad, they were only playing after all. But it's not enough, grumpy in the roof decides they should all be silent so we all come in, Badger goes in his cage, Molly on her bed and Hen lays in the living room doorway rolling his eyes in disgust as he watches me read the blogs of the day.

Then Other Half gets up. What does he do? Comes downstairs and lets the dogs out into the garden and watches them bombing about and barking while expressing that it's a lovely spring day and how nice it is outside in the garden.

I give up.

Trampolining Hound

2009-04-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

I know I have no photographic evidence but Henry has decided to take up trampolining.

Even I can't quite beleive it. At regular intervals during the week he does a bit of mad running around the garden, this involves taking in as many obsticles as possible and jumping or running under them. Fergus did a very similar thing so I can only assume this is a Saluki thing. Anyway, lately Henry has been jumping onto the trampoline and then on to the wall at the end of the garden, trotting very quickly along the wall, down into the vegetable patch and springing out over the wall of the veg patch onto the lawn to continue the mad running.

This week though he has always stopped on the trampoline and sort of bounced about on it, no wall or veg patch just the trampoline. It's really mad.

Then in the sun the other day I decided to sit on the trampoline and was instantly joined by Henry who proceeded to bounce about and play bite me while barking. It's very funny and I don't understand why he is doing it but he seems to love the bouncing. He even jumps on when my stepson jumps up and down on it which causes much hilarity.

I'll do my best to get a photo, if I can catch Henry in the act.

Visiting Part2

2009-04-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry I'm a bit behind with my blogging, life has sped up a little thanks to the weather at last allowing me to get out into the garden and finally start the jobs that should have been done at the begining of spring - it is I suppose technically the begining of spring here but it feels like we should be half way to summer....

Anyway, the dogs and me had such a great time in Kent. The difference in the weather down there was amazing, it was mid summer own there compared to Scotland and the dogs spent as much time as possible basking in the sunshine, Molly has been down several times now and always makes a beeline for the lawn and lays in front of Mum and Dad's caravan enjoying the reflective rays until she is so hot she can't move.

Badger didn't really understand the heat. He was born in the middle of September and has only known the winter so he spent quite allot of time underneath the caravan in the shade. Henry decided that life was too short to lay around and spent many hours springing around the garden, leaping over bushes, ducking at high speed under apple trees and perfecting hurdling over the carefully erected fence around my Dad's newly sewn vegegables.

Henry also decided that he'd get all the other dogs in the neighbourhood going several times a day, every day. He would stand in the middle of the garden and bark. Then bark again. And again until he got a reply. This then got other dogs in other gardens barking until every dog around and beyond ws barking and Henry would come into the kitchen looking very proud of his work. Strangley the whippet cross we had when I was a child used to do exactly the same thing!

We did have a bit of a stress. Badger decided suddenly to attack any moving vehicle along the road while we were out walking. Oddly enough the first time this happened I was telling my Mum about Badger's brother who does the same thing along the lane to the farm when Badger suddenly swung out at a van, very nearly pulling Dad into the road at the same time. We all laughed at this as it was quite a funny coincidence but after it had happened several times in a few hundred yards we realised it was a potentially fatal pastime so I had to spend quite a bit of time walking Bader up and down the road trying to calm him down whilst he did his mad Collie stare at every oncoming vehicle and lurched out to kill it as it passed.

I managed to get him sorted out after several attempts but then it was time to come home so I'll have to take him to a town to see if it worked or not.

All too soon our visit was over and I had the long haul back home, I tried very hard to bring the sunshine with me but unfortunately it didn't want to come until this week. However I did manage not to give in and visit the shopping mecca Bluewater or Lakeside and so came back to Scotland with nothing but homemade sandwiches and cake from Mum for the journey - a financial miracle!

Visiting

2009-04-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

Last week the dogs and me went all the way down to Kent in England to visit my parents. At first I thought it would be best to just take Henry with me. As he is my boy I like spending time with him alone, going for walks or even just a drive in the car, but as preperations started Molly started tugging at my heart strings and then I was starting to feel bad about leaving Badger on his own if I took her with me.

So I called my Mum and warned her that I might possibly be arriving with three dogs....I got my Dad as Mum was out and he was very enthusiastic about it so off we went.

The first hurdle was to get Badgers cage in the jeep, Molly and Henry would travel in the boot where there is a proper dog guard but as they all like to spring out when I open the tail gate I decided that Badger should travel in his cage in the middle of the jeep so I could have some control over getting them all in and out for wee stops.

It's not easy getting a cage in the middle of a jeep but I managed it eventually then I packed up the jeep with everything else and off we went.

The second hurdle was getting Molly and Badger along the first few miles of twisty turney roads to the motorway without them being sick. It was very early in the morning and I think I caught them on the hop as neither of them threw up, thank goodness.

This was the first long trip Badger had been on so to begin with he sat in his cage and whined while looking curiously and Henry and Molly who as soon as we got on the motorway laid down and went to sleep. After a while though Badge lay down but kept an eye open just in case.

The journey down was great, no traffic ques or anything and about half way down I turned round to check the dogs and noticed that Badger has an unusual travelling position, upside down!
He was laying in his cage completely upside down with his legs in the air! It was so funny! I tried to take a picture with my phone but I couldn't manage it while driving along and every time I stopped he turned over. Goodness knows what lorry drivers and people in buses and coaches much have thought!

Stopping in the services for the dogs to wee wa interesting, Molly and Henry know the routine well, they know it's not a walk so they do what they have to do and then we go back to the car. Badger on the other hand thought it all a big adventure and couldn't help running up to every person he saw and giving them a rapturous greeting. It took me a moment to realise that he never actually sees people apart from us and the people on the farm so it must have been big stuff for him.

Once we arrived my Dad helped me get the dogs out of the car and he absolutely loved Badger. Henry and Molly knew where they were and settled in straight away by inspecting every inch of the garden and starting to play. Badger was in his element, licking and wagging his tail and smiling with his choppy mouth.

Then we all went out into the garden and the dogs entertained us with a mad running game all around the flower and vegetable beds. Dad had made a sort of criss cross fence around some seedlings in order to keep Henry off but he ended up using the fence as a hurdle, luckily the fence went right round that bed and Henry has a long span of jumping!

We then went into the kitchen where Mum was making the dinner and the dogs did that thing of laying all over the kitchen floor just where you tread. Mum is very experienced in dog hopping and went about making the dinner stepping in and out of legs and over bodies as if they were there all the time. She also threw the odd bit of meat every now and then where it would land in the mouth of whichever dog it was aimed at without the dog having to get up.

It was true doggie heaven, very relaxed and laid back and we spent the rest of the evening talking about dogs, drinking wine and laughing.

Wake up Call

2009-03-28T02:18:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks Other Half has been getting up at 5am for work. This means he lets the dogs out around that time for the first pee of the day.

This is not good. Dogs like a routine and if you impose one on them they soon get right into it and adopt it into their 24hr internal clock.

So, as I said, Monday to Friday they are out at just after 5am. On Saturday they aren't. But they want to go out at 5am as that's what they've been doing all week. In a misguided effort to try and let them know it was the weekend, Other Half ignored their whining from downstairs whilst I remained asleep.

At 8am he went down for a cup of coffee and on coming back up the stairs mentioned to me that 'my dog' had pee'd on the hoover.

He didn't actually do anything to the hoover, just cleaned the pee up around it and left the hoover.

Now, the 'my dog' in question here is of course Henry. And the hoover is not just any old hoover, its a rather expensive Roomba robotic hoover which works all on it's own, no human required. It's like having a lady who does come and do for you without having to leave a key or pay her. The robot hoover is my very best friend and a superb investment, how on earth could Other Half just let it sit there with the pee seaping into it? Worse still, Other Half told me that it was making funny noises and wirring a bit!

Aggggghhhhh! Out of bed I sprang and came downstairs, growled at Henry who did that funny little tail wag and sloped off to his bed. I got the screwdrivers out and stripped the hoover, cleaning it up with a collection of baby wipes and toilet paper. It's now in pieces drying out completely before I put it back together again.

If it dosen't work I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm not sure if I can claim for a new one on the house insurance or if I should raid the credit card for a new one. One things for sure, I'm not living life without a robot hoover!

Nice Quiet Routine

2009-03-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks I've been going out in the morning, either to work or the shops or on various errands that need to be done.

Because Molly and Badger are both car sick (something I need to get sorted out very badly) it's a complete nightmare to take the dogs out and about with me. Henry is fab in the car, if he's in the boot he usually stands looking out of the window and the world going by and if very occasionally he is on the back seat he actually sits bolt upright in the corner and looks down his nose out of the window, it's very funny as he looks as though he is being chauffered.

Anyway today I am in all morning, doing all those housework jobs that need to be done before the weekend and I've noticed that the dogs are all very calm and just lazing around. It's total bliss, just like it used to be when I had Ferg and Bon, the most laid back dogs in the world who basically laid around all day and night with the odd burst of mad running in between.

So am I hoping for too much to think that a sense of canine calm may be coming over our small pack? That they have all finally settled into life with each other and us and have reached that serene state of being able to lay on a dog bed or sofa and just watch whats going on instead of frantically all jumping up to follow me every time I move around the place?

I'm probably hoping for too much, I think this calm is from the recent routine of my being out every morning lately and this is what they do while they wait for me to come back, but I can dream can't I?

Right, I must get back to to doing the washing and cleaning....

Snoopy

2009-03-13T02:28:00.000-07:00

This one is for MBNAD Woman, I couldn't catch Badger upside down on his cage but this is the next best thing!

And I forgot to say in my weather report for Catherine Holman that the pee-wits and curlews are flying all around us now which is so lovely, especially at night, perfect!

Pictures!

2009-03-13T02:12:00.000-07:00

Ok I think some long overdue pictures are called for.

This one is what is left of my back garden after a winter of being 'Henryised'! Can you see the track that he has carved into whats left of the lawn, it's more visible down by the oil tank but runs right round the lawn.

Here is Henry looking so good compared to this time last year. He is now literally twice the dog he was after putting on all the weight he lost. He's really confident and I hope very happy and enjoying his life with us here in the hills.

Here's the lovely Molly, I think she could be hinting that it's about time I cleared last years flowers out of the tubs.

Here is an attempt to get all three in the picture at the same time! Goodness knows what Henry is doing!

Spring Clean

2009-03-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

I only realised the aptness of the title of this post when I wrote it, I've spent the day cleaning and tidying the house and it's spring (well just about) so I guess that means I've been spring cleaning!

To be honest, this was inspired by the carpet Badger the other day. I just had a feeling that everything had a faint whiff of dog eminating from it. This was confirmed when I put on my trusty 'round-the-house -and-comfy-and-don't-care-what-it-looks-like-fleece and it really smelt of dogs. It actually smelt more of dogs than the dogs do so into the washing machine it went and off to the cleaning cupboard went me.

To begin with I stripped Badgers cage out, put the contents into the washing machine and washed down the cage, luckily it's foldable so I popped it into the bath and sprayed it with bathroom cleaner and then hosed it with the shower.

I then went all over the carpet rubbing it again to remove another Badger and got the end of the hoover pipe and went all round the edges and under things. I also dismantled the sofas and hoovered under the big cushions, something I haven't done in a while, along with cleaning the windows. Along with all of this I dusted absolutely everywhere so now the living room is looking very spik and span.

And the washing machine is straining under the pressure, it's been washing dog beds, blankets and coats since mid morning and I still have loads more dogs stuff to do, all those fabric dogs toys that they all chew must be very stinky (I'm not going to sniff them..) along with towels and big wipe down things that i got in Tescos the other day. I'm also going to wash all the covers on the sofas to freshen them up too.

Once I've finished that I then have all the other washing to do but that's small fry compared to this marathon!

So now that I've done a days work I now have an evening shift at my real job, work as a dog owner is never finished is it?

Quiet Week

2009-03-07T00:34:00.000-08:00

As I said in the previous post I've been catching up on some training with Henry and it's going really well.

The biggest thing is to get him to come back if he is off the lead (which he isn't unless he has escaped), so every single time he's been out in the garden and sometimes on a walk (am still forgetting to take the treats with me grrr!) I'm calling him and instantly giving him a treat.

Well, it's working. It's a bit of a pain to remember the treat every time he comes in from the garden but what made me realise it was working was when I said his name out on a walk to try and stop him from pulling and he instantly turned round and ran the length of his vast expanding lead back to me, brilliant!

All I need to do is keep it up and really condition him to come to me every single time.

On the Badger front, things have been getting big. He has completely outgrown his bed. This is the bed which when I bought it made him look like a small potato lying in the middle of a kingsized bed. Now I think he out grew the bed a couple of weeks ago but Other Half insisted that it was still ok, until yesterday morning he was in his cage digging and moaning allot and when he stopped he let out a huge sigh. I looked over and there he was laying half on and half over his bed while looking at me with a complaining expression.

This was a bit of a pain as I really didn't have the cash to buy a new bed this week, so I carefully folded a spare duvet into the exact size of the cage and wrapped it in a lovely fleece blanket and now we can't keep Badge out of his cage. He's in there all the time perfecting the art of dog relaxation in every position he can manage!

I've also had an attack on the living room carpet. It was looking decidedly grubby but I really couldn't work out why until I tried to remove a small coffee stain from it and while rubbing away I noticed that about half a million dog (Badger) hairs came up. So I got a carpet cleaning spray for freshening carpets up, sprayed it over the carpet and got down on my hands and knees and rubbed the carpet all over in circular motion and I reckon I got a whole Badger out of it. I think the carpet probably enjoyed it too!

We now have a lovely fresh smellying and new looking carpet again. All I hope is that this was Badgers fluffy puppy hair coming out and that it's not a permanent shedding thing as we'll have to buy a new hoover that beats the carpet.

Training

2009-02-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

I've decided that I've let dog training go a bit.

As soon as I got Henry I was determined that he would be better trained than Fergus. It wasn't a case of not bothering with Fergus, goodness knows I spent a small mortgage on trainers and training clubs, but Fergus was a completely different kettle of fish, or dog biscuits.

All I want is to be able to let Henry off the lead and to have control over him so he can run free like he is made to do.

So for the last couple of days every time I've let Henry into the garden I've given him a small treat whenever I've called him to come in. This took a couple of goes to work as obviously the animals and smells beyond the garden fence are much more appealing to Henry than my calling him indoors. But once the penny dropped in Hen's head he started responding really well.

A couple of times I forgot the treat and he's pestered me like mad and I've wondered what he wanted and then I've remembered. I guess this means that he is probably taking the training even more seriously than me.

Taking things slowly so as not to bombard Hen with too much to different too soon I decided to try the treat thing on our walk today. It worked brilliantly. Every time I said his name he bombed back to me, looking me in the eye and got a treat.

I even tried calling him back when he was going away from me directly after getting a treat and he still came back. Excellent.

I did this lots of times during the walk and he seems to be getting the idea. So lets hope that with lots of practice (on my part) we will get to the ultimate thing of letting Henry run.

Once thing that I did think about at the end of the walk was that I noticed that Henry looks me right and straight in the eyes when he comes back to me. I know it sounds daft but I've never noticed this before so I'm going to make a point of making sure he sees me looking back at him in the eye too and maybe a connection will be made, who knows, it's worth a try.

Now I must go and stop Badger from destroying the robot hoover which this week he has decided to take a big dislike to and if he breaks it that will cause me masses of hard work!

Snoopy

2009-02-26T03:44:00.000-08:00

We have horrible weather here, all sideways rain and big winds which make the tiles rattle on the roof.

This sort of weather is always a pest, before dogs it was the sort of weather that made me want to curl up beside the fire with a good book or watch good tv but now I just see it as even more cleaning as the dogs insist on running on the grass, get covered in mud and run back inside before I can catch them to clean their paws.

One person in the house is thinking of nicer weather though and that is Badger.

Yesterday I found him lying on top of his cage, upside down and looking at me with his one blue eye as if this was perfectly normal.

I'm sure I remember Snoopy doing just the same and dreaming of sunny days.....

Canine Confusion

2009-02-18T00:50:00.000-08:00

This week Other Half has been helping out on the farm, feeding the sheep and cleaning out the cows. Now I don't mind sheep but cows are another thing, they may look all lovely and docile but I've heard stories about how they will get you on the ground and kill you at the drop of a hat so I am not keen on going in the barn with them, preferring to stay well behind the bars. I don't dislike cows, in fact I do actually really like them but having been chased several times both on foot and on my bike I think it's best that I admire them from afar.

The dogs are rather confused by Other Halfs temporary occupation, espcially Wee Pup Badger as Other Half now comes home smelling of all the wonderful farmyard smells that dogs like and only the farmer usually smells of. Badger adores the farmer and always licks his wellies whenever he sees him, the wellies are usually splattered in deposits from the cows and various other unspeakable substances. So this week Badger can't quite work out why it's Other Half who has the tasty wellies and why he's not allowed to lick them.

Henry is also a bit perplexed as he usually barks at the farmer and Wee Pup Badgers brother as they walk up the field next to the house to feed some of the sheep and the farmer usually says hello to him but now Other Half is the other side of the fence telling Henry to be quiet and stop barking.

Just to add to all of this, Wee Pup Badgers brother now follows Other Half home and hangs around the outside of the gate waiting for Other Half to come out, so Henry and Badger now bomb out towards the gate to see if he is there every time they go outside.

Molly is of course taking all this in her stride and taking complete advantage of the fact that the other two dogs are so intent on everything that is going on and has stolen the prime basking spot in front of the log stove - very sensible in my opinion.

Have Another Log for the Fire

2009-02-12T02:29:00.000-08:00

While I've been typing the last post about Henry running mad in the forest I was aware of a small commotion somewhere else in the house.

Other Half is home and I just assumed it was something he was doing.

The noise got rather loud and there was a bit of a crash and bang so I decided I should investigate and I found Badger dragging the ornate, cast iron, log holder upturned around the living room.

He must have been trying to steal a log to chew and had somehow got his collar caught on one of the decorative ends of the log holder and was desperately trying to stop it from following him around the room!

I think Badger is spending a bit too much time with Henry!

Mad Running

2009-02-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

Being a Saluki/Greyhound mix Henry is a fast dog. In fact everything he does seems to be at 100mph, eating, chewing a dog chew, moving round the house, exploring the garden.

Another thing about being a Saluki/Grehound mix is that Salukis are renound for not coming back if they get off the lead. Fergus was the worst for this, for fourteen years I took him about on extender leads, learned how to build dog proof fences and stressed like mad everytime we had visitors in case they left the front door on the latch. He absolutely refused to come back, in fact I found out that he could run at 42mph by chasing him up the road in my car (probably a rather dangerous thing to do but at the time that was the only thing I could do to get him back as I'd open the back door and he always jumped in to be chauffered home). I did try, and try and try to be able to let him off, even paying a proffesional dog trainer £30 and hour but in the end after spending half an afternoon trying to persuade him to come back from chasing the rabbits on a railway line I gave up.

So, as the lovely lady who runs the local dog training club where I take Henry says 'You pass your mistakes from your first dog onto your second dog' and what a true saying that is. I know Henry isn't my second dog, he is actually my third after Fergus but he is my second Saluki mix and most of the time it's like having Fergus around all over again. But I just can't summon the courage to let him off the lead.

Every time Henry escapes I feel the old panic rise inside me, it's like a terror that's very hard to control and if people knew how scared I feel they would lock me up! But I have to say that Henry has always come back, even the time that I didn't even realise he'd escaped (by squeezing himself through a square of stock fencing and nearly castrating himself all over again) he came back so why do I worry so much.

So imagine how I felt yesterday. We took the dogs up into the forest for a nice long walk. It was a lovely day, the sun was shining and everywhere was covered in snow. It really looked like a Christmas Card, especially the snow that was stuck to the pine trees.

As we were walking along a deer bounced accross the track. This was excellent to see as we'd seen deer the day before as well. But of course Henry and Molly went absolutely mad and when that happens they are a bit hard to control. Henry was doing his usual howling bark and started to jump about trying really hard to get out of his harness, he's actually so bendy and bright that he knows how to get his front legs out of the harness so we've had to link the harness to his collar so that it's impossible for him to get out of both.

Well yesterday that theory failed. Henry struggled and bended and pulled and jumped, all at the end of his long extender lead so there was very little we could do from 25 feet away and he managed to wriggle out of his harness and then yanked his head out of his collar.

And he was off up the track.

At 100mph.

And I was having a heart attack.

It was bad enough that he was off the lead but pine forests are planted really densely so I knew that if Henry ran into the trees I'd have very little chance of ever seeing him again and he'd probably end up getting shot by a game keeper or injured and we'd never find him as the forest is literally miles big.

Other Half and myself started yelling at Henry to come back, hoping against hope that he wouldn't run into the trees which so far he hadn't done. But he wouldn't come back, he just kept running about like a mad thing but staying a fair distance away from us.

Then he did it. He ran into the trees and my heart dropped.

I actually threw my arms in the air and turned around thinking this was it. We'd have to walk home with just two dogs and wonder forever what happened to Henry.

But then Henry re-appeared. And started to run towards us and I though it was all over and he was coming back but no, he scooted round and ran further down the track and then over the brow of the hill and once again disappeared.

So I shouted at Other Half, blaming him for all this which wasn't really fair so Other Half shouted back at me and the I realised this wasn't really getting us very far so I started sprinting up the track trying to catch up with Henry or at least try to see if I could see him.

And once again Henry re-appeared, over the brow of the hill doing probably more than 100mph, with his head down and his legs going so fast they were a blur, and best of all he had a big doggie grin all over his face.

He ran towards Other Half who managed to grab him, but then he let him go and Henry actually just stood there while I (by now a snivelling but happy wreck) put his harness and collar back on.

So it goes to prove that my lovely dog training lady is right, you shouldn't pass the mistakes you make with your first dog onto your second dog, even if they are a Saluki mix.

And I'm going to get really brave and find a field with a big fence and try letting Henry off the lead so he can run. After all he was built to run.

One Man and his Dogs

2009-02-08T02:40:00.000-08:00

Oh dear, Other Half has had something of a stressful week with the dogs.

Firstly, becuase I am usually working when he is at home and vice versa, Other Half has the dogs on his own quite allot. We have different views on dogs, I think that if you leave them to get on on their own they are quite happy. Other Half on the other hand is always watching them and monitoring what they are doing. Consequently he sees all the naughty things the dogs do and is often telling them off or trying to stop them doing something, or trying to take something that they shouldn't have away from them. This causes Other Half allot of stress.

So this week, Other Half decided to take the dogs out for a walk somewhere different. He bundled all the dogs into the boot of his car and took them to the hills behind a village about ten miles away. Other Half's car boot is different to mine, mine is split so you open the top half first and the bottom half stays shut, allowing you to grab the dogs leads before letting them out. Other Half's boot opens from the bottom, making it alomost impossible to grab the dogs leads, because of this Other Half decided to test the dogs staying abilities as he opened the boot.

Bescause the dogs knew they were somewhere new and exciting none of them stayed and all three jumped out of the boot and of course all three ran in different directions. A car was coming along the lane and poor Other Half had the devils own job to try and round all the dogs up before they got run over. This he managed to do somehow and then proceeded to take them up the hill.

During the walk the dogs were pulling and sniffing and eating sheep poo and generally behaving in a very excitable way. They are always like this when they go somewhere new. Other Half has been up this hill many times with Fergus and Bonnie and didn't see why Henry, Molly or Badger should be in any way excited. So they got shouted at quite a bit.

Then when Other Half and the dogs finished their walk Other Half felt guilty for shouting at them for pulling and misbehaving on their walk so he took them to the village shop and bought them all a milky way to say sorry!

A couple of days later Other Half got up in the morning and let the dogs out into the garden at just the same moment when the farmer next door came past the house with his dogs to feed the sheep. There was an almighty amount of dog barking and yelling as all the dogs always want to get together when they see each other either for a fight or a good game. Wee Pup Badger's brother was one of them and he came through into the front garden to bark through the side gate. This made our dogs bark at the other side of the gate and somewhere along the way one of them must have jumped up and caught the catch and the gate opened.

This caused a mass canine break-out!

Henry and Badger cleared off into the farm yard, and Molly did as she always does when Henry has done something naughty, she came back indoors and acted all agitated. It took Other Half a few moments to realise what was going on and then he looked out the window and saw the gate was open. Poor old Other Half, still in his jammy bottoms, grabbed a coat and a pair of wellies and flew out of the garden to find Henry and Badger.

He found Badger in the cow barn with Henry and Badgers brother chasing a chicken in between the cows legs! How none of them got trampled by a cow I've no idea.

Badger was easy enough to catch but as soon as Other Half tried to get hold of Henry he shot off up the track to pay a visit to our neighbours.

Luckily the farmer was already up there and caught Henry, turned him around and sent him on his way back down to Other Half. Other Half intercepted him at our driveway and Henry bombed back into our garden.

Henry and Badger had had a great time, but I think Other Half's nerves were rather frayed to say the least!

And I still can't work out how neither Henry or Badger got trampled by a cow!

Snow Dogs Again

2009-02-03T03:29:00.000-08:00

I really must get the batteries sorted out and charged in my camera as I missed a brilliant picture yesterday.

I let the dogs out into the snow which they all absolutely love and Molly decided to sit in it which is very strange but it's what she does, and sometimes she lays down in it, odd for a dog with very thin fur but she likes it, maybe there is a dog expert out there who could explain it.

I then went indoors and after a couple of minutes I looked out of the door as I heard Henry barking madly and Badger barking back at him. Well, you would honestly never believe what I saw, Henry was on the trampoline actually bouncing around in the snow on it with Badger underneath trying to bite Henry every time the trampoline stretched down! Both were barking like mad and it really seemed like they were smiling and laughing!

Who on earth would have thought that a dog would go on a trampoline, let alone bounce about on it?

Mad Dogs and Busy Women

2009-01-30T00:54:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that I'm still here, it's just been a bit busy with my new job and my old job and fitting everything in.

Henry is still just as mad, he's currently barking at the farm dogs as they go up the track for their morning preamble to feed the sheep with the farmer. To see the farm dogs he has to balance with his hind legs on the arm of the sofa and his front paws reaching over about 2.5feet to the window sill which is quite slippy. How he does this without slipping is beyond me.

Molly is still very laid back and very much in charge, her winter coat is fully in now and she is like a giant hamster, all lovely and velvety soft, I'm not quite sure what it says about the temperature of our house if one of our dogs has grown a winter coat but she seems to have done this for both the winters we've had her. No complaints here though as it's gorgeous to stroke.

And wee Pup Badger is finally caged. Hahaha! I knew I'd get revenge somehow! Only joking! He decided to go on a one pup demolition voyage in the kitchen so it was either get a cage or move out myself and as it's cold out there I decided the cage was probably the best option, and what a great move. Badger is now in the living room at night with the other two and has settled in the cage really well, I never thought I'd ever get a cage for a dog but it instantly removed about 95% of the stress of having to keep an eye on him all the time. He NEVER wee's in it which again is another stress removed and I know that when he is inside it he can't chew anything that he is not meant to chew. Consequently I have found that my relationship with him is a million times better as he never does anything to drive me mad so we are now really good friends. Not that Other Half likes that very much, especially as we were out yesterday afternoon and on letting Badger out on our return he ran straight past Other Half and bounded up to me, whoops! Guess I'm just more of a dog person than Other Half hahaha!

Henry to the rescue

2009-01-14T03:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was having a bad pup day.

It seemed that for days Badger was on a mission to wreck the house and cause as much mess and destruction as possible. He has ruined my kitchen, removing and chewing all the Scandinavian hearts that are on the unit doors, thereby completely wrecking the entire theme of the kitchen, he's wee'd so many times on the laminate flooring that it's now starting to de-laminate itself in areas, he's scratched the paint off the wall in one place and has really chewed the bottom of the solid oak kitchen table.

Put this with his mysterious ability to actually remove anything from the kitchen table, despite being still very small, and dragging whatever is on the table about the floor, chewing it and then weeing on it, and then pulling his bed through the wee as well and you have a very stressed dog owner.

I think I'd be much more tolerant had it not taken 10 months to house train Henry, which was on top of a further 10 months of problems with dear old Fergus who had started to have accidents in the house and previous to that I had the same problem with dear Bonnie.

So for literally three years I have been cleaning up dog accidents in my house and just when I can see a good 12 years of clean floors along comes Badger, who may look cute but will not ever keep still and goads the other two into constantly playing and rolling around and fighting and generally wearing me out.

So I shout at Other Half for bringing a puppy that I didn't want into the house and tell him to do more with Badger so he has started walking him at 7am which should help.

Anyway, yesterday, in a rage of anti dog feeling I decided to take them all out for a walk in order to tire them out. Badger was off the lead as usual and also as usual being a real pest, constantly jumping up at Henry and Molly and biting their faces.

For a change I decided to walk round the field which has a river running along the side of it. It's a nice walk and puts me in a good mood so things improved the moment we got through the field gate.

Once we reached the bottom of the field, we stood by the part where the river meets with a second river and I stood looking at the view while Henry and Molly paddled in the river. Badger decided to have a go at paddling too, he's never been in this field before so this was the first time he'd seen a river.

The paddling and looking at the view was going very well, until Badger decided it would be a good idea to jump in the water. Only to get instantly swept away as he jumped into the deep bit.

Instantly I was in the water after him, he was paddlign furiously with his little paws and whinining and crying and going round and round in circles.

I was in up to my waist, dragging poor Henry behind me, who was having to reluctantly swim, while Molly sensibly jumped onto the bank and was following on her extender lead.

I was wading as hard and fast as I could through the water but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't reach Badger who by now was in a complete state of panic as was I.

After what seemed like ages I realised I was never going to catch him as the water was going to fast and I had to get out before Henry and I also got swept down the river. I decided that the only thing I could do was get out of the water and try and chase Badger from the bank and hope that there would be a shallow area where he'd be able to catch the ground and I'd be able to get him - I also knew there was a good chance he'd be pulled to fast and far down the river to ever be seen again but there was nothing I could do, it was truly an awful situation to be in!

I started to drag poor Henry out of the water, only to realise we were on the opposite bank to Molly, so I had a puppy being swept away, a frozen wet dog half in and half out of the water and a dry but unable to be let off dog on the opposite bank - agggghhhhh!

By a huge miracle at this moment Badger got swept to the same bank as us but further down. I yelled at him and he seemed to get caught on the edge which somehow got him out of the flow of the river. He straight away started to swim towards me, while I waded towards him. As soon as he was within reach I grabbed his scruff and pulled him close, giving him a hug that nearly squeezed the life out of him. He was shaking and cold but I had him back!!!!!

Then I had to negotiate getting back over the river to Molly so I kept wading until I found a shallower part past the point where the rivers meet and yet again poor Henry had to get back into the water to get over, while I carried Badger.

Molly was really pleased to see us and she and Henry sniffed Badger all over and then we started our soggy walk back home, my wellies were completely full of water and even though I emptied them out they kept re-filling from my wet clothes!

I realise that jumping into a swollen, fast flowing river after a dog was really quite a silly thing to do, but looking back it was just second nature to wade in and try to grab Badger but before I knew it we were way down the river.

Still, we are all safe, warm and dry and I'm not feeling so anti-puppy any more!

Happy New Year

2009-01-07T01:22:00.000-08:00

Well Christmas is over and it's the New Year.

We survived the festive season without the tree being weed on once. That is amazing, since we have too dog dogs and had a real tree. I can't say the same survival statistics applied to the tree decorations though which were regularly removed from the tree and then removed from one of the dog dogs mouths. Molly strangely didn't join in the bauble chewing.

Other Half took all the decorations down before I got up on Monday morning and I came downstairs and promptly didn't notice the lack of a 6ft tree and various sparkly things around the living room. I think this lack of notice didn't go down too well but I was half asleep at the time.

I have to say that it's nice to get back to normal, I hadn't realised quite how minimalist our living room is, and it's great to be able to dust again without having to knock over loads of cards or decorations, not that I really want to dust at all but someone has to do it. The dogs did their best to help by capturing and arguing over the long duster on a stick and bending it so that it now goes very effectively round corners.

The dogs have also been trying to keep me busy by waiting until the living room is lovely and clean and then sneaking a log onto one of their beds and chewing away at it until an appropriate amount of mess is made and then getting up and leaving the log for another dog to find and take away to another bed to make another amount of mess. I'm sure they are doing this on purpose but I'm not letting them know that.

So apart from that life has gone back to what resembles normality in a three dog household and it's all a bit flat really but hey ho!

Merry Christmas Everyone

2008-12-27T03:27:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry I've not posted for a while, I've been working (even on Christmas Day) and so it's been a very busy, in fact busier than normal for busy at this time of year.

So here is Christmas, Henry's second with us, also Molly's second Christmas with us and Badgers first ever Christmas with anyone. At the begining of the week it hit me that I had an enormous amount of stuff to do before the big day. I always put myself under an immense amount of stress, trying to get the house impeccably clean, perfect and decorated as well as trying to get the garden nice and enough supplies and food in to last at least until March.

And it always goes wrong.

Or if not wrong then I usually have to give up on trying to get something done. This year for instance I wanted to finish plastering the front hall. It's still not finished and looks dreadfull as half of it is plastered and the other half is bad homemade artex with pink plaster adhesive all over it, looking like a very bad 90's paint effect. I;m sure no-one has noticed, although the guests we have coming this week for New Year may well notice it as I started it in November just before they last visited us.

Due to having so much to do I decided to double up on some tasks, walking the dogs is always a big chunk out of the day so I decided on Monday to out them in the boot of the car and walk them on the way to the the supermarket where I was going to do my food shopping. The supermarket is a 72 mile round trip away so the long journey would also help to tire them out and it worked a treat. We walked round the grounds of local castle where I decided that they should have a couple of herds of deer like in Knole in Kent, anyway the dogs really loved it, pulling me this way and that and lots of general excitement. They then snoozed in the car to Tescos and again on the way back.

As this plan worked well I decided to do the same on Tuesday as I needed to go out to buy coal and logs and also to replace a couple of Christmas presents that had been chewed by Badger. How he managed to get them was a mystery until I caught him climbing up on top of the dog food bin, from there on to the rubbish bin, from there onto the window sill and then on to the kitchen worktop. He is 13 weeks old and already learning Leaphound tricks!

Off we went round the castle again, then on to the saw mill which was closed Oh no!! Luckily they sell bags of logs in the Spar (can you beleive that!) so Christmas with a log fire was saved in the nick of time. I also managed to get the presents locally and then we went off to get the coal which had to go in the middle of my car as the dogs were in the boot. The only problem with that was that it left the small gaps in the dog guard exposed when I folded the seat down and that meant that Badger shot out through it and straight into the arms of the coal man who really loved him. We put him back in the boot only for him to crawl through five minutes later and sit on top of the sack of coal for the rest of the journey.

Then suddenly Christmas was here. It always creeps up on me like that after weeks of planning (and doing very little about the plans) and days of running around like a nutter. You'd think after all these years of having Christmas we'd be experts at it and be able to organise it without a second thought (or any thoughts at all) after all August Bank Holiday is a breeze, and even family holidays away are easy compared to this.

Canine Chaos

2008-12-17T15:56:00.000-08:00

Well the tree chaos has not stopped. Or should I say canine chaos. I got in from work quite late last night and let the dogs out last thing for a wee. Two hours later they wanted to go out again. Then two hours after that they wanted to go out yet again. This sometimes happens when there is a fox or deer lurking around so I decided to ignore them and go back to sleep.

Bad move.

In fact very bad move as when Other Half got up he found three piles of diorreah and two wees downstairs.

It was Henry. We decided to try him on Bakers food. He'd had it a few months ago and he got quite bad trots but we thought it could be because he had been starved and his system wasn't used to it so we put him on Eukanuba and that suited him fine, but not our bank balance as it's nearly £40 a sack. So we tried Bakers again which is far cheaper and more readily available but what a price to pay!

So I had to go out today and buy more of the expensive stuff for Henry, while Molly is still on the Bakers which she loves and Badger is on puppy food, doggie diets in this house are getting more complicated by the day.

When I got back it looked like the dogs had been having a party in the living room. Badger had managed to sneak a plant pot full of peat into the house and had thrown the peat all over the carpet. He'd also been chewing on a bauble from the tree which left a red stain on the carpet and also pink stains up his front legs so now he is a tri-colour collie of the red, white and black variety.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Badger had also been in at the coal bucket, adding grey to his white bits. Very strangely he eats coal, Henry does the same from time to time so I can only imagine that there must be something in it like a mineral or something that is good for dogs? Who knows? What I do know is that it leaves very black and difficult to remove marks on the carpet.

All the dogs had been running about and jumping on the sofas making the whole place look completely dishevelled, I'd only been gone a couple of hours and it would take me the rest of the day to sort it out! So I spent the afternoon vaxing the carpet and cleaning away peat and coal and then after all that I went to work for a rest!

Christmas Tree

2008-12-16T05:43:00.000-08:00

Oh dear. We finallt have the tree up for Christmas after hours of moving furniture about and trying to work out how best to fit eveything in the living room without it looking like an exlposion in a junk shop.

Other Half came up with a very good idea which was to leave the tree undecorated for a day or so, so that Badger would hopefully not be too tempted to try and climb up it or worse, knock it over. So we duly did this and decorated it on Sunday, along with a few other things about the room. All dogs ignored the tree, brilliant we thought. We went to bed and still all dogs ignored the tree (well actually Badger sleeps in the kitchen to minimise any mischeif he can get himself into during the night). Monday morning came and again, all dogs ingnored the tree.

Until today.

I have had to rescue five baubles from the tree out of dogs mouths. Some are beyond repair, others have begun to make a different display along the mantlepiece where I can arrange them so that the chewed bits are to the wall and can't be seen.

It's like a treat tree now, the dogs just seem to wander past it, pluck a bauble they fancy off the tree and chew it. Where will it all end?

Luckily Other Half is working and probably wont notice the additions to the mantlepiece decorations but what's particularly annoying is they have chewed the decoration I made in England with my Mum while my Dad was in hospital getting a new knee. I spent ages pinning sequins into a model egg and tying it with ribbon which made a gorgeous sparkly bauble only for me to find it five minutes ago on the hearth rug, with most of the sequins expertly removed and layed all around it.

No dog will own up to having done the deed, all look as guilty and innocent as each other - but all know that I am mighty p***d off with them for this.

I will spend the rest of the afternoon in the living room writing cards and guarding the Christmas tree until I go to work. Hmmmppphhhh!

Good Boy Henry

2008-12-11T00:40:00.000-08:00

Being a Saluki cross, Henry is not to be expected to be super well behaved. Fergus (also a Saluki cross) was typical of the breed, very aloof and only ever did what he wanted, even if he layed down when you told him to, he was actually going to lay down at that moment anyway.. Ferg would also spend allot of time upstairs on his own, even when visitors came he would say hello and give them a sniff, check out any luggage they might have (you never know if they had food) and then shoot up the stairs to lounge about one of the bedrooms.

Henry is much more sociable. He's never gone to lay in another room away from me, apart from at night when he sleeps in the living room and that took serious tenacity to acheive. He's also really affectionate, liking to cuddle up on the sofa with you, managing to get all four legs across your lap and his head buried in your stomach. He's very different from Fergus who the closest he really came to that was to lay down the side of the armchair.

The biggest problem with Ferg was recall. He just refused to come back. Sometimes it was like he was just having a laugh with you. In the early days I tried. I took a bar of chocolate on walks with me .I know, I know, you shouldn't feed dogs chocolate but it was the one thing that Ferg would do just about anything for, except come back. He did come back for the first bit of chocolate, then for the second he snatched it so fast I didn't even see it go and by the third he was two fields away and ignoring me. After a year of panics, thinking he would never be seen again I gave up and bought a long extending lead and got 13 years of stress about people leaving doors and gates open.

Consequently I have become paranoid about Henry. All in all he is much more responsive than Ferg. He comes back in the garden every time (Fergus would just look or simply move an ear and ignore me). He even came back the couple of times he escaped, but I just haven't got the bottle to let him off the lead.

So imagine my suprise when the day after we had the log burner installed I realised that the garden gate had been left open and for one night and a day Henry had been at liberty to run abuot on the track and yet he didn't run away, never to be seen again!

I still can't pluck up the courage to actually let him off yet but I do feel much more positive about it. Well done Henry my boy!

Christmas Time

2008-12-10T16:05:00.000-08:00

This time last year Henry had only just arrived and I was somewhat worried about putting up the Christmas tree as I had a feeling he was just the sort of dog to try and climb up it with the obvious disasterous results.

Amazingly Henry took to having a tree in the living room really well, unlike Fergus he didn't pee up it (a trick Ferg learned to do without ever getting caught in the act in 14 years), nor did he steal any of the decorations from it.

The tree did fall over, but that was because it was too heavy on one side and Henry was no-where near it at the time, even though he looked incredibly guilty about it!

So now it's that time of year again and just when I thought we were out of the woods (scuse the pun) as far as dog worries were concerned, we are back to square one as we now have Badger. Badger is currently into everything. When I say everything I mean that nothing is unturned by his curiosity.

It's sometimes very maddening.

This week Henry taught Badger how to jump accross from the arm of the sofa onto the living room window sill. This is a skill that Henry taught himself and which we tried very hard to stop but to no avail. And now we have two dogs doing it. Badger has also learned not only to go up the stairs but also back down. This means that he can go up there, chew my shoes (the ones I need for work are his favourites of course), drag the clean laundry about the floor, chew anything paper and generally cause havoc and of course it was Henry who taught him to go up the stairs.

Anyway I digress, today we had a suprise delivery. It was from the people who own the forest along the track and they very kindly gave us a Christmas tree. When I found out I couldn't stop smiling, I love Christmas trees and now we have one. I'll just have to get a stand for it, preferably a Badger proof stand, that won't fall over.

I just hope that being a real tree, Henry won't feel the need to pee on it...

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

2008-12-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

I forgot to say that we had a log burning stove installed! It's fab, really really great and has made our house a home. It's so good to see smoke coming out of the chimney and the sound of the crackling fire is just so nice.

We took bets on which dog would discover this source of heat first. Bearing in mind he was rather bald this time last year and an expert in seeking out warm radiators, Henry worked it out before the other two. He has taken to lazing in front of the fire, stretching out in pure luxury, turning over when it gets too hot to even out the warming of his lovely new fur coat.

It's also lovely when he gets up and climbs up onto the sofa with me all warm like a big leggy skinny furry hot water bottle.

Molly hasn't bothered with the fire at all and Badger seems to dislike the heat, if he spends too much time snoozing in the living room he starts to pant and goes off to lay in the kitchen on the floor - he's from outside dogs and his coat is really think and warm so he really dosen't seem to like the heat.

So the log burner is a hit with just about everyone in the house but there are one or two wee problems, caused of cause by the dogs, the have decided that it's great to have an ever changing supply of logs to chew, this is ok except they leave lots of little bits of wood about the place. They have also decided that they like to eat coal! Very odd indeed and certainly not good for the living room carpet!

Puppy Power

2008-12-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

Goodness it's been a while since I posted. I'll blame Other Half for bringing a puppy into our previously relaxed household.

Since I last posted the snow has come with avengance, it's brilliant and the dogs love it too. All of them keep going outside and eating it as well as running around in it and rolling about. Molly for some strange reason keeps sitting in it which must be odd as she has rather thin fur on her back legs.

Henry won't stop barking whenever he goes out, this then gets the dogs in the farm yard to bark which in turn echoes around the hills and the dogs in the next farm along also start barking.There is a cottage in the other direction about half a mile away and the dogs there have started to bark to. I wonder how far this chain of barking goes? Maybe down to Cornwall and up to Durness? I'm sure Henry knows this and does it on purpose.

Indoors, it's been the usual chaos, caused mostly by the presence of Badger. He can't be left alone for two minutes without chewing something or generally getting himself into trouble. His favourite item to chew is any electric cable. This is not good and it doesen't matter how many times I tell him off he goes back to it as soon as he thinks you've forgotted about it. He;'s also chewed almost every pair of shoes and boots belonging to Other Half, removing the insoles and biting up the laces, my wellies which is completely banned, a corner of the sofa, the kitchen table leg and horror of horrors he chewed a small hole in the living room carpet, systematically removing the fibres one by one while I was sitting next to him. When I realised I couldn't beleive it, I honestly thought he was chewing a toy or something.

Molly and Henry have also calmed down their play fighting with him. It used to be constant, all day every day, getting rougher and rougher and noisier and noisier. I think maybe my yelling at them at regular intervals may have had something to do with the better behaviour.....

So life is settling down a bit, not much but it's getting better, but three dogs is still very hard work.....

Snow

2008-11-21T23:54:00.000-08:00

Today it's going to snow. It was forecast and there are already little fluffs of it occasionally drifting down from the sky. Now that it's light I can see the clouds are absolutely packed with white stuff just ready to burst out like an over-bashed feather pillow in a pillow fight.

There is nothing quite so magical as dogs when it snows. Especially the moment when you open the door and they realise the world has turned white and soft. You can see their momentary hesitation in the doorway, the crinkle of their noses and widening of their eyes as they try to work out what has happened.

Then they tentatively put a paw out as if they are testing to make sure they wont sink and then they leap. And leap, and bbound and run and smile and bark and roll and leap again.

Snow and dogs is a great combination as long as the dogs stay toastie warm of course but I've never come accross a dog who dosen't love it.

And today I'm going to miss it as I'm off to the Country Living Show in the SECC Glasgow with my freinds in the village, where I will try not to spend any money and will be envious of Other Half who will be here with the dogs in the snow...

Ouchhh!

2008-11-21T14:17:00.001-08:00

Poor Henry had a bit of an accident earlier today.

We were in the house laughing at Molly bombing around the living room at 200mph which was extremely funny when we heard a sort of dog sreaming noise from outside. After a moment of looking at each other asking 'What on earth was that?' Other Half and me ran outside to see what the matter was.

Poor Henry had jumped the fence which seperates the grass in the garden and was holding his front leg up and crying in pain. He had really hurt himself but we couldn't work out what he had done as he was so frightened that it was difficult to hold him still to have a look.

It seemed he didn't want to walk so Other Half lifted him over the fence and then I carried him into the house where we could take a better look and calm him down. He was so frightened and making little whimpering noises as I carried him in.

Once inside we realised that he had somehow scraped the inside of his front leg almost right down to his paw. It's really deep and has pulled the fur off but not actually cut his leg, it's more like a really bad graze. It also seems that he has bruised it quite badly as he's limping on it slightly.

He will be ok, just rather sore for a few days, although I think he'll most likely have a bit of a scar which will be a shame but at least he's going to be alright and he's been cuddling up to me on the sofa for most of the evening for extra special Henry cuddles which are lovely.

Dog Walk Chaos

2008-11-17T03:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we took all three dogs for a walk. Although Badger hasn't had his second injections yet we think he is pretty safe around the farm but for the next two weeks all dogs are confined to close quarters.

We decided to walk down the long track and as sometimes happens some holiday makers came along to park up and look at the view. As we got closer to the car we thought we'd better scoop Badger up as he has a habit of going under the cars on the driveway and we didn't want him to get run over if the car decided to move off.

Badger was in a particularly playful mood and wasn't wanting to be caught so we scurried about trying to catch him while Other Half held on to Henry and Molly's extending leads. When we finally go hold of Badger we looked up only to find that Henry and Molly had their heads and front half of their bodies in the open window of the car!

If it wasn't such a shock it would have been really funny (well actually it was quite funny) and I ran up to get them down and the occupants of the car were really nice about it, despite the mud that Henry and Molly had put all along the window ledge. I had Badger in my arms and the lady in the passenger seat immediately wanted to stroke him and while she was doing that I realised that Badger had got his undercarriage slightly coated in cow poo at some point of the walk so there I was trying to be very nice about the dogs and thankful that they didn't actually jump in and hoping no-one would notice the smell of cow poo which was probably transferring itself from Badger to the nice lady.

By this time Henry and Molly had started to whine as they wanted to get moving so we made a hasty retreat along the track.

I thought that the problem with walking three dogs would be about getting tangled in leads and dogs going off in all directions but it seems that there is more to it than that!

Isn't blogging great?

2008-11-16T03:18:00.000-08:00

Ok this is a post by me about blogging and the unexpected delights I've found in it. Over the last week of so I've clicked on the odd 'Blog of Note' at the top of the Blogger page and found some really fab blogs, the first was Back Porch Musings which is just wonderful and all about decorating and interiors. It's just like buying a really expensive magazine but without the expense or ads.

From there I found Catherine Holman Folk Art, a style I've always loved and adored. Catherine's blog led me to Nie Recovery, this I clicked on purely out of curiosity for the logo and found the most heart breaking and ongoing story of a beautiful family, the parents of which have been seriously injured in a plane crash earleir this summer. Looking at the photos of the family happy together before the accident makes it such a terrible thing to have happened.

Then on Friday night through Back Porch Musings I found Cape Cod Memories (Beachy) and oh my, clicking on this one is like spending the day somewhere truly peaceful and beautiful and once you've read it all you feel just like you've had a lovely holiday somewhere. This one is definately my favourite at the moment

So the moral of this post is about how great blogging is. It starts from a purely nosey begining right up to feeling you've found new friends even though you'll probably never meet them. And most of all it's stopped my bad habit of sneaking expensive interiors magazines into the shopping trolley!

Routine

2008-11-14T11:42:00.001-08:00

One of the most important things in a dogs life is routine. And strangely since Badger arrived we have adherred to a very strict routine. So much so that it's actually becoming boring.

Early Morning Routine
The dogs wake around 7.30 to go out for a pee and a general snoop around the garden. Badger gets his breakfast. All dogs go back to bed until we have breakfasted and showered etc.

Mid Morning Routine.
Henry plays with Badger. Badger Plays with Henry. Molly watches and adjudicates where needed. All dogs go back to bed.

Lunch Time.
All dogs look through the kitchen door while we eat. We go out for a walk, unless we have sideways rain and wind which no-one likes.

Mid Afternoon.
All dogs go back to bed.

Late Afternoon.
All dogs eat dinner, go out for a wee, then go back to bed.

Early Evening.
All dogs watch us having dinner. All dogs go back to bed.

9.30pm
All dogs wake up and start running around having play fights, barking, growling, rolling about the floor.

10.30pm
Same as 9.30pm

11.00pm
I give up and go to bed leaving Other Half to it.

Somewhere in the middle of my slumbers, Other Half settles the dogs, sends them out for a wee and all dogs go back to bed.

So pretty much all our dogs do is just eat, sleep and wee and play. Not a bad life eh?

Badger Watching

2008-11-14T04:17:00.000-08:00

The latest craze for Henry is Badger watching. Other Half decided that Wee Pup should be named Badger as he is black and white and looks a bit like a badger. I got the wildlife book out to check and there is a similarity I must admit.

So when the opportunity arises Henry will drink Badgers water, eat his food and generally keep a close eye on his new friend.

Some of this vigilance turns into knocking his new friend over and rolling him about like a football, very strangley Badger seems to love this and never seems to get scared even when Henry grabs his back leg as he walks away and drags him back. It's really funny to watch but was quite scary to begin with as Henry has rather huge teeth.

Hery has also taken possesion of one of Fergus's favourite toys, a large furry bone. Ferg loved this bone and never ever chewed it or tore it. henry has made a large hole in the side and is intent on removing the insides to throw them about the living room. I have of course done my best to stop this and do intend to sew the hole up but the bone is now all dog slebbery which makes that not such a nice job, and to wash it forst would probably mean blocking the insides of the washing machine.

The arrival of a new pup has certainly livened things up around here, not that they were quiet in the first place. Molly has started to play, both with Henry and Badger and she's started to do a really crazy thing which we have called 'trolley bumming'. This involves running round and round so fast that she becomes a bit of a blur, while that happens her back end gets lower and lower to the ground so much so that it seems she much have trolley wheels on her bum to facilitate this!

Ssssshhhhhh...

2008-11-05T23:34:00.000-08:00

It's very quiet here. It's half past seven in the morning and I've decided to take action about the constant dog goings on around here.

Henry is in on it too and he came up to get me at 6.50 this morning and we sneaked downstairs without waking Other Half to let Wee Pup outside for a pee. We then gave him his breakfast, took him outside again just in case and then put him back to his bed.

He's still there. And is quiet.

Bliss.

Henry has gone back to bed too (Molly didn't get up) and I'm just checking my emails for work while enjoying the quiet.

Henry and I are thinking about slipping Other Half a sleeping potion to keep him in bed longer so that the house stays nice and quiet without Wee Pup constantly moving and disrupting anything.

Mad playing dogs

2008-11-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

It's complete madness here.

Since the arrival of Wee Pup Molly has decided to become really seriously playful. Not with Wee Pup but just on her own. Henry plays on his own as well as with us and Wee Pup is currently enjoying almost constant attention from Other Half (he is meant to be his dog so he's taking full responsibility for everything which is really good).

So, the house is something like 'Doggy Daycare' at the moment. There isn't a moment when there isn't something doggy going on - it's not good when you are used to a peaceful life and right now I think it's just me that had a peaceful life.

On the up side, Henry has been a superstar with Wee Pup, he is tolerating him, looking out for him and running after him when he wanders off in the garden. It's brilliant although we aren't letting Wee Pup get too amourous with Henry as several times Henry has got a bit too rough with his big paddy paws and also Wee Pup has decided he needs to test his teeth on everything and we'd rather not have nasty recriminations.

Molly has been brilliant with him too, taking very little interest in him until he is scared or gets a Henry paw on top of him. She seems very caring about him which is so lovely.

On the Leaphound front, Henry has been making full use of the fence that I've had put accross in front of the grass in the garden. I put the fence up last winter as Henry kept bombing around the grass and started to wreck it. We are really exposed to the elements here and a bonfire on the grass takes two years to mend so a Leaphound tearing it up is almost terminal.

The unexpected advantage of fencing the grass off was that the dogs stayed nice and clean during the winter so I didn't have to clean the mud off their feet every time they went out for a pee so I decided to put the fence up again this winter.

The trouble is Henry has decided that this winter the fence is not for sectioning off the garden, its a hurdle for him to practice his Leaphounding with. He takes four steps out of the back door and takes off while accelerating at an incredible rate of knots before landing half way accross the other side of the garden.

This is instantly and fluidly turned into a rapid bomb around the garden, sometimes hurdling back over the fence and sometimes running so fast towards the wall or fence that it seems impossible for him to stop or turn in time before hitting it but with total skill he seems to angle his skids so that he never hits either of them.

Of course this all leads to major muddy paws which then have to be cleaned before Henry can come back in otherwise the carpet and sofa get all dirty. I wonder if the fence is going to be any use at all this year!

On a sadder note, it is exactly a year since I lost my dear old Fergus. I guess leaving me on the 5th November certainly meant he won't be forgotten and I had been anticipating today with more than a little sadness but now the day is here it has been fine, mostly I think due to Henry. He is so much like Fergus when he was young that it's sometimes easy to forget which dog is making me laugh, and today Henry and Molly have both made me laugh allot which has made me forget to be so sad.

Strangley though we ended up back in the vet where we were a year ago as while driving along the road we came accross a buzzard that seemed in a bit of difficulty. It didn't appear to have broken a wing or anything but was rather dazed so Other Half wrapped one of the dog blankets around it and we whisked it to the vets, only to end up in the same room as a year ago which was slightly bizzare. The bird was incredibly scary when the vet unwrapped him and I decided it might be a good idea to hide behind Other Half as he looked rather angry with me (the bird not Other Half). Anyway the bird has gone off to the wildlife hospital so I'll post if I hear anything about him.

As for Bonfire Night, well we are far to away from anywhere to be bothered by fireworks but we may be having some at the weekend, further up the track well away from the house. I think I may well stay in the house though, just to be sure the dogs are ok, although I'm pretty confident they will be fine but it's best to be safe than sorry.

Fencing

2008-11-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

This week we have been getting some fencing done as Henry being a Leaphound can jump very well. Despite this he decided to get some extra jumping in while it was going on.

This is all normal for Henry and usually happens at high speed and it's a very good idea to keep out of the way while he is doing it.

At one point he decided to use the fencing that was yet to be used and half way accross the grass as a hurdle which was really quite excellent to watch.

A couple of Pup photos

2008-11-04T09:43:00.001-08:00

Here are a couple more pup photos just to show how cute he is.

New Addition

2008-11-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

We have a new addition to our household this week, a puppy border collie who was born in the barn next door. He's very cute but quite hard work and has made me realise just why I've always had adult or young dogs!

Henry and Molly are coping with him very well, from the first hour they have let him wander around in between all their legs and have only growled when he has tried to invade their space or climb all over them.

Wee Pup might be staying forever, we'll see how it goes but for the time being everyone is enjoying having him to stay - Henry was also wondering if Mossie might want to give him a tip or two to make sure he stays here!

Wrap up warm

2008-10-27T15:23:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day of it being cold enough for the dogs to wear their coats.

I'd like to say that my dogs have such a large selection of coats because I have had four dogs so far, but the truth is that Fergus and Bonnie the first two dogs were terribly spoilt by me, resulting in an entire canine wardrobe of coats, collars and leads. Not to mention dog toys and various other accessories.

At the last count we had seven coats, ten leads and 6 collars. All the collars came from Harrods because I used to think it was rather nice to have my dogs in posh collars with gold embossed Harrods logos inside. Now I'm too far away from Harrods to indulge. Probably a good thing for the bank balance nowdays.

When Henry came he had his own collar and coat which was really lovely of the rescue people to give him. They tried to give us a lead to but we showed them just a couple of our collection in the boot of the car and agreed we didn't need one.

So today was cold and windy and I was wearing a coat so the dogs would too and I chose their big red fleece lined coats with the lift up hoods that roll down as cosy collars. They are the only dogs in a 20 mile radius (maybe more) that wear coats round here and the farmers must think I am mad but my dogs must be warm, and someone in these parts must provide the entertainment!

After our walk (where Molly caught a mouse and ate it) we came back and I spent some time in the garden with the dogs doing the duties with the shovel.

Today whilst weilding my shovel I found a large part of the mop in one of the poos. It can only be Henry who ate it, but why?? This has to go down with the poop scooping after Henry ate the candles, that was like poop scooping poo shaped candles, no poo just wax!

Probably the best of the lot belongs to Fergus who stole approximately 30 mini chocolate bars one Christmas and scoffed them down as quickly as he could before he got caught out. After blaming other people for being greedy and eating most of the chocolates I realised who the culprit was the next morning and for a few days after as Ferg hadn't bothered to chew or take the chocolate out of the wrapper so we had lots of intact albeit melted and squishy chocolate bars still in their wrappers all over the garden!

The wind gets up their tails

2008-10-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

The weather over the last few days here has been awful. More rain than you need to fill a bucket and seriously strong winds that blow you over.

The rivers around us all filled up and overflowed and the tiles on the roof of the house rattled constantly for three days, it wasn't very nice.

Also what wasn't very nice was having to send the dogs outside to go to the loo. There was a very good chance that Henry would see this as an opportunity to revert to pre-toilet trained days but amazingly he didn't and on Saturday joined Molly in refusing to go outside until lunch time. Both dogs curled up on the sofa and refused to move. I knew how they felt, I decided to join them and went completely deaf at Other Halfs suggestion that we go out somewhere instead of staying indoors all day.

The worst thing about the wind (apart from it completely ruining your hair) is that when it really blows Henry gets scared of it and runs indoors whether he's finished or not. He originally came from slightly warmer climes in England so the weather here was a bit of a shock to him to say the least.

The farm dogs on the other hand seem impervious to all the wind and rain and come to visit every day and have now started to bark at Henry and Molly through the front window while Henry and Molly bark back from inside. I'm not sure what's being said, it could be 'hahaha we can run around anywhere we want cos we are outside' or it could equally be ' hahaha we are inside in the warm with central heating and sofas for beds'.

The only activity on Saturday was a rather fierce game between Other Half and Henry which involved lots of barking, jumping, bouncing (all on Henry's side) and outwitting on Other Half's side. The trouble when Henry plays is that he gets so carried away that he sometimes bites your arm or hand instead of the toy that he's trying to get so I think Other Half came off worse, but Henry had a good time.

In the evening just for entertainment value I remembered the two dog balls from my last two dogs that you put treats into and the dogs are meant to roll them around to get the treats out. It makes one Schamko last about 20 minutes which is incredibly good value so I decided to try them out on Hen and Molls.

Amazingly Molly remembered what to do, even though I had only shown her once about a year ago. So she was off and away rolling her ball around the living room like a premier footballer.

Henry on the other hand had seen nothing of the sort before and took a little more instruction but it was far to hard to get him to concentrate on learning rather than trying to beat the ball up to get it to yeild the treats.

This was quite funny to watch and got even funnier when Other Half remembered that Henry's ball had a movment sensor in it where you could record a message and every now and then it would play it when the dog moved the ball.

Other Half being slightly mean decided to record his best telling off noise, the one he uses to instantly get the dogs out of the kitchen, then then set the ball and gave it back to Henry.

As soon as Henry moved the ball it made the noise. Henry stopped dead and stared at the ball. Then he prodded it with his paw and it did it again. Then he jumped at it and it shot accross the living room followed quickly by Henry who had started barking at the ball.

A dog/ball scuffle broke out and suddenly Henry was running off with something in his mouth that was telling him to get out very loudly.

Henry had somehow expertly managed to remove the noise part of the ball and was determined to chew it up to shut it up - brilliant dog, how brainy is that?

We fell about laughing and just managed to stop the noise thing from disappearing down Henry's throat.

I think we'll only get the treat balls out now and then, I don't think my nerves could stand it every day!

More relaxing

2008-10-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

At the weekend I went to the Sea Life Center in Edinburgh and learned that sharks have no bones but cartilage instead to make them more bendy.

I'm wondering if Henry could be related to the shark family?

I also learned that sharks have five gills, I'll take a look underthe furry stripes later...

Relaxing

2008-10-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

Henry takes relaxing very seriously. Here is a picture of him lazing on the sofa while I write this. I'm not sure that dogs should actually be able to bend like this but he is still alive so I guess it's ok.

Yorkshire Puddings

2008-10-17T04:18:00.001-07:00

There is a sense of humour difference in our house today.

Yesterday we visited Other Half's Mum and Dad for dinner, we took the dogs with us and when we arrived Other Half went out to chat with his Dad while he finished cleaning his car and I had a cup of tea with his Mum and the dogs in the living room.

Other Half's son was there too so there were people spread out all over the house and driveway. Henry and Molly aren't the best at coming back if they get off the lead and because everyone was all over the place the dogs were continually pacing about trying to round everyone up which was causing me quite a bit of stress as those outside kept coming in and out and leaving doors ajar which could mean an escape attempt.

After about half an hour I decided to give Henry and Molly their dinner in an attempt to get them settled and stop driving me mad with the pacing. I fed them in the kitchen and had to supervise as there were various stages of a roast dinner about the worktops and of course that is much tastier than dog food.

For some reason Molly decided to raid Henry's bowl of food, Henry then moved round and I tried to get Molly back to her bowl, somewhere in the middle of this incedent Henry managed to produce a yorkshire pudding. It honestly just appeared in his mouth - ok there were a whole load of them sitting on the worktop just out of the oven but I really didn't see him jump up and take one.

I had a momentary panic, and decided to confess my dogs sins straight away as otherwise Other Half's Mum would think I was the yorkshire pudding rustler. I called her in and hoped I wouldn't get too told off for badly training my dogs and she immediately started to laugh saying that not just one yorkshire pud had gone but six! It was really funny because at no time had Henry been out of our sight, so how on earth he had managed to steal six yorkshire puddings and still continue to pace around the house we will never know but I am impressed with his tactics as I'd have thought that faced with a tray of warm yorkshire puddings straight out of the oven and for the taking he would have scoffed the lot at once but he must have been pacing about the living room, going past the kitching door and thinking 'I'll just slip in there and grab another one of those puds and they'll never notice'.

Stealth and skill, what a dog!

Other Half didn't see the funny side, but then again he is fairly new to life with a young Saluki Greyhound and there will be much more to come. Lucky he dosen't know that....

Satelite Stress

2008-10-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

Back in April (in the middle of house-training-hell) I came downstairs to find no accidents whatsoever. But Henry was acting very guilty, looking all too cute and wagging his tail in that special way which means he has done something he shoudn't.

As I couldn't find anything I let him out and carried on with breakfast as usual and it was only when I was tidying up for the day that I saw it. A puddle on the shelf under the tv. I really didn't beleive my eyes, how can a puddle appear on a shelf? Unless it had been but there by someone with stripey fur.

On further investigation I realised that it was exactly what I thought it was, wee. Wee on the shelf, dripped off the shelf and most of all all over the satelite box. Oh dear. I didn't really know where to start apart from disconnecting the power to make it all safe.

After thinking about it for a short time I decided to go for it, clearing up wee isn't the nicest of jobs but when it's cold and on your tv shelf it's even worse so armed with a bucket of hot soapy water and a cloth I disconnected the wires going into the back of the box and carefully lifted it, trying not to disturb the puddle. For some reason it must have had some electricity still in it as the box made my fingers tingle when I touched it.

Then I carefully wiped the box down, followed by the cables and shelf and also checking for drips onto the carpet, it was like a scene from CSI.

I decided to take a look at the inside of the box, if it was just a resistor it should be fixable but once I opened it up I discovered that several parts had really corroded - never underestimate the power of wee, it's very corrosive especially on the inside of a satelite box.

The box was unfixable (I wouldn't have had the cheek to give it to a repair man) and this was a big problem as we live in the middle of the hills in the middle of nowhere and we don't get a tv signal at all so satelite it the only way we can watch tv. I decided that tv wasn't a high priority in the entertainment stakes, after all I know of several (probably slightly mad) people who claim not to watch tv and I'm sure if they could live without it then so could I. Other Half was away with his work at the time and I had a mental list of things to do in the evenings instead of watching tv.

On the first evening without tv I go on rather well. I had my little multi frequency radio which manages to pick up Radio 4 despite the hills and I got on with painting the kitchen. The evening flew by and it was great to have go on with some well over due diy. On the second evening I did some work and some clearing out of junk. Great again, getting those jobs done that had needed doing for months. Evening three was good too, I went into the garden and did some weeding, and a bit of cleaning inside.

By evening four I was exhausted.

Either people who choose not to watch tv have high energy levels or are happy to sit and read a book without moving very much. I have neither, I can't sit still for long without a job popping up in my head and I feel guilty reading a book when there is stuff to do.

I then had a brainwave. iPlayer on the BBC. Great, brilliant, lifesaver and energy re-booster. It seemed like the answer to everything, I could watch tv and even better only watch the programmes I like. Heaven.

Except that just like the tv signal being blocked by the hills, the same hills prevent us from having a super fast broadband connection. So watching a 30 minute programme took nearly two hours with lots of stops and pauses and often dying in the middle. It was somewhat frustrating but better than exhaustion.

I endured it for nearly two months until Other Half decided he could no longer stand weekends without tv and I gave in and bought a new satelite box.

The new box was proudly installed on the shelf under the tv. Henry didn't even seem to notice. For about four weeks.

Then one morning the puddle was back. Nooooo! The box was once again dead.

I decided that if I could live before with just iPlayer for entertainment then I could do it again. This decision was mostly influenced by lack of money and having none spare to buy yet another satelite box so in reality I had no choice.

I managed another three weeks of iPlayer before spotting a fabulous portable satelite system on Ebay. It was cheap. Very cheap. But worth a shot so I bid and won and waited for it to arrive.

Once it came I opened the box and realised that I knew absolutely nothing about satelite communications and this needed some knowledge albeit basic. I waited for Other Half to come home and we had a Saturday of dishes on poles, attached to fences, wind blowing the poles down, finding a signal but only getting Brazilian tv then loosing all signals while trying to find Sky. After several hours I remembered that Henry had only peed on the receiver box, not the dish and why didn't we connect the portable receiver to the original dish? I took cover and Other Half plugged the box in.

We had tv! Yey! 700+ channels of absolute tosh. More rubbish than we could cope with and to find the more intelligent channels was like finding the old needle in a haystack. We ended up with London local news, Yorkshire ITV, Wales BBC2 and a handful of other strange chanels but at least we had tv.

Throughout all this Henry acted no different. He was oblivious to the trouble he had caused and just seemed to watch the comings and goings of various satelite boxes with total disinterest.

After we could endure the news from Hull, Kendal, Looe and Maidstone no longer we eventually bought a third Sky box. This time I dug out and old chest that was hiding away in the workshop, rubbed it down, cleaned it up and put the tv on top. The satelite box is now way out of reach of a dogs back leg high up on a shelf above the tv. It actually looks better than it did before but we won't tell Henry that in case he tries to continue with his interior decoration career.

Serious Barking and Sleeping

2008-10-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of days Henry has done some serious barking.

It started on Saturday which was very rainy. For some reason he just took to barking at absolutely everything, me, Other Half, Molly (especailly Molly), the cats on the farm, the hares in the field and the dogs on the farm.

The dogs on the farm decided to come up to the front of the house and stand on the track and bark back which was quite funny to start with but then Molly joined in and we had two dogs standing on their back legs at the window barking at two more dogs through the window who were barking back. This could only go on for so long before one of the occupants of the house had a nervous breakdown.

Then the rain wouldn't stop so we were all stuck in the house together, especially as the river burst it's banks and ran over the end of the track so unless we were up for a quick (and it would have been very quick as the water was rushing by) swim there was nowhere to go anyway. Of course the dogs didn't realise this and were trying every trick in the book to get out which for Henry involved even more barking.

Eventually as the day went on the rain slowed and I decided to take the dogs to dog training club as they had the hall for Saturday evening instead of Thursday due to a mix up.

I did mean to go to the first class of the evening but due to everyone barking and jumping up and confusing everything I ended up being half an hour late so I decided to creep into the hall and watch the first hour and then join the second class. As I opened the door a perfect class was going on, no barking (bliss) and every dog was behaving perfectly, and of course because it was so quiet everyone looked as I went in.

Having been noticed I was given the job of going up to each dog to say hello and give them a treat, now I'm a real dog person and I felt all puffed up at being asked to do such an important job so off I went around the hall being all important.

Being a real dog person I didn't worry at all about the dogs, after all they were in dog training club and everyone knows everyone and all the dogs are getting socialised so I wasn't expecting to be snapped at by the first very cute fluffy white dog who was also incedentally rather small so I immediately over-reacted and jumped back half a hall length! This attempt over I moved on to the next dog, a very very lovely lurcher who I'd never seen before, she looked at me with adoring eyes, refused my treat and growled! This really wasn't good so I quickly moved round the rest of the dogs before being told to bring Molly and Henry in to join the class.

As I said, the class was lovely and controlled and quiet, until the three of us crashed through the door. Henry started barking straight away and Molly was very insistant at going up to the lovely lady who runs the classes as she knew she had a pocket full of treats. The peace was shattered for the rest of the evening.

After the first class ended the dogs for the second class started arriving. We normally go to the second class so all the dogs know each other and for 20 minutes or so the hall was full of dogs all going around saying hello to each other and bounding to the door to greet the latest arrival. As one owner said, we could remember when we had a full social lives of our own and Saturday night was the night to get dressed up and go out partying but now it's our dogs who have all the fun! Henry of course was the noisiest, barking and howling at everyone, running around the other dogs and sidling up to the owners as he knows they all have treats in their pockets.

Once everyone had settled down we had a great lesson, both Henry and Molly walked perfectly to heel, sat, stayed, stayed while I walked accross the room, did a recall and then a silent recall and looked completely well trained. Why is it that this happens in the hall with all the other dogs and then on walks at home they are like a couple of hooligans? I'm yet to get Henry to walk to heel on a walk.

Then we all went home after extracting Other Half from the pub and for once in the weekend both dogs laid on their beds and snored away, there is nothing better in life than to look upon dogs who are fast asleep and worn out, it's a sort of blissful thing that should be bottled.

Up to Date

2008-10-09T01:15:00.000-07:00

I think at long last this blog is now just about up to date. My intentions for it were to catalogue the antics of Henry and his co-conspiritor Molly about once a week or whenever I felt like it and having spent the last few months recalling the best part of the last year I think it's safe to say that we can now start from now.

It's October 9th and the biggest part of news I can give you is that Henry seems to be completely housetrained. It's been over four weeks since he had an kind of accident in the house and he has at long last worked out that if he comes up to the bedroom in the morning I will instantly get up and let him outside for a wee - I'm not sure how he worked this out but I'm very pleased he did.

We think the biggest part in this momentous turn of events was to cut out the dogs breaksfast. Because Henry was such a skinny thing when he arrived we had to give him several meals a day. Food is Henry's biggest hobby in life and we think it was actually his stomach waking him in the morning and not his bladder (or bowels) and that once awake his system would begin to do it's stuff.

By cutting out the breakfast his stomach didn't bother waking and withing three days Henry was sleeping in until 8.00am - amazing considering he'd never managed to stay asleep much past 6.00am for the last ten months.

It wasn't easy. I began by spending a week at my parents, house training being so much easier there as the dogs slept in the room with us. I absolutely refused to feed the dogs before 8.30am. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they will always try to bring their feeding times forward by an hour and then if you give in they start trying to bring it forward by another hour and so on and so on... but it was a good start, although hard not to give in to the two of them standing at the kitchen door looking sad and hungry and trying to grind me down.

We came home from Mum and Dad's and spent a week at home before going away again in our caravan, somewhere again where the dogs sleep in close proximity to us. It was during this week that I decided to just leave out breakfast altogether. It was hard as the dogs tried every trick in the book to get some but I gave them the equivalent amount off breakfast on top of their dinner so they got the same amount of food and bingo, three days later Henry has completely forgotten about getting up at the crack of dawn and weeing everywhere. Deep joy and alleyulah!

The final test for this came this week on Monday when we had to go out at 2pm and got very delayed in coming back which meant the dogs were left in the house for 7 hours - they are never usually left at all except for a couple of hours here and there so we really expected and would have excused any accidents. But on our return we were amazed to find that neither dog had done anything. Brilliant.

As for antics and mad behaviour, Henry did try to throw himself through a stock fence yesterday after a mad hare hid quite successfully and then decided to dart out at the last minute. Other Half said that Henry would actually mince himself through the wire in the efforts to run after the hare before realising that it hurt and I think he was right. It's a bit of a nightmare round here at the moment because every few meters or so there is a hare or a couple of pheasants hiding in the hedgerows, all ready to leap out at Henry and run away. Still, it all makes for an exciting walk and also improves the muscles in my arms brilliantly.

Summertime

2008-10-05T06:09:00.001-07:00

Through the summer Henry's progress back to normal weight, health and energy was coming along brilliantly.

His coat was almost completely grown back in, there were no bald spots at all but the feathering (or what was left of it after his starvation) had all fallen out and wasn't showing signs of coming back. Certainly the fur on the back of his front legs and back legs was slightly longer than ther rest of his coat but when he arrived there were patches that were a good 3 inches but hey ho, I didn't care all I cared about was Henry being happy and healthy.

The house training was still a big issue though. He was fine if I was around but that was probably because I could let him out as and when he wanted and as it was warmer the back door was open most of the time so the dogs could wander in and out at will. He did have a habit of getting up early, (earlier than me at 6.00am) peeing and sometimes pooing in the living room and going back to bed. I was so stuck as to a solution that I honestly didn't know what to do. I'd count the non accident days as great days and would be full of hope that we'd turned a corner, only for us to go back ten steps a week or so later.

On a postitive note, Henry was behaving much better on the lead when he was out for walks, I'd still not let him off and when we first used to go walking he would be a complete nutter at the sight of a hare, rabbit, sheep, lamb or cow. He would jump up onto his hind legs and bounce along making a horrendous screaming, howling barking noise certain to bring himself to the attention of anyone within two miles. But as we saw all these animals every single day the novelty eventually wore off. We were still doing really long walks with our neighbour and I think Henry was running out of energy to take quite so much notice!

Most of the summer Henry and Molly spent their days lazing around in the garden in the sun, getting too hot and then coming to lay on the floor of my workshop until they cooled and then going back out into the sun again, a perfect summer for dogs really.

We were making a huge amount of progress with Henry and by virtue of the fact that the pace was slowing down meant that he was doing really well - if it wasn't for the house training problem I think he would be well and truly settled.

We would get there...

Don't eat all your food at once

2008-10-02T04:45:00.000-07:00

One day in May I was busy around the house. I'd been on the phone and doing all the usual house work type things that seem never to end.

The dogs were being well behaved, Molly lazying around and Henry was very quiet. In fact he was too quiet. This was usually not good news as it meant he was up to no good.

On further investigation I saw him in the yard sniffing about. He didn't seem to be doing anything wrong so I continued with what I was doing.

As I was washing up I looked out of the kitched window and realised he was still sniffing in the same area just outside the store where we keep the washing machine and dogs food etc. This was odd as it was unlike Henry to concentrate on the same thing for very long. Then I realised he seemed to be eating something, now this could mean anything so I decided to go out and investigate.

It took two steps across the yard for me to realised what Henry had been up to. He'd somehow broken into the store and got the sack of dog food down from above the washing machine. What I didn't realise straight away was that he had eaten about a weeks worth of food in one go. I had to measure what was left in the bag to work that one out and that was after I'd wrestled the bag from his jaws.

Well, I decided that no harm had been done and that Henry would just be rather full. Then after the vets had closed for the evening (I'm sure dogs do this on purpose) he started to swell up. Henry is a very skinny dog and now he looked like a skinny dog who had eaten a small football. He was obviously in a bit of discomfort so I decided I should consult the internet for advice.

The internet is never the best place for medical advice, you are either about the die in the next two days or there is absolutely nothing wrong with you and it appears the same for dogs too as the advice I found was that A)there was no need to worry or B) Henry would explode like a balloon full of half digested dog food.

Having had various contents of Henry's stomach all over the living room carpet on several occasions I rather wanted to avoid the second diagnosis so I looked further into what I should actually do. Thankfully there was one piece of very good advice and that was that if the dog has overeaten dry food then remove all access to water as it will make the food swell up inside the dog with the explosion more likely to happen.

Poor Henry was desperate for a drink and followed me around while I watered the plants in the garden, thinking back I realise this was a rather mean thing to do in the circumstances, he was that desperate for a drink that he took to trying to lick the peat in the tubs. Then I remembered that the toilet lid was up, for some bizzarre reason all my dogs have chosen to drink from the toilet and as I made my way to the bathroom Henry seemed to pre-empt me and rushed ahead shoving his head down the pan desperately drinking the water. It was really hard to try and drag him away from it as being a bendy dog he managed to wriggle free and go back to drinking the toilet water.

After the fight for the toilet which I won I then had a rather uncomfortable night of Henry trying to lay down but being so rotund from the amount of food inside him he couldn't actually lay on his side as he wobbled around like a weeble, (remember them?) so he would pace about trying to find a more comfortable position.

After an hour or so he made a bit of progress, he was sick, this was good as it got some of the food out of him so I was rather pleased with him, but then the daft dog decided to eat the sick before I could clear it up - why do dogs do that? The evening was then a routine of Henry being sick and me rushing to clear it awway before he could eat it, sometimes it was a physical struggle to get to the sick first. Something else which was mad and only a dog would do was Henry complained bitterly when he didn't get any dinner! Dogs!

By the morning though all was good, Henry looked much more sleek and less like a dog shaped football and it was clear that he had recovered from his overeating session which saved us from another visit to the vets.

He did demand his breakfast though.....

Living in hope of house training

2008-10-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

After we returned from Mum and Dads I was full of hope with the house training problems we'd been having with Henry.

Other Half clearly didn't beleive that there had been no accidents having caught me out on several occasions when I'd tried to pretend that Henry had been doing better than he had.

On our return though Henry got back into his usual routine. Waking before us, wandering around and weeing somewhere downstairs. So I got back into my own routine of waking before Henry, getting him up and putting him outside so early that he probably did it all in his sleep, I know I was barely awake. For a few days it seemed that no matter what time I got up Henry had woken before me and left a message for my descent downstairs. It was truly doing my head in, I'd now started to wake at 4.30 am to pre-empt Henry's bladder and it was taking it's toll on my sanity.

In desperation I spoke to the loveley ladies at Greyhounds Galore. Just talking to someone made me feel better, Other Half was getting less and less patient with Henry and I could see his point but on one or two occasions it was mentioned that the dog had to go if he didn't make a significant improvement. This caused rather a large argument every time which probably didn't help the situation as a whole.

The lovely lady at Greyhounds Galore gave me some good hints and tips and was just generally so nice that I felt re-charged and ready to resume the battle of the bladder once again.

So it was back to the big routine. I'd not stopped the routine but I confess I had slipped. I think it was really more down to being worn out and exhausted. I was waking at 4.30am, sometimes going back to bed and sometimes doing some work. I was then waking to let Henry out at 6.00 am and again at 7.30 and again at 8.30am and despite all that Henry was still weeing in the house. I also couldnt go to bed until at the earliest 10.30 pm as if I went too early Henry would pee within an hour of my sleeping. I was truly exhausted, grumpy and at the end of my tether, over the last four years I'd cared for two ageing dogs one after the other who had me up during the night and really stressed me just by being old and frail and after thinking it was all over I was finding it to be even harder with this new dog. I dont think being tired was helping.

Somehow after my talk I felt a bit energised and decdided to take a harder line. I would get up at 6.00am and no earlier, and stick to the routine that I'd earlier devised. I realised that Henry had manipulated me into doing what he wanted and it had to stop before I lost the plot.

I also invested a huge amount of money on anti pee spray and mega impressive anti pee smell spray. Both worked, for two days.

However, I started taking the dogs on longer and longer walks with our neighbour. Both of us had managed to slow down and put on weight and generally get unfit so we stepped up our daily walk to 8 miles a day. Henry and Molly of course took it in their strides but they also became much calmer around the house. I noticed an almost immediate change in Henry and he became allot better with the house training, maybe we had turned a corner.....

A few months after this I am writing this having spent the last three and a half weeks with absolutely no accidents whatsoever. Hopefully we are finally there and Henry has finally got the idea that weeing in the house is not good. Other Half seems to have come around to him after a long period of dislike due to the peeing and life seems to be going fine - long may it continue, especially as the Vax machine is broken, probably due to overuse.

False Teeth and Tomatoes

2008-10-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

During our stay at Mum and Dads both dogs had a great time. They had the run of the house and garden and my Mum is a real softy, giving them lots of treats and titbits which both dogs soon cottoned on to.

Henry's house training, or rather lack of it was a big worry though. I really didn't want him weeing in my parents house so I decided that the dogs would sleep in my bedroom with me. On the first night, every available floorspace in our room that wasn't covered by either furniture or dog beds was covered with big thick decorating dust sheets, just in case.

On the first night Henry got me up at 4.30am to go out for a wee. Amazing. Although it was 4.30am that was of small importance to the fact that he had actually woken me up to go out and by the end of the visit we had managed to get this wakening time to 7.30 am oh yee haa!

Also during the visit Henry didn't have one single accident, not one. Amazing. So what was so good about my parents house that wasn't in our house, I wracked my brains and came up with a big zero.

Of course food came into the picture again, this time we found out how much Henry likes salad. Whilst preparing a salad he would jump up and steal things from the work surface every time my Mum turned her back. He took a tomato here, a radish there, a couple of boiled eggs and then a whole cucumber disappeared. Mum luckily saw the funny side but ended up having to prepare food high up on top of the grill to the cooker - luckily Mum is very tall.

Then one night not long after we had gone to bed I realised I'd left the bedroom door adjar and that Henry had slunk out of the room. This was instantly followed by the realisation that there was some sort of kerrfuffle going on around the house.

I could hear Henry and also my Mum moving about and I got up to discover that Henry was running about the house with my Mum's false teeth in his mouth! Every time my Mum got near him he would spring away with the teeth parts of the false teeth on the outside of his mouth making the whole thing even more comical. It took the two of us to catch him which made it all the funnier.

The next day Henry came proudly boucing into the kitchen from the garden with a half eaten cucumber that had obviously been buried and dug up, thank goodness he didn't manage to get outside with the teeth otherwise we'd have been digging up the garden in the middle of the night to try and find them...

Holidays

2008-10-01T08:38:00.001-07:00

During March we had to go to a wedding in Surrey. This meant finding a kennel to look after Henry and Molly so after much asking around we finally found a lovely lady called Heather who runs a kennels, cattery and also rescues animals that need a home.

It was the first time Henry and Molly had been in the kennels and I was rather worried that they would be ok but Heather assured me that everything would be ok and after I finished all the paperwork we went out to the car to fetch the dogs. Once back in the kennel compound Heather took both the dogs leads and off they went without so much as a glance back at me.

So much for my worrying, both dogs were fine and actually I think they rather liked it in the kennels as they both seemed more interested in Heather than in me when I went to pick them up. So that was one big thing off the doggie owning list, a good reliable kennel where the dogs were happy.

A few weeks later I decided to go and visit my parents in Kent. I almost always drive down as I'm often quite bad at eaking out another couple of extra days in the sunshine down there. Our neighbours sister lives in London so she came along for the ride which was good company and also a great help with the dogs on the way down.

During the afternoon before while I was packing both dogs and especially Henry were looking rather unsettled, I suppose they knew something was afoot. In order to take my attention away from packing and then going away the dogs started bouncing about the house so I let them into the garden where they embarked on some mad running. It was quite funny as they were bombing about the garden like mad things barking and springing about. But then Henry took it a bit too far and ran right into Molly while barking loudly. Molly immediately took offence and snapped back at him which resulted in a loud yelp from Henry.

Henry came straight over to me like a small child about to tell you that the bog boy did it and I noticed that he had a cut on his side. On further investigation I found that it was quite a big tear and that the skin had been pulled away from his ribs, ouch!

What was more of an ouch was that I was going to Kent in 12 hours and now I had a dog with a hole in his side. My first thought were to try a bit of first aid myself. I'd been back and forth to the vets with Henry on a regular basis and I was getting a bit embaressed by it. I had a think about how I'd fix it if it was me and then realised that I'd need some of those butterfly plaster things. My brother used to work for a ship and aircraft company and he specialised in servicing the first aid and rescue equipment so we are more than prepared for a major disaster but not if it needed butterfly plasters.

After searching through two marine and one rather cool Japanese aircraft first aid pod, getting a vast amount of iodine all over my hands and becoming rather afraid of the sissors and tweezers for more serious events I gave up on the first aid kits. I did briefly consider sticking Henry together with super-glue but having tried to do this once on myself I decided against it as the risk of getting bitten was quite high on that one.

So it was off to the vets once again. The vet was as usual really nice, and Henry seemed as pleased as ever to be in there, he must be the only dog in the world to actually wag his tail and pull on the lead to get into the vets.

In his excitement Henry refused to keep still while the vet clippered the area of the tear in his side, resulting in a much bigger and quite wonky area of shaved fur, which in turn made the whole thing look much worse. The vet then got out the dreaded staple gun. This is something to make your eyes water but it is a very efficient way of fixing cuts and tears but it is rather painfull and after the third staple Henry did a big slump and gave up, it was really sad to see him just give in to the pain but two staples later and it was all over.

The vet told me to keep Henry from bouncing. Hmmmmm, not much chance of that! We also had to put one of those big white lampshades on him which we already had at home so off we went with a stapled dog to resume packing.

Once home I tried the lamp shade on Henry but it just wouldn't stay on his head. He seemed completely adept at removing it the moment I turned away so I gave up. He didn't seem too interested in the staples so hopefully they would remain unchewed.

Wrong. The phone rang, and after about five minutes I noticed Henry licking himself out of the corner of my eye and didn't think any more about it until I finished my conversation and found that he had expertly removed one of the five staples. Problem.

The problem was solved, this time by a large winter dog coat, probably two dog sizes too big for him but it fitted right over the stapled area in his side and prevented Henry from getting at the wound. Genious.

The next morning we set off with our neighbour to Kent. The dogs were really pleased at coming with us, I think they thought they were being left behind or something. The only thing I couldn't do was get Henry to wee before we set off,I'm not sure if it was wearing the big red dog coat or not but I really didn't want him weeing in the car....

After a couple of hours Molly started to fidget so we stopped for some lunch and to let the dogs out, again Henry refused to wee, this was not good, normally on a drive to Kent I'd only stop once if at all so I knew if Henry didn't wee now I'd have to stop again and the more stops the more chance we'd get of getting caught up on the M25 during rush hour.

A couple of hours further south we stopped once more and still no wees from Henry, I was begining to get some rather funny looks from people as it was quite a warm day and Henry was still wearing his huge red coat. Molly was an angel, performing almost on command and being really well behaved in the car.

We'd arranged to drop our neighbour at Stanstead so she could get the shuttle from there into London and once more I attempted to get Henry to wee. And once more he refused. This is the dog that won't go a day without having an accident in the house yet he was travelling almost the length of Britain without a single drop leaving his bladder.

We finally arrived at Mum and Dads at 5.30pm and he finally wee'ed in their garden after being there for nearly half an hour, amazing!

Molly had been to visit Mum and Dad before and it wasn't long before she had settled right into everything but Henry had never been anywhere with me to visit before so after ten minutes he started to bounce, he bounced around the house, bounced around the garden and bounced on the walk we went on before dinner to try and tire him out. Luckily Mum and Dad are great dog people so they are very tolerant of mad dogs like Henry but somehow I don't think they expected quite so much bounce!

Pot-pourri is not food

2008-10-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

Around late January early February Henry was settling in well. We still had major issues with the house training but apart from that he was improving every day. He was doing incredibly well at dog training and amazingly for me I was keeping it up at home too so he was turning into the best behaved dog I'd ever owned. He was also sleeping through the night but I was still having to get up at the crack of dawn to beat his bladder to the back door every morning.

The one thing Henry was still mad about was food. He was still slightly underweight and his main interest in life was finding anything that was vaguely edible, this included any type of vegetable (cooked or uncooked), anything run over and long dead on the road, raiding the compost heap and also the kitchen bin.

One thing we weren't banking on was that Henry would go on a night time scavange hunt into areas of the house that even we had forgotten about. This resulted in him managing to squeeze into the six inch wide gap that ran along the back of the sofa to retreive some long lost, non smelly (to us) pot-pourri that I'd temporarily placed there when we moved in after failing to find a home for it and promptly forgotten about.

Apparently to Henry this was a great find, it was various colours of orange and brown with some sprayed gold bits and made up of very exotic dried fruits and seed pods. It was really quite nice to look at and very decorative and most definately not edible.

So Henry ate it. Not quite all of it but about three quarters of a dinner plate full.

I was awoken by him wimpering at the bottom of the stairs followed by the unmistakeable sound of retching. I wasn't too worried, dogs are sick all the time and it seems mostly for no reason so I was instantly shocked to seem several orange patches of sick all over the living room carpet and even a couple up the cream coloured sofas. This was projectile sick in doggie form and it wasn't good.

I let Henry out into the garden and started to clean up the sick. It wasn't cleaning up very well, the sick was coming up (excuse the pun) but the orange dye wasn't. I had orange blobs all over the living room and to make matters worse Henry came in from the garden and was promptly sick once again on the carpet.

I decided the best thing was to not feed Henry for a day and let the pot-pourri work it's way through his system so I dug out one of the big dust sheets to protect what was left of the carpet and kept an eye on him.

He was fine for the rest of the day, rather listless but still interested in food which I saw as a good sign but as the evening wore on he seemed to get more and more ill. It was by now too late to call the vet so I decided to sleep on the sofa downstairs with him until it was time for the vet to open.

By the next morning poor Henry looked very sorry for himself, he was looking very skinny and downtrodden and the vet decided to take him in and keep him at the surgery. He ended up staying for three days. This was a very good lesson in getting your dog insured and I felt releived that that was one of the first things I did when I got Henry.

On the fourth day Henry came home. It looked as though all the weight he'd put on since I'd got him had been lost and we once again had a skinny ribby dog who despite everything he'd managed to put himself through was still bouncing! And eating.....

Snow Dogs

2008-09-21T01:23:00.000-07:00

Just after Christmas it snowed! We get fairly big snow here as we are about 1000 feet above sea level so it's also very cold at times so getting lots of snow makes up for the lack of sunshine (well sort of).

Anyway, on the morning of the first day of snow I woke up and went downstairs to let the dogs out and on opening the back door they were just so funny. Neither dog seemed to have seen snow before, both of them usually go rushing out the door in a hurry to get sniffing round the garden but this time they just kept looking at the snow in the sky and watching it fall to the ground. They then tentatively stepped outside and both got snow on the end of their noses as they sniffed this strange cold white stuff that had suddenly appeared.

And then they went into snow dog mode.

Snow dog mode is a super fast accelerated version of a normal dog except this mode only happens when it snows. There is a similar mode for sandy beaches. Both dogs run madly round and round, leaping and jumping and smiling loads. It's so funny and lots of fun. For some bizarre reason Molly kept laying in the snow and rolling in it and then springing back up to belt round the garden again. And the very best thing about snow mode is that there are no muddly paws to clean before they can come back indoors.

Big and Wee Problems

2008-09-20T02:39:00.000-07:00

When Henry came to stay he wasn't house-trained. In fact he'd never been in a house before so we had the mamouth task of trying to house-train him.

It's not as easy training a dog that has passed the cute and cuddly puppy stage, even if technically they are still a big pup as they have learned that it dosen't matter where they go and in some cases if they wee all over the house it makes them feel more secure. But I am a patient person and was fully prepared to overcome all of Henry's problems until he became a super-dog.

During the first few days it was miracle if Henry went to the loo outside. Every night and after every meal and playtime and first thing in the morning I would put him on his lead and walk round and round the garden with him until he perfomed. This worked well when the weather was nice but most of the time during the winter here it blows about 60mph winds with sideways rain, I certainly didn't want to be out in it and I have a big winter coat to wear. For a small skinny balding dog it certainly wasn't much fun at all and he spent most of the time outside trying to get back in.

He was also scared of the wind. You can here it coming from the end of the valley 2.5 miles away and it wooooshes up into the side of the house and every time that happened Henry would croutch down and cower so that didn't make house-training any easier.

Henry also seemed to have a bit of a communication problem. Molly has learned that if she paces around the living room we know she wants to go outside. Henry wanders about, runs about, throws himself about, barks, whines, laughs, lays down, trots and bounces all the time. So you spend most of the time letting him out and he dosen't want to go and then you go into another room to find that he has been to the loo in there and that was what the last batch of energy was all about. There was no consistancy about it and we were trying to work him out while he was trying to work us out, it wasn't easy.

Then we started to turn a corner. I noticed that his 'accidents' had pretty much stopped during the day. I work from home so I'm around all the time which I had thought would be great for settling a new dog in. But as soon as I told Other Half that the accidents were getting fewer Henry would go aack 6 steps and start doing it again. I was totally stuck and didn't know what to do.

I tried every solution possible from 'Get Off' sprays to stop him from wanting to wee on things (which worked for about 4 hours and then he just wee'd on them anyway) to wee disolving solutions designed to clear up the wee and destroy the scent left by it, to making home made solutions of lemon juice and spraying that about the place and trying to cover rotten smells with all sorts of anti bacterial air fresheners. Our house was begining to smell like a kennel and I was exhausting myself trying to sort it out while Henry was exhausting himself trying to keep it smelly. If there was a house-training product or technique I had tried it. And Henry had ignored it.

Finally after five months I took him to the vets. I was trying very hard not to burst into tears as I told the vet about the problem. I wasn't being emotional, I was simply worn out by it all.

The vet listened and made nice noises about getting it sorted out which made me feel so much better. She then gave Henry a good going over, taking some samples etc just in case there was a medical problem at the bottom of this - no pun intended!

There was no medical cause. Part of me felt releived, most of me felt totally deflated that the problem couldn't be solved overnight with a couple of tablets, although actually it wouldn't be great if it was medical for Henry's sake.

On seeing my deflation, the vet then had a really long chat with me about routines and feeding and patience and actually this made me feel lots better and on leaving the surgery I felt re-energised and ready to fight the canine sewerage battle anew. I was also armed with two bottles of super dooper industrial strength wee and poo smell and scent destroyer (which were half the price of all the other stuff I 'd tried).

So off home we went, Henry sitting in the back of the car looking rather insulted by the whole experience.

Back home I got to work with the spray. It smelt of marzipan. Rather odd but I didn't care. Once I'd gone around on my hands and knees sniffing the entire carpet for smelly bits and exterminated the smell I felt so muhc happier. I gave it a night and asked my neighbour to come down the track for a smell test. When she walked in she announced that it didn't smell of wee in our house any more yippeeee! It did smell of marzipan but who cared, it didn't smell of wee.

Strangely Henry hadn't had an accident that night either so I had a blissful morning of no clearing up before my breakfast, oh what joy!

Bouncing Furry Legs

2008-09-19T01:11:00.000-07:00

It was on my cousins return visit from Durness that we realised Henry had begun to turn a corner with his body.

My cousin noticed that he was ever so slightly less skinny and there was the beginings of fur appearing on his legs. I suppose that being with him every day I hadn't noticed this but it was a major turning point for Henry and his recovery from near starvation. These pictures of him a short while later as for the first few weeks of his life with us my camera wasn't working and so the only really bald pictures we have are on a mobile phone but you should be able to see that his back legs are still very sparse and the lower parts of his front legs are the same.

In fact he was so skinny and so cold because of his lack of fur that he had to wear his lovely thick fleece coat all the time even when he was indoors and he had to wear another one on top when he went outside. Every evening he would curl up next to me, really close and I'd hold his poor skinny bald legs to keep them warm, he was a total heart breaker and all I could do was love him loads.

It was around this time that he started to become bouncy. And I mean really bouncy. He seemed to love having my cousin and family to stay, perhaps it was an extended pack thing but he really started to come out of himself, chasing balls, socks, anything really and it was about this time that he started to perfect his 'wind you in the stomach' leap. This involved (and still does) running at you full pelt, jumping into the air and poking you in the stomach with his front legs. It' a bit hard to describe how he does it exactly as he does a sort of extra jump on his back legs just as he does it, but it just about knocks you out! It seems to be his 'special' way of saying hello and over the last few months I've learned to very skillfully avoid it!

He also learnt to leap onto the windowsill with the skill and grace of a mountain goat. (In fact some neighbours have got goats and the way they move is very similar to Henry) he leaps with all four paws onto the arm of the sofa and then stretches his front legs accross the gap onto the windowsill to look outside. It's quite amazing to watch and rather funny when someone is sitting at that end of the sofa as a rather big dog springs onto the arm.

The main problem with this is having to constantly clean the dog art from the window, left there by Henry's nose and also being ready to clear up spilt tea from suprised visitors.

I suppose he shouldn't really be allowed to do it at all but it is rather funny to watch.

So, Henry the Leaphound was christened.

Full Scottish Breakfast & Black Pudding

2008-09-16T00:47:00.000-07:00

A few days before Christmas my cousin, her husband and Mum, plus two rather large German Shepherds were coming to stay on their way up to Durness were they were to spend the holidays.

Once they arrived we tried to get all the dogs together to see how it would go, we had a contingency plan just in case they didn't like each other.

The German shepherds were huge, I mean really huge, much bigger than I remembered and Henry and Molly sniffed around them while they stoated about the garden, all dogs were on their leads,just in case. Molly was fine, she wasn't bothered about playing or jumping around, she just said hello and went off and left them to it. Henry of course was a different case. He jumped about the shepherds, they tolerated him, just. Then the big male shepherd got fed up with him and we all realised that Henry wouldn't even make a dinner for him, and not even a small snack, he'd just be a mini dog treat as he seemed so skinny in comparison. We decided that the dogs would all end up having a massive fight and a visit to the vets was not what any of us wanted just before Christmas so we resorted to keeping one pair of dogs in another room and the others in the living room with us and swapping them about every half hour or so. Needless to say, the shepherds were incredibly well behaved, so settled and took everything in their stride, I was completely in awe of them and wished my dog training skills were up to that standard!

The next morning I got up early to make everyone a huge Scottish breakfast complete with black and fruit pudding which everyone enjoyed. All too soon it was time for our lovely visitors to get going on their long trip, so we helped them with their stuff and waved goodbye, ready for the next round of Christmas visitors, Other Halfs parents who were coming down the next day.

When I went back into the house I found various contents of the kitchen bin strewn accross the kitchen, hall and living room floors. Then I noticed one of the little plastic strips that they put around the fruit and black puddings. I immediately did a mental calculation of how many strips there should be and found that there were 8 missing! They were nowhere to be seen so the only place they could be was inside a dog, but which dog?

I didn't panic, after all I've had dogs for years and they eat all sorts of things without a problem but I decided I should call the vet just in case. The vet said to bring the dogs straight to the surgery as the plastic rings could get caught in the dogs gut and cause some major problems. So I had to leave all the beds unchanged, bundle the dogs into the car and run to the vets. Molly is often car sick so I tried to drive very badly to encourage her but of course this was one of those journeys where she behaved impeccably and wasn't sick at all!

Once at the vets the dogs were taken straight through to a special room with kennels in it and I had to hold the dogs while the vet administered masses of bicarbinate of soda and water to them. We then put the dogs in the kennels and waited. The vet said the result was usually fairly instant and that it woudln't be long before we found the plastic rings again.

However the dogs had other ideas. They looked extremely insulted at what had just happened to them and stood there looking very indignant indeed. We waited, and waited, the bicarb made the dogs blow up like a pair of odd balloons but still nothing happened.

After a long time the vet said the only thing we could do was try to hurry the digestion process along by trying liquid parafin which the dogs were duly dosed with. After speaking with the vet I decided to take the dogs home, armed with all the symptoms if anything should happen and also a small bottle of liquid parafin. I also promised to try and find the rings once they were expelled.

Thus began the mystery of the disappearing plastic rings. The dogs were fine, no adverse affects to either the bicarb or parafin, most dogs would have been laying with their legs in the air doing impressions of an exploding sewer works, but oh no, my dogs did nothing at all. I then had to spend the next few days (including Christmas day) picking through all expellations (the only polite word I can think of at this moment) to find the plastic rings and they never appeared. Never.

It seems that the plastic rings around black pudding and fruit pudding from Tescos must be dissolvable as several months later the dogs are still alive dispite never finding them....

We wish you a merry Christmas

2008-09-16T00:35:00.001-07:00

We'd had Henry for three weeks when Christmas was upon us.

We had deffered putting up the tree for as long as possible as we just knew that we would be wakened in the dead of night to the sound of it crashing to the floor with a dog in the middle of it, but we could put it off no more. This was to be the first Christmas in this house so the first thing we had to do was locate the tree and decorations. Henry of course was very interested in all of this and followed us around while we tried to find the boxes.

We live in a rather old cottage where the upstairs rooms are part of the roof, this means that there is a sort of tunnel which runs around the rooms upstairs, all around the upper part of the house. We found the tree and deccorations just inside one of the hatches to the tunnel. We also saw a stripey tail disappearing into the tunnel once we'd pulled the boxes out.

Thankfully we managed to catch hold of Henrys tail just before it completely disappeared and managed to pull him back through the hatch - I had visions of calling the fire brigade and of them crawling round and round the roof of the house while Henry ran round and round just ahead of them, that and it all being filmed by Animal Rescue and being made to feel like a bad pet owner.

Putting the tree up was actually not quite as bad as we expected. Henry and also Molly kept putting their heads into boxes and trying to work out what was going on but all in all they took to having a mini part of the forest outside all in their stride.

Night time was also a bit of a suprise as the tree remained standing, the decorations along the fireplace had all been removed and thrown around the living room, killed and then left but apart from that we were very very pleased. Fergus always used to wee up the Christmas tree in his efforts to continually terrorise Other Half and we had remembered to unplug all the lights, just in case!

Things were looking promising for Christmas yey!

Two Steps Forward....

2008-09-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks of saintly patience we seemed to be getting somewhere with Henry's night time anctics. He had finally quietened down and had stopped all the barking and howling and running around for no reason in the middle of the night.

The difference this made to my sleep pattern was amazing, finally I could go to sleep at 10.30 and stay asleep until 6.00am, just about a whole nights sleep.

The house training wasn't really coming along though, well it was a bit but nowhere near as well as it should have been and I needed to keep my eyes glued to Henry all the time otherwise he would go off and leave a nice smelly present for me, usually in the middle of the living room floor.

One of Henry's other mad habits was eating. I dont mean eating like a normal dog, Henry eats like a mad thing, as if he's never eaten before in his life. I suppose that being starved to within an inch of your life would make you slightly obssessed with getting every morsel of food that you can but Henry had taken this to extremes.

One of my little luxuries in life had been eating my breakfast on the sofa in the living room whilst watching the news on tv. Not any more! On emerging from kitchen with my bowl of cornflakes and milk Henry would do a very good impression of a merecat on his hindlegs whilst walking backwards and trying to get his nose into my bowl all at the same time. Being a rather big dog this meant I had to hold the bowl up above my head.

Sitting on the sofa for breakfast was a complete hazard, Henry had absolutely no manners whatsoever and tried to simply push his way past my fending off legs and eat the contents of the bowl. First thing in the morning just after I had cleaned up the nightly poo and pee and been jumped over the last thing I felt like doing was fighting with a dog for my breakfast so I took to eating in the kitchen with the door firmly shut and Radio 4 for company.

This didn't really solve anything though as it meant that no-one could eat anything in the living room, not even a chewy toffee without Henry on their lap trying to extract it from their mouth so I decided I should persist with the sofa breakfasts.

It took a few mornings but it finally paid off, I started off by standing up and holding the bowl high in the air between spoonfuls, then I progressed to sitting on the arm of the sofa using my legs to fend Henry off. After a couple of days I eventually sat on the sofa, again using my legs to fend him off at one stage he ended up standing on the sofa back looming over me from behind but I still wouldn't give in.

And eventually I could go back to my morning tv and bowl of cereal without a dogs nose in the bowl.

Progress

2008-08-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

Despite the lightheartedness of previous entries into this blog life with Henry was hard work. I'm a really patient person when it comes to animals, realising that they cannot speak and usually any trouble they are in is due to us humans. So faced with a dog who had been so badly neglected as Henry my patience was super high.

My sleep levels weren't. Every night I would let Henry and Molly out for a pee last thing before we went to bed. I'd settle the dogs down on their beds, pull the living room door to and go to my own bed.

After five minutes Henry would get up, wander around and start to howl, bark, cry, whine, jump, run and generally cause havoc. Other Half had said he didn't want dogs in the bedroom so I had to close the door over but I think this was what was making Henry get all stressed. I persisted nonetheless as Molly was quite happy downstairs and I was sure Henry would settle in time.

The barking and howling was rather hard to sleep to though and it would go on for hours every single night, then he would settle down at about 2 or 3am only to start again at around 5.30am.

I'd get up at around 6ish, get a rapturous welcome of a two springing stripey hounds jumping up like mad things the moment I opened the door (Molly never used to do that) and find all sorts of deposits left for me by Henry.

It wasn't easy, as cleaning up dog poo, dog pee and avoiding getting jumped all over first thing in the morning by two very big dogs can test the patience of a saint, beleive me.

So after a few nights, Other Half decided he wasn't putting up with the howling and barking any more and he yelled at Henry to shut up at about 12.30am. It worked. I was amazed. But I still had to clear up the poo and pee the next morning, and avoid the mad jumping up and he was still starting to howl and bark at 5.30am.

My patience persisted though, and my progress was getting nowhere, at one point I decided I must be the most patient person in the world as surely no-one could be so sleep deprived and still happily clean up poo in their pyjamas at 6.40am ever morning.

I really didn't know what else to do other than be patient. I was sure Henry would settle down eventually, in the 6 months he had been alive he had been with his mother, then gone to another home, then left to wander and fend for himself, then picked up by the dog warden, put into the dog pound, put on death row, given a repreive by the lovely ladies at Greyhounds Galore, put into their kennel and and then come to live with me. That was five homes (that I know of) in six months and he was still really a big pup who no-one had bothered to socialise, train or let him know what was expected of him so to be patient with him was all I could do for him just now until he settled.

I'm Henry the 8th I am I am

2008-08-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

By now we'd had the new dog five days. He still didn't have a name and he still wasn't housetrained. Ok I didn't expect him to be housetrained by now but he really should have a name.

I had decided against FergusII as this dog just was Fergus and it seemed wrong to Fergus to semi erase him by giving his name to another dog. But that left me with a problem because for years I'd always said I'd call my next dog FergsII, so I was on the hunt for another name.

I decided to look up baby naming websites as I thought this was as good a place as any to get a name but have you seen how many names are out there? It was impossible, espcecially as the dog was holding back on his personality due to so much happening to him in a week, although he was showing slight signs of the madness attached to all the dogs I've had.

There were lots of things to consider in choosing the dogs name, would it be badly out of fashion in a few years? Would I always have to explain why I called him what I did? Would I always have to spell it at the vets, groomers etc? Would it sound ridiculous being shouted out loud in public?

So many dilemas and without a single idea.

I decided to start at A and work my way through the alphabet until somthing hit me.

To start with I tried Fergus. This only proved to make Molly come tearing up to me looking for Fergus. Other half suggested Taxi in response to the calling out loud in public problem, but he wasn't a taxi he was a dog! I quite fancied Saluk as he is a half (or more Saluki) but Other Half said that was just silly. So again I was stuck.

Then a trailer for the BBC series The Tudors came on tv. I'm really into history and while Jonathan Rhys Myers was breifly on the screen it came to me in a flash. Henry the 8th had ginger hair. The new dog has ginger fur (with stripes which I'm sure Henry the 8th didn't have but you never know) and I'm really into history so there it was.

I went out into the garden with the dog and as he wandered around I called Henry and he came bombing up to me so the decision had been made, Henry was here. Henry the Leaphound was yet to make himself apparent.

Sit and Stay!

2008-07-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

Four days after getting the dog I decided to take him to the local dog training class. It was a puppy group but as he wa about 6 months old they let him join. I was very determined to get it right with this dog as Fergus never ever came back and would look back and grin at me as he ran at 45 miles an hour away from me. The consequense of this was I could never let him off the lead in 14 years, even two weeks before he died he used to get turbo boosts on when I thought he was old and slow enough to be trusted and I'd have to leg it as fast as I could to catch him.

It was also very stressful when people came to visit as they would do unpredicatable things like go out to their car without telling you, leaving the front door on the latch and the garden gate wide open. Several times I had to drive about trying to catch him as he seemed to like the car and it was the only way to keep up with him (we once clocked him running at 45mph) and when I did he would leap into the car as if I was his chauffer.

So off to training we went.

We walked in and every other dog was a rather expensive pedigree and here was I with a rather mangy, half bald, skinny as a stick lurcher on the end of a lead. Oh dear.

Never fear, everyone was so friendly and even though my dog looked a tad infectious everyone let their dogs say hello which was so nice.

The class went well, I think the dog did better then I did as I kept tripping up and over the dog and generally doing the wrong thing but we agreed to go back the next week and at the time of writing we've been going for 8 months now and enjoyed every single class.

I think the main reason for the dog to like the class was the sausages we used as treats. Being half starved he would do anything for the minutest piece of sausage so the whole thing seemed a bit of a doddle to some point but my fingers were rather chewed from him trying to get at the meat and mistaking my fingers.

Off to the Vets

2008-07-31T09:26:00.001-07:00

We got the new dog on Sunday and on Monday I took him along to our vets to be checked out and chipped.

I opened the back of my car and he leaped in, much higher than he needed to and nearly bashed his head on the roof of the boot! As we drove to the vets he sat bolt upright and very regally in the boot, looking around him and taking everything in. It apepared he seemed to like going in the car which was great.

On arriving at the vets I walked to the back of the car, started opening the tailgate and before I knew what hit me a dog was sitting over my face on my shoulders! He had leaped out at such a speed that I hadn't even finished opening the tailgate and how he was managing to balance almost on my head I really didn't know.

I managed to get him onto the ground and got some very odd looks from other people parking their cars.

The vet was really concerned about his weight, he really was skinny, and we agreed that I'd bring him in once a week to be weighed until he reached a healthy weight. On his first visit he weighed under 18 kilos and he should have been between 25 and 28 kilos. She then went through all the flea and worming treatments that I'd have to give him and when she did the micro chip she asked what his name would be and I had to answer that I didn't know.

I always thought my next dog would be called FergusII after all FergusI was a great dog and in my opinion he had a great name but Other Half said this would be wrong and now I was on the spot I knew he was right as the dog wasn't Fergus at all. The vet let me decide and let her know the next time we were in so I was under pressure to get thinking.

One thing I asked was if it was ok to give the dog a bath as he was still very smellly and she said it was fine, oh yeee ha!

Strangely the dog seemed to like the vets, it may have been because everybody who saw him immediately went 'awww, look at him, poor thing. What happened?' after which the dog got allot of fuss and a couple of people including the vet gave him treats so of course he thought this was great.

It was a bit difficult being out in public with him though as his legs were completely bald and his body so skinny it was hard to see how he managed to stand up. The skin on his legs and lower body was also covered in lots of red sores like spots and he looked dreadfull poor chap. The worst thing was the thought that people were thinking it was me who had let him get into this state.

We then went home and I started administering the various deadly potions from the vets which I hoped would not have any dire effects on the rear end of the dog while I tried hard to think of a name for him.

What Candles?

2008-07-29T14:48:00.001-07:00

I was woken with a start very early the next morning. At 5.00am to be precise to a morning chorus of the howling bark and lots of jumping style movement so I decided to go downstairs to see what was happening.

As I gingerly opened the living room door the first thing that hit me was the new dog. He literally threw himself at me and being a rather large skinny boney dog it was rather painful.

As I tried to make my way into the room I was accompanied by a bouncing dog throwing himself at me and almost trying to climb onto me as I walked.

It was then that I realised that he had needed the toilet, both types. The living room carpet had taken a beating and whilst trying to fend the dog off I realised that he would tread in it if I wasn't careful and dog poo on your PJ's is not a good mix.

I put my big winter coat and wellies on and put the dog on his lead and took him outside to walk around the garden to see if he needed the loo. He did. Where was it all coming from? He'd only been a few hours before when we went to bed and again during the night. It must be nerves.

We went back in and after removing the big coat I set about cleaning up and I then realised that it was not only poo and pee on the carpet but little metal things all over it too. It took me a moment to realised what they were. They were the chewed up metal covers to tea lights without the candles in them.

Where were the candles? I kept a basket full of tea lights on a low shelf as we get a lot of power cuts out here in the sticks and never gave them a thought when we went to bed. I could see the teeth marks in the metal pieces but there were no signs of the wax candles. Then I realised.......the candles were in the dog.....

I hurrily started to try to piece together the metal pieces to try to establish exactly how many candles had gone, all the while the dog was intently watching me. After five I started to worry. I got to 14.

Sitting there at 5.10am I really didn't know what to do. The dog seemed fine and the candles weren't scented to it was just solidified parafin wax that he had eaten so surely it couldn't do him much harm? It was too early to call the vet, or at least it didn't seem much of an emergency to disturb the vet at this time of the morning so I decided to wait and see and got on with the poo cleaning.

Once I'd cleaned upI fed the dogs their breakfast which was wolfed down, took the dogs into the garden again and then I decided to get some breakfast. At the time I used to get a bowl of ceral and perch on the sofa in the living room and watch early morning tv while I ate it. Not any more!

As I came out of the kitchen zebedee started again. He was actually walking and jumping up on his back legs trying to get the cereal out of the bowl even before I had sat down. It was impossible, as I sat he climbed all over me to try and get the food, he was so hungry he didn't care what he did to get food , undertandable if you've been starved, a complete pain if you haven't and you are trying to eat breakfast to GMTV.

I gave up and went into the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind me and I ate breakfast in the kitchen at the table for the first time in years..

Shortly after breakfast it became aparent that new dog wanted to go to the loo so once again I pulled on the big winter coat and took him into the garden and found out just were the candles had been hiding.

It was interesting scooping the poop later that morning, it was more like scooping poop shaped candles and that was really what was coming out of the rear end of the dog and the cold air was solidifying it. I can now say that 14 tea lights had no effect whatsoever apart from giving him a bit of a clear out and making the garden poop scooping slightly more interesting and less smelly than usual!

Jounrey to the North from the North

2008-07-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

The lovely ladies at Grehounds Galore telephoned to say I could go the next day to see the Saluki Cross. By this time I was getting quite excited at the prospect of getting a new dog and the pangs of not wanting another one were almost wearing off.

We had to travel from Southern Scotland to North Yorkshire, a not insignificant journey so we set off good and early the next day with plenty of goodies to eat on the way and Molly in the back looking rather perplexed as to why we had put the dog guard seperator in the boot as we'd nornally only do that for holidays and friends dogs to make two compartments.

We finally arrived at our destination to a very warm welcome and were taken straight to see the dog. He was kennelled with another dog, a small black greyhound who was absolutely lovely. I was slightly taken aback at how skinny the Saluki cross was and rather shocked to see that he had no fur on any of his legs. He really was in a bad way and his current condition was much improved from when he had been taken from the dog pound after the threat of being put to sleep if nobody could rescue him.

He was wearing a very cosy coat and it seemed cruel to take it off to inspect him and I just knew that the nice ladies had looked after him so well that I just said we would take him there and then. I think Other Half had expected to go off and discuss the matter but even he felt sorry for the dog. We then got Molly from the car and introduced the dogs to each other. To this day I feel rather guilty as it seemed she preferred the Greyhound to the Saluki cross but we had made up our minds and as they didn't dislike each other either it didn't seem too bad.

Then the most heartbreaking thing happened. We went to put Molly and the new dog in the back of the car and the Greyhound cried and cried and howled and barked. He so didn't want to be left behind, it was truly awful and if we had had space for three he would have come with us as it really was one of the worst things I've ever been through to walk away and leave him there.

It turned out that some weeks later the Grehound found a home with a lady who absolutely adores him so I feel much better now but I still feel the guilt when I think of him crying that afternoon.

We then sorted out all the formalities (I must point out that I'd ommitted to say that we had to get a reference from our vet and prove we had a well fenced garden etc and that the dogs would not be left alone for hours on end etc before we could take a dog home) and got into the car and started making our way home.

The first thing that hit us when we closed the car doors was the smell. It was dreadfull. And it was coming from the new dog who was looking very regal in the rear of the car but smelling very badly. Molly was looking suitably disgusted and promptly ignored him through the seperator. It was very cold but we had to open the windows to let the smell out, it was hard to discribe, probably the best way is that it was a very strong dog smell but even that discription dosen't do it justice as to the strength of it.

After a few miles the new dog settled down and went to sleep, it was almost as though he had given up on his own life and that he was just accepting whatever happened to him.

We got home in the evening and let the dogs into the house, Molly settled on her bed and the new dog ran around, and around and around. I know that dogs have to investigate a new place but this dog did it at super high speed.

We deicded to feed them and goodness me, the new dog ate his food at lightning speed! It was gone almost before he looked at it. He then went outside to do his business and came back in and started the high speed investigating once again.

The high speed investigating went on for four hours. It drove us mad. It was only interrupted for a short while when we switched the television on. This was really funny, the new dog had obvioulsy never been in a house before let alone seen a television and he just couldn't understand it. He stood in front of it with his ears cocked moving his head from left to right, then went round the back to try and find the people who were inside it. Once he realised that he couldn't work it out he went back to the high speed investigating of everything else.

Probably the worst thing about all this was that the high speed investigating was wafting the smell around the whole house. We couldn't wash him the moment he came in as that would be a bit much, and we also decided not to take his coat off as it was very cosy and on inspection it appeared that what fur he did have was rather sparse and he would be very cold without it even indoors and the coat smelt almost worse than he did. We decided to put up with it and invest in some strong air fresheners the next day until we could bathe him and wash his coat.

Later we went to bed. The dogs went out, did what they had to do, the new one on a lead so that we could make sure and we all went to bed, the dogs downstairs and us upstairs.

All was quiet.

Not for long.

After about 30 minutes he started to howl. Then bark. Then howl. Then a very odd barking howl. It was very loud.

I had read somewhere that it would do no good to give in and go down to him so I tried to ignore him. It went on, and on , and on.....I gave in and went down and was given the most raptourous welcome known to man. I settled him down and went back to bed.

All was quiet again and again not for long. We went through this routine several times until my ears stopped working through exhaustion and I fell asleep.

Fergus - The Begining

2008-07-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

This is Henry's story. He is a beautiful Saluki cross Greyhound with mad stripes and an even madder brain. He moves very fast and eats even faster, he is my friend, my personal security center and he makes me laugh every day.

Henry's story wouldn't be complete without starting at the begining before Henry came about. Henry was preceded by Fergus, mad, beautiful, funny and my very best friend. He was also a Saluki cross Greyhound and he is the reason I have Henry.

I got Fergus from a rescue center in Kent. He had been badly abused, burnt with ciggarettes, kicked, starved and generally not treated well. I was told he would be a cruely case if they could find the previous owners but of course they never did. But Fergus had his revenge, he came to live with me and my ex in a lovely country house in the Kentish countryside, he had a giant garden to make his own running track, his own 4x4 to cruise around in and a lifelong mate in Bonnie the Gorgeous Greyhound. Fergus had a better life than the scum that ill-treated him and he deserved it.

14 years on and life had moved on. Fergus, Bonnie and I had moved to Scotland, leaving behind the old life and starting afresh. Bonnie had died in 2007 at the grand age of almost 15 from simply wearing out and Ferg went on another 18 months finally wearing out last November after a summer spent laying in the sun with his new mate Molly the Mad Greyhound in our lovely cottage in the hills. He loved life and terrorised all who tried to tame him and make him a 'normal' dog. For three weeks after he died I didn't laugh at all.....

Lonely Grehound

2008-07-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Fergus my first Saluki Greyhound had died on Bonfire Day 2007. Molly the Greyhound, his mate was sad. In fact she was sad, I was sad and even Other Half, the subject of 'Ferg Terrorising' for several years was sad.

In my sadness I had resolved not to have another dog. Be sensible, stick to just one, it made life much easier, I could have a hand free on walks, not get dragged in two different directions and the food, vet and kennelling bills would be halved. It made sense both financially and generally, two dogs were hard work, they took up twice the amount of space and caused twice the amount of trouble. I definately was not going to get another dog.

Then I started to browse the internet to 'look' at Salukis. Only to look, not to buy or rescue or anything, just a perusal just to see. I also decided to investigate dog training classes for Molly as she was ever so slightly deranged and we'd never really put the effort in as she had basically followed Fergus and learned from him.

It was a week after Ferg had died whilst looking for dog training classes that I came accross Dumfries & Galloway Canine Rescue. They had lots of interesting things on their sites, including dog training but also there was a button to press to view the dogs that needed homes. DON'T DO IT!!!! DON'T PRESS THE BUTTON!!!!!!!!.............................I pressed the button.

It was heartbreaking, so many dogs needing homes and none of it their fault. It made me cry and I tried to stay detached. Then I saw a big shaggy Lurcher. He was lovely, a giant version of Scruffy, the dog I had as a child. Oh what a dilema. I didn't want another dog. But I had space, love and so much doggy paraphenalia that it seemed wrong not to get another dog. Agggghhhhh, I didn't want another dog!

I switched off the computer and tried to put it out of my mind which lasted all of 5 minutes. When I switched on again I tried to distract myself by looking at pictures of Salukis again and then came up with the idea that I would break the bank and get a real Saluki puppy. Not a rescue but a complete blank slate, small and gorgeous, sweet and trainable. But I didn't want another dog.

I managed to survive a few more days but gave in once more and decided to look into getting a Saluki pup. Well it appears to be easier to take a holiday on Mars. I found some breeders websites but none seemed to have any litters. I tried to email a few people to enquire about the cost of a Saluki pup but got no reply - this could have been my dodgy email account but it didn't help. One site even wanted people to explain why prospective owners thought they should be lucky enough to have a Saluki grace them with their presence in their life! Goodness me.

I then found out that there are an almost impossibly small number of pups born each year, something like 140 - and that made the decision, what chance realistically would I have of getting one? Probably none and even if I did goodness knows how much one would cost. So that idea was out of the window. And I didn't want another dog anyway.

I then had another idea. Saluki rescue. I tried to email and again no reply. Bloody email! Mine works most of the time and every now and then won't send anything out. So I tried searching for rescue organisations and quickly came accross www.greyhoundsgalore.org.uk as they were advertising a young male Saluki cross who'd been in a bad way when they picked him up. There was a picture. It hit me in the head so hard I nearly fell off the sofa, it was a perfect cross between Molly and Fergus, this lovely dog had Fergus's eyes and ears and Molly's stripes and gaze, what a wonderful combination, how could I reisist.

I still didn't know if I wanted another dog. Note the progression from not wanting another dog.

Other half by this time had had two weeks of me saying I didn't want another dog but constantly showing him pictures of the shaggy Lurcher and the Saluki cross. In the end he broke and demanded that I choose one of them and we would go and get it at the weekend. I protested, I really didn't want another dog, the heartache after loosing Ferg and Bonnie was too much to go through all over again.

Then I looked at Molly. She was laying on her bed gazing up at me with her huge sad eyes. She looked sad. She looked lonely and over the last couple of weeks she had really pined for Fergus, probably more than the humans in the house. It was though she was saying to me that she wanted a mate, a friend to run around with and get up to all sorts of mischief and continue the legacy of terrorising Other Half. She was spending her days on her bed in the living room while I went about my work in the workshop outside. She didn't want to come with me and lay under my bench, all she wanted to do was nothing. It was so sad.

That was the decider for me. Molly needed another dog even if I was unsure so I phoned Dumfries and Galloway rescue to ask about the shaggy Lurcher. The man I spoke to was really nice and said that another couple were coming to see him that day and if they didn't want him then I could come to see him. I had decided that as I'd seen the Lurcher first I'd give him first go.

The other couple wanted the shaggy Lurcher so that made the decision, I would enquire about the Saluki cross so I emailed Greyhounds Galore.

I got a reply. It was very honest. The Saluki cross was in a bad way. He had had some sort of allergy and lots of his fur had fallen out. He had also been starved and was extremely skinny. His behaviour was quite mad, when he went for a walk he would walk on his hind legs and go completely off his head when he saw another dog. They were very honest and I thank them for it.

I emailed back to ask if I could go to see him the next day.

Henry the Leaphound

New Bed(s)

I've Missed This

Spring Has Sprung

Busy Time

Badger the Hoover

Badger the Chicken

Free and Simple Pleasures

Mad Dogs

Timberdogs

Chicken Feed

Blog Holiday

More Toe Problems

New Arrivals

Well Done Badger

Second Day Off

Lovely Day

Dog Stress

Well Done Henry!

Puppy Dog Tails

Good Boy Badger!

Blogging is good for the soul

Trampoline

Henry Says Hello

Relaxing

Chickens or not?

Sunshine at last

Normal House with no grumps

Grumpy

Trampolining Hound

Visiting Part2

Visiting

Wake up Call

Nice Quiet Routine

Snoopy

Pictures!

Spring Clean

Quiet Week

Training

Snoopy

Canine Confusion

Have Another Log for the Fire

Mad Running

One Man and his Dogs

Snow Dogs Again

Mad Dogs and Busy Women

Henry to the rescue

Happy New Year

Merry Christmas Everyone

Canine Chaos

Christmas Tree

Good Boy Henry

Christmas Time

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Puppy Power

Snow

Ouchhh!

Dog Walk Chaos

Isn't blogging great?

Routine

Badger Watching

Ssssshhhhhh...

Mad playing dogs

Fencing

A couple of Pup photos

New Addition

Wrap up warm

The wind gets up their tails

More relaxing

Relaxing

Yorkshire Puddings

Satelite Stress

Serious Barking and Sleeping

Up to Date

Summertime

Don't eat all your food at once

Living in hope of house training

False Teeth and Tomatoes

Holidays

Pot-pourri is not food