Cooper's latest adventure

He ate a rock. What a dufus.

He started vomiting this morning and couldn't keep anything down. I decided to take him to get it checked and I'm glad that I did. The rock was in his small intestine. I have the rock in a baggie but decided to spare you a picture of it. I asked if he could be neutered while he was already anesthetized. I was allowed to watch the surgery which was cool. I have the best vets! And thank goodness for pet insurance!

Hopefully he will be well enough to come home tomorrow.

another pretty sunset picture

It reminds me of a mountain with a glacier on top.

A few of you commented on my last post that Cooper is getting big. Yes, he is! He is officially oversize so won't be going into the show ring. He and I will be starting a puppy class next week. When that's over, off to the vet he will go to be neutered. I'm just as glad that he's big as I wasn't sure how much energy I really had to do the showing. There are fewer shows now due to the economy so traveling becomes necessary to show a dog. I'm not a good traveler these days; I like the support of my carefully chosen chairs and my own bed. This fact makes me sad. I used to love going to shows and now I'm too tired to care.

summer weather at last!

Today was lovely, sunny but not too hot. The storms have moved east and are terrorizing Manitoba and Ontario. Ontario even had an earthquake the other day in addition to a couple of tornadoes.

We enjoyed some backyard time.

Cooper and B played a few short rounds of tandem tennis ball retrieving before the game morphed into them chasing each other, not the ball.

As Lynn commented, everything is indeed very green after all the rain

and my good husband spent his weekend weeding the garden so that we can see what else is growing there besides weeds.

As I've mentioned before, Cooper is an outside kind of guy, happily rolling in the grass
before flashing me a huge doggy smile.

Saturday sky

They don't call Saskatchewan the Land of the Living Skies for nothing.

I'm contemplating building an ark

Yes, more rain yesterday. Torrential rain. Hail. Flashes and crashes.

The backyard is turning into a swamp. The weeds have taken over the garden. The mosquito population is booming. The air is hot and muggy. We are so not used to this amount of moisture around here.

Thankfully, we seem to have narrowly missed today's storms which are occurring northeast of us complete with tornadoes.

my new favorite YouTube video

monsoon

We were under severe storm watches and warnings for most of today including possible tornadoes, damaging winds, large hail, and torrential downpours.

I headed out to a couple of appointments this afternoon just as a thunderstorm was brewing. By the time I got to the chiropractor's office, it was hitting full tilt - thunder, lightning, and monsoon-style rain that kept up for more than an hour. Power was out and some businesses closed because apparently life as we know it cannot happen without electricity to run the cash registers.

By the time I got to appointment number 2, the parking lot (this same one, from a post from last year) couldn't drain the water fast enough to keep up.

Unfortunately I didn't have the forethought to wear hip waders so I got wet feet.

We had another storm with heavy rain after supper. Parts of my back yard are flooded but I'm sure it will soak in by tomorrow as long as the rain is finished.

This has been a very strange spring, weather-wise, for the prairie provinces. We in Regina have been relatively fortunate. Other places are in far worse shape.

stormy sky

Well, we finally had a couple of days of sunshine but now we're into another major rain cycle. We've had so much rain this spring that many farmers are having to write off crops for the year. Their fields are literally under water and they can't get machinery onto them to do the seeding. Cattle farmers are losing young calves because of the wet conditions. In some cases they can't even get to the cattle to provide veterinary aid. For a land that is usually too dry, this year has been very unusual. It seems that there is no happy medium as far as moisture is concerned.

I just took the dogs outside and it has become very windy. The sky is lighting up all around. We're bound to get thunderstorms when there is this much humidity in the air. Although I'm sorry that there is more rain on the way, I do like a flashy thunderstorm so I took my camera onto the back deck to see what it can do. There are so many settings on my new camera that I haven't even read the manual about most of them; I started to just snap away on different settings to see what happened. I took 42 pictures and got one that worked.

Sadly, I wasn't organized enough to note which camera setting produced the winner so I will have to try them all again the next time I take pictures of the night sky. I'm starting to hear thunder now so the storms are getting closer. I'd better take the dogs out again now before it starts pouring.

p.s. Cooper just heard his first real big thunder bang while we were outside. He barked at it. Yep, he's a sheltie.

change

Notice the new look!

Blogger offered some new choices to try out before committing to change and I liked this one. I was tempted to go with the rainy background because it has been raining and raining and raining and raining and raining.....
but I decided I've seen enough rain and would like sunshine and blue skies better.

so it will be

Thank you all for your opinions about the button selection for the girly pink socks. I decided to let the recipient in on the fun to weigh in with her choice, thereby destroying the whole surprise aspect to the birthday gift but oh well. Of course the recipient will be my niece Katie. She likes the pearls the best so pearls it will be.

I think that it`s* a fine choice. A girl can never go wrong with classic pearls.


*If anyone knows how I managed to change my keyboard so that it now gives me a backwards accent mark (`) instead of an apostrophe, please let me know. I`d* like to change it back.

eta: Never mind about the weird apostrophe problem. It disappeared when I restarted the computer. Funny how that solves so many problems.

pink

I finished knitting the first lacy pink gift sock. How cute is this?

The pattern calls for a loop and button to close the lace cuff. I dug through my buttons and came up with a few possibilities:

balloons,

kitty,

classic, traditional pearl,

and tiny basic white.

I haven't decided which one I like best. There is also the possibility of just stitching the cuff edges together and foregoing the button and loop. There is plenty of stretch for putting the sock on without the opening.

Keeping in mind that these socks will be worn by a ten year old girl, what do you think is the best option?

a new dog door, sort of

It all started because of Cooper. He loves being outside. Not really doing anything special out there, just sitting on the lawn most of the time watching the birds and bugs. I've never had a dog quite that crazy about being outside although Harrison liked it too. The others are content to follow me around.

Before the bugs arrived, I left the door in the sun room open so that he could come and go as he pleased. That's getting to be less of a good idea as the mosquitoes are starting to make their presence known.

There just isn't a good place for a dog door. The door has a large window with internal blinds and there isn't room on either side of the door. Putting a dog door elsewhere in the sunroom wouldn't work too well either as the dogs would have a heck of a fall without steps to the ground.

I mentioned this one evening when we had our friends Al and Rhonda over. Al mentioned that he had seen an ad in a magazine for a Bug Off magnetic screen door that might work. I checked it out online and ordered one. The nice thing is that you can still open and close the door while the screen is there.

From the inside looking out:

And from the outside:

The screen slides onto a pressure rod that fits snugly in the doorway. It velcros onto the door frame at the sides. There are powerful magnets in the split and at the bottom of the center opening so that the door can be opened easily by pushing it and closes again on its own. Weights along the hemline keep it hanging straight.

If you don't want the screen door you can just pop it out and roll it up for storage. It's pretty slick and it wasn't very expensive.

Dan was worried that the dogs wouldn't figure out how to use it.

I wasn't worried at all. It didn't take long for Bentley and Robbie to learn to push through it.

Cooper needed to be shown a couple of times before he was confident.

Austin, the very cautious dog, needed to be convinced with the lure of cookies but even he was going in and out on his own within a few hours. It helped that it was soccer night in the park for little kids' teams and the dogs always feel the need to go outside to announce to the neighborhood that there is something happening on soccer nights. Good motivation to rush through the door, especially for Austin the Defender of the Universe.