Booty-licious

In the ongoing war of The Food Lady Versus Tweed And The Infected Toe, there is only one weapon.

THE BOOTIE.

But it's not a particularly effective weapon, since we are now on Bootie #3.

Hello up there! Hai! Take this off, or I will.

It's too big for him. The last one was too small for him. The first one was just right, until he ate it off.

I eventually got tired of it, so I just cut off all his legs. It makes his tail sexier anyway.


The good news is - his toe is totally healing and looks really good (but also creepy, because it's been shaved). No thanks to Tweed, who eats everything I wrap his foot in. I have gone through more vet wrap than I ever thought possible. They are starting to greet us with a roll in their hand at the local Tisol.

The Infect-o-foot has not stopped Tweed from having a good time.

Who wouldn't have a good time sandwiched between these two hawt bitches?

What a hard decision for a dude!

This one is the yin to his yang (and her own)

But this one has a tough, bulldog-like exterior and a heart of tennis balls I MEAN GOLD!

Together they are Unstoppable Cuteness.

As you can see, Piper is getting along with Miss Maeven The Raven just fine. Maeve is VERY VERY ANNOYING:

but Piper is maintaining and even enjoys a good game of bitey-face with her every morning.

Interestingly, it is the baby of the family that is put out.

Please send her back to where she came from.

I've been getting the cold shoulder. If we all sit around on the sofa of an evening to watch tv, Wootie is napping in my bed, in the other room. When I go to bed, he slides off with a pitiful expression and crawls underneath it. You KNOW he's pouting, because he doesn't like to sleep under the bed where the Grumpy Tweedigator lives at night.

Now he's trying to win back my love by being A Good Dog. This afternoon, he posed for a photo op all by himself. I was standing there admiring the view and I heard this little whimper ... I turned around and he was doing this:

Sassy little thing.

Look how cute *I* am, Food Lady!

Which of course inspired me to try something. Something that was FAIL.

No matter how hard you wish for it, Food Lady, I am not Phoenix.

Yeahno. It's too scary.


(But if you need me to, if we are ever lost, I can dig us to safety.)

Wootie thinks winning me back is probably a lost cause. He's decided to go Team Guy.

Too bad his teammate is only thinking about one thing.

I hope we are leaving soon, so I can eat the bootie in the car. Mmmmm .... bootie ....

No matter what happens with Maeve, I already know I have the best, most devoted dogs in the whole world.

Ouch

Poor Tweed. He has a pus-filled pocket of infection in one of his front toes. It must be quite painful, as he licked it into a horrible mess.

As you can see, it's really slowing him down.


Don't worry, that's our last trip to the beach anytime soon, since his toe needs to heal, which means it's staying wrapped and not getting wet. Or at least, that was the plan. After shaving his foot, charging me a princely sum for The World's Most Expensive Vet Wrap ($14.00!!!), coupled with The World's Most Expensive Antibiotics ($60.00!!) my vet assured me that her wrapping job was "dog proof." For extra good measure, she sprayed it with the foulest tasting stuff around.

Tweed unwrapped the bandage in the car on the way home.

Oh but I was ready for this. When we got home, I put a boot on him. He looks ridiculous and he's MAD AS HELL because even his considerable brain can't wrap itself (pardon the pun) around the concept of Velcro.

Mwa ha ha ha.

Anyway, so today was our last beach trip until his foot is better. I had to get one last one in.

Maeve was very glad that I did!

Wahoo!!

So was I. Because how else would I get shots like this?

Piper has acclimated to Maeve now and it's no longer constant Mad Teeth(tm). That does not mean she is really happy about sharing her Queen Bitch status though.

I'll serve her up a big ole platter of Whoop Ass right now!

She spends a lot of time trying to escape Maeve.

But Maeve is insane.

and FAST!

ZOOOOOOoooommmmm

You are all terrible HORRIBLE AWFUL CRUEL enablers! It's like you all got together and caused a tilt in my reality, because yesterday my landlord informed me that he'd put my condo on the market and it's now officially for sale. Looks like I am moving whether I really intended to or not!

However, whether that move will include Maeve remains to be seen. Because although I really like her, there are two concerns I have.

Concern #1 - Maeve does not jump. I mean, she doesn't jump anything. Small log in the way? She goes around it. Frisbee in the air? Very keen, but waits for it to come to the ground. Last night at agility class during warm up, I tried to coax her over a 10" jump and she limboed underneath it. A stunning display of dexterity to be sure for a dog that stands 18" at the shoulder, but nothing that's going to rocket us to Nationals or anything. Now, I have started a fair number of my own agility dogs (5, akshully) and I teach it to beginners as well, and I've never seen a dog so reluctant to jump.

I already have a non-agility dog (not that I'm MRWOO naming any names MRWOO) and I don't want another agilitydud. Tweed is going on 10 years old - sooner rather than later my boy will retire. And Piper, bless her, is coming along really well (in spite of my poor sportsmanship and bad temper, I should point out). (See Gerhard? I already KNOW I'm an asshole) but she is 7 years old - I waited much too long. If I'm going to get another dog, I want one I can compete with down the line.

Of course, it's easy to say all this when I'm not looking at this face!

Concern #2 - ZOMG!

Hello, my name is Linus, and you promised to love ME!

Okay so this is not really a concern, just a cheap and sleazy way to segue into new rescue puppy photos!!

Goshgillygeewhiz, they are SO DARN CUTE! They are now 33 days old, and have transformed themselves from sleepy cuddly potatoes into razorsharp shark monsters with a taste for blood. NO TOES ARE SAFE!!

Why are you standing on one leg clutching your foot and crying, Facebox Lady's assistant?

I look cute, but I'm just lulling you into a false sense of security. Then I'll attack. And attack, and attack, and attack ...

I do not remember Mona's puppies being this obsessed with feet. PAINFULLY obsessed with feet.

This one was the worst offender of them all. I think he might be a direct descendant of Satan. Or else that Shark Water guy should be doing a study on him or something.

Stalking ... feet ... tasty, delicious feet ...

And this one is just dreaming about feet.

Satan's foot soldiers! (I really need to lay off the puns)

Aren't they the dreamiest though? I so love them (at someone else's house)!!

We have had a fair number of applications come through for them already. The usual handful of ridiculous ones (are they housebroken? How much training do they have? I'm about to have a baby, can I adopt one?) but also some really stellar applications from some really amazing performance homes. So if you want one, act fast (PAULA).

See? I can be an enabler too.


Stop blogging. More ball.

2010 TDBCR Rescue Wall Calendar

Order yours today!


All photos were taken by yours truly (some of them you may recognize!) and each featured dog is a TDBCR rescue! 100% of the proceeds go back into our fostering program (and believe me, after Cafe Press takes its cut, there's not a lot of proceeds - so order lots of them!).

Got another calendar you'd like to see? Maybe a Dogs In Ridiculous Clothes calendar, or an All Puppies All The Time calendar? Let me know and I'll do my best!

Love,

Your Food Lady

The Farmer In The Dell

Those of you who know me know that I never miss a chance to make fun of people who live in The Sticks. I like to joke that they marry their first cousins in the back of a pick-up truck to the ear-splitting tunes of the local bar's country & western band, 'cept for Terrance on the banjo, who got drunk and fell off his trailer's stoop and had to be replaced with Uncle Jim Bob, who plays a mean set of spoons. My friends in The Sticks don't care much for my jokes (and scowl at me from under the brim of their 10 gallon hats whilst gnawing on hayseed or whatever).

Anyway, today I was in The Sticks and witnessed one of the many crimes against nature that are the reason I don't get out there much:

That's a little dawg gettin' it on with a big dawg, who don't even notice none, while another one has a good ole look-see at the action. All of this was happening on someone's lawn.

Speaking of crimes against nature ... while fortunately Calibre, the randy Jack Russell, is neutered and Sonic the foster border collie is about to be spayed, a union between the two were they not would produce THE SPAWN OF SATAN also known as a BORDERJACK.

*Duhn-duhn-duhn*

This is Pip, a new foster in the TDBCR program. She is about 4 months old, 12 inches high and has a set of batteries on her that never run down.
Be afraid, dear readers. Be very afraid. But first, adopt this borderjack puppy!

If psychosis:

is not your thing, don't worry - we have another bargain for you.

One tongue for adoption (may or may not include border collie).

Sonic is a sable and white border collie (or possibly English Shepherd) who is also a newbie in our rescue program. You may know her by her Biker Gang nickname, "Howler Monkey." If you adopt her, you get twice as much tongue as you'd get with a regular dog.

Don't be sad that you have missed out on great deals we've offered in the past, like Gargoyle Dog:

Or the model that's so popular with kids - "Snarlpuss":

Because if you act now, we'll give you Spawn of Satan AND Howler Monkey, as one insane package. That's right, we're practically giving them away! Or they are running away. Whatever.

Anyway, back to The Sticks. What can I say? I'm a city girl - I grew up on the East Side and spent the last 10 years living in downtown Vancouver, lulled to sleep at night by the sounds of traffic, bums' shopping carts and drunk transvestites fighting with each other. Moving out here to the suburbs was quite the culture shock!

The only thing worse than friends who have children and become walking baby poo blogs are friends who move to The Sticks, and tell you stories that make you want to scratch your eyes out, like about finding spiders in their bra while unloading mountains of hay bales and the choice half of a cow they won at the local meat draw.

*vom*

And yet there is a part of me that longs for something that the city can't give me.

That something is this:

Zomg! Meet Maeve, the newest addition to our fostering program. I picked up Maeve to drive her to her foster home on Friday night and ... umm ... I didn't.

Bad Food Lady, bad!

Oh yeah, like YOU could have resisted this:

She is 8 months old, matches Piper dainty footsies for tiny pound and wiggled her way into my WANT PUPPY void. Dammit.

She is also completely hilarious.

The stinkin' thing is, I can't have 4 dogs in my condo. I barely squeaked in with 3, and that's only because my landlord went to bat for me, nice man that he is. Making Maeve a permanent addition would definitely mean moving. And if I'm going to move out of my perfectly nice condo, I may as well find something with a yard for the dogs. And since I'd be feeding more mouths, I may as well try and catch a break on the rent. And since none of those things are likely to come together in one abode in the city of Vancouver, it probably means moving to the sticks.

What do you think? Is this face worth swallowing my pride?

Oh who am I kidding? I have no pride. I do, after all, live with this:

We're dan-cin', yeah ...

Tweed said "You go right ahead and keep that puppy, Food Lady. I'm going to go home with these people" and he hopped into their van.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that those nice people were taking this home with them.

*duhn duhn duhn*

Can't take him anywhere

Vancouver's summer is bidding us adieu for another year, so we're taking advantage of the precious few nice days left to enjoy some swimming. Today we went to Trout Lake.

I was very excited when we got there, as the first thing Woo did was swim out to the Floating Log with no prompting whatsoever. "Yay!" I thought, "He remembers our last photo and training session!"

I should have been suspicious as soon as he gave me this look.

Because after sniffing up and down the length of the log, he then did this:

WTF? Why me? Why do *I* have the ONLY dog in the world who takes a crap on a floating log, in a lake, surrounded by grass?

Yay! I have humiliated The Food Lady! Off to find something else to do!

OMG don't make me get on this thing. I saw what Woo did!

*sigh* I hate you.

But I WUV you! Did you see me take a dump on that log? LOL!

He's tainted the whole lake. Yuck. I feel dirty.

Piper missed The Great Log Incident of '09 because I was holding the bag of tennis balls, and she was doing this:


It's a good day to be alive.

What? What? What did Tweed just say? The lake is tainted??

Oh dude. So gross. I don't think I should get in here ...

She eventually jumped in, but Log Dog was waiting for her.

(*cue JAWS theme music*)

Come 'ere Piper, I'm gonna taint you too!

Gross! Get outta here Woo! You're disgusting!

(Poor Piper. Little brother suck)

I'm going to go play on the field, which Woo has not defiled.

Woo is a dirty dog. In so many ways! Last week we went for a hike with the very lovely Rivet.

It wasn't raining, and most of the route is gravel paths. Nevertheless, Wootie still ended up looking like this:

Who's a disgusting, filthy, rotten little stuffed pillow of a dog? Who is it? Who?

Me! It's me!

Well it's not me. So take your stinkin' camera and ...

TWEED! Language, mister!

Yeah, sorry. Whatever.

And we know it's not my pretty, precious little princess.

*blink, blink*

I'm feeling generous toward Piper these days, can you tell? I am very proud of my little snuggle snookums. In our agility class (you know, the one lorded over by The Sadist, who btw has taken up the habit of menacing us Stupid Humans with a broom, or a spare jump pole. It's ominous, because he's German, so he sounds scary even when he's happy) we have to do Very Mean Things, like run courses from the Worlds agility competitions and such. And last night in class, Piper successfully completed a challenging course, 20 obstacles without a refusal, without a bar down, without missing a contact etc. I almost threw a party for her, I was so pleased!

That's right. I'm da bomb. You may now refer to me by my new nickname, Greased Lightning.

You like her better than me now, don't you? I may as well just end it all, right now, on these train tracks. This photo is totally not posed. I swear.

Oh of course not Tweed. I love you both equally. And at least twice as much as Filthy Woo.

What? Come on, give us a kiss.
Blech.

Hello there. Excuse me? Can you help me find a Schnauzer blog? I think I may have taken a wrong turn somewhere...