Gorillas in the mist (?)

Leapin' logs! That's not a gorilla, it's Tweed!

On the weekend we drove out to MacDonald Beach and met up with Jen and Lu.

"No you didn't. You never saw me, I was hiding. I am a highly skilled operative. Go away."

But today, as promised, we went to Hole Digging Park to play some Fifa (tm)

Piper got carded for illegal moves. Please note those are her BACK legs you see there in front of her.

"Do you want me to beat her? With a big stick? Plz?"

"What? I didn't do nuthin'"

As for Mr. Woo ... Mr. Woo eats things he should not eat, which he finds in the park.

"Oh hai! I ate some stuff!"

And then he vomits.

"Ugh. Hai. I don't feel so awesome."

It looks something like this:
(best viewed large - he has some wicked tongue moves)

Tweed rejects this post.

In other news, I am employed again! Everyone say "phew." Now I don't have to sell Tweed!

People Look So Dumb in Bicycle Helmets

"What is she doing to me now? HAAAAALP!!!"

Everyone looks silly in a helmet.

But you should ALWAYS wear a helmet! And with winter coming, you should wear something warm on your bean under your helmet:

Piper is not into cycling. She prefers to be fashionable.

And she has shoulders to die for. Tweed ... not so much.

Mr. Woo is outdoorsy, and likes the MEC fashions.

So I lied. We didn't explore Hole Digging Park today ... it was a bee-yoo-tee-ful day, so we made the trek to Trout Lake for some swimming and stuff.


"'Ello! You Che-waa-waa, Mi' ja!"

"YOU CANNOT HAZ!"

So this week I learned that Mr. Woo's Fetch Mechanism is broken, but is repairable with cookies.

It goes something like this:

Throw ball. Woo ignores you, and it.

Throw ball, waggle cookie. Mr. Woo enthusiastically chases ball, and returns it to you.

Coy devil.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FELLOW CANADIANS!

ETA: See anyone you recognize in this man's photostream on Flickr??

We Are The People In Your Neighborhood

This week we are exploring the "local" dog parks to see which ones we like best. I say "local" because none of them are *really* within walking distance, the closest (and our least favourite / most likely to cause Woo to dig holes) being a 16 minute walk away (so says Google Maps). However, 16 minutes X 2 eats up a lot of the allotted 45 minute pre-work morning run, so I don't really consider that "walking distance."

I thought we would photo-document the off leash parks as we explored them. Except I didn't think about doing that until this morning, and it also has been raining, so we're going to fake like it's our first time (who knows what that's like? Ladies? Who's with me here? Hello?)

Today's visit was to the off-leash area on the corner of Oak and 37th. This is not really our neighborhood at all, and would take 38 minutes to walk to, allegedly. It only takes 6 minutes or so to drive though, so I tossed the beasts in the van and off we went.

On the way we made a pit stop at the park at 37th and Columbia, but it was not really a hit with the dogs. I have nicknamed it "Monkey Tree park."

It's a great big open field in Queen Elizabeth Park, but that's really all it is ... a big open field on a crest. The pooches said it was boring, and while the foliage was lovely:
It did not otherwise provide very many photo ops. And Tweed, who considers himself my artistic muse, looked downright blah.

So we moved onto the next park.

This park had a monster in it.

SCARY!

The park on Oak and 37th has the usual "off leash rules" sign planted and the edge of it and someone has used a Sharpie to write "Doggie Death Park" across the sign. If you had the sort of dog who, say, didn't come when you called him, or chased squirrels with reckless abandon, or who thought The Food Lady's Road Rules were "stupid" and your dog's name was Mr. Woo ... then this park could be quite dangerous. The only thing that separates it from Oak Street at rush hour (ie always) is some half assed shrubbery and trees. We stuck to the East, as far from traffic as possible, but I'm not convinced we'll be spending a ton of time at this park.

The other mystery of the park is why it's not been mowed. The grass is at least waist high. This makes poop scooping a kind of fecal safari, or what we have come to call "Mission Impossible." We've only been to the park twice and I have lost two poops and a rubber Chuck-It (tm) ball already. It's clear this park will be a land mine of poopies in the dark winter ahead, so I think it will be off limits until Spring.

Anyway, having already lost a Chuck It (tm) ball to the jungles of Oak and 37th, today we were forced to play Fifa (tm), it being the only toy we can't really lose in tall grass.

Mr Woo wasn't super happy about having to share his precious Fifa (tm) with his siblings, but it sure kicked his competitive gear up a notch or two, and he finally got some exercise. Which is good, because he is starting to resemble an orange Fifa (tm)!

BARKSCREAM!BARKSCREAM!BARKSCREAM!


Tweed, OTOH, is not a fan of Fifa (tm) and couldn't quite believe I was making him play with it.

"Saaaay what?"

He's a pretty good sport though, so he soon joined in the fun. The rules are:

Never kick Fifa (tm) toward Tweed.
Never expect Tweed to chase Fifa (tm).

"Oh hai! No kicking stupid ball at me. Kthnxbai!"

Tweed will go get it if Mr. Woo has abandoned on it in search of something vile to roll in. That's his version of playing-with-Fifa (tm). I think he secretly likes it, myself.


Piper, OTOH, wants it all the time. She will steal it from the other dogs if she has to, or intimidate them into dropping it. She Doesn't Play Well With Others which is why we usually all each have our own toy.

"Throw it. Kick it. Do something with it."

And then once she has it, she is not inclined to give it up.

MINE!

It's hard work, being such a greedy witch.

So this park on Oak and 37th has its pluses and minuses both. On the plus side:

It's full of little hidden treasures:

It has some great photo ops:

But for the winter, it's just too overgrown, too dark (no lights!) and too close to a busy thoroughfare. I think if we played there regularly, I'd be one less dog over the strata limit in this building in no time! And with my luck, I'd step on every stray and lost poop in the whole park.

In our next entry, we will explore what is possibly the city's most pathetic dog "park," the one that is a scant 16 minute walk from my house and which, oddly, causes Woo to dig holes furiously.

Until then, keep being beautiful, my friends.

PS - I'm looking for a job, since I just lost mine. If you have any leads, feel free to drop me an email!

We're Movin' On Up

... to the East Side.

etc.

We have been incommunicado for a week, blog readers, because the Food Lady has been packing, cleaning, moving and unpacking again. Last week, 3WAAW, Nutz and the Food Lady too, moved to a bigger, better apartment. I wasn't kidding about moving to the East Side!

Our new home is more than double the size of the old one. We lost our magical private deck, but gained floor to ceiling windows, and a gas fireplace, and in-suite laundry! We are no longer quite so close to ocean, but as the Food Lady's car (right now parked in one of the *ahem* two underground spots that come with the condo) can always drive us there.

Another view of the place from the other side of the suite.

Such a lot of hard work, moving is! And the dogs don't know what to make of the new place. It's so different from the old place, but it has all our furniture in it. They are a little weirded out. Mr. Woo snapped at a friendly neighbor dog in the parking garage, which is something Mr. Woo never does, unless he is feeling extremely stressed out.

Mr. Woo is not the only one who is stressed out. As if moving is not bad enough in and of itself, I had the additional fun-and-good-times experience of losing Donut in the move. I realized on moving day that her carrier was on loan to my sister and I foolishly thought that I could just carry her to my car in my arms. The punctures on my thighs and my scratched up hands and wrists will remind me for some time that I was WRONG! My 5lb kitten morphed into something like a oversized Smilodon and clawed her way out of my grasp just as I reached my car, then she vanished in an instant. Seconds after it began to rain. Argh!

I found her about 5 hours later, wet, oily and very scared under a garbage bin in an alley. This was after I had run all around my old neighborhood crying, calling all my friends and recruiting people to help me look for her, finally having to leave to escort the movers to my new place and convinced I would never see her again. Poor Nutz - a nice guy (with 5 cats!) working on the leaky condo next door helped me get her out from under the bin, and she went into a crate in the car with Mr. Woo, who cleaned her up for me.

Gah.

And Donut was not all I lost. I also, sadly, said "farewell" to our friend Sporty.

Sometimes I forget that my job as a foster home is prepare the doggies for a new and better life somewhere else. It's especially hard to remember that when they were almost dead when you got 'em, and made a miraculous recovery, and stayed for 3 months ... and thought the sun rose and set wherever you were standing too :(

If I had not been in a position where I had to move, I would have put exactly 0% of my efforts into finding Sport a new home and he would have lived out his life with me. But it didn't work out that way - in a city that is experiencing a housing shortage for renters, there was just no room for Sport in my apartment hunt. Finding a home for my own dogs was my priority, and Sport just was not my dog. No potential landlord wants to hear the sentence "I have 4 dogs."

Fortunately, the foster home who sprung Sporty from the shelter for me a few months ago had told me at the time that if they had not been leaving for Australia within days, they would have just kept Sport. And so they were delighted to have him back - fatter, cleaner and way less stinky - as a permanent guest who will spend the remainder of his retirement with them.

Bye bye, old buddy.

To make up for the endless days of packing and cleaning and moving, during which the only words directed at my poor dogs were "OMG Would you please get the f*ck out of my way!?!" I loaded them in the van and hauled them to Bridgeman Park for a good two hours of play time today. It's beautiful in the Fall.


Mr. Woo has still not forgiven me for upsetting his life, and in every photo of him that I take, he looks extremely pissed off:

Or else he just won't look at the camera.

Tweed, bless his heart, tried to make up for Woo's bad manners, but all he managed was

Portrait Fail:
(I've enlarged the expression on his face so you can't miss it)

I also caught him in his favourite "I think I'm about to sneeze" pose:

As well as snapping a private moment between him and his licker!


And Piper's 24/7 thought bubble, as usual, simply reads

Ball?

Ummm .... Ball?


Oops. Another private licker moment, caught on (digital) film!

This is what Mad Teeth (tm) look like without a ball in Piper's mouth!

More Wootie cold shoulder:

But finally I got a family portrait!

So now you know why I have been neglecting our fans this week. In fact, I had to (steal) internetz to post this week's entry as my internet is not hooked up yet and won't be for several more days! But now that we are mostly settled in, I should be back to more regular updates.

If the bike ride home from work doesn't kill me, that is ... more than 30 continuous uphill blocks. Oh dear. If I don't make it, I bequeath Tweed to you!

Love,

The Food Lady.