I’ve seriously had enough of the heat. I am SO ready for these dog days of summer to end.
Speaking of dogs, I had an interesting kind of day today. As most of you know, all of our dogs are rescue dogs. CeCe, who is no longer with us, Meg and Belle were all adopted through American Brittany Rescue (ABR). K, the newest member of our family, came from the National Brittany Rescue and Adoption Network (NBRAN). Both of these organizations are run completely by volunteers. Neither has a kennel or any other kind of brick-and-mortar facility. They both rely on people to volunteer to provide temporary foster homes for dogs that they have rescued until suitable forever homes can be found.
Many rescue groups like ABR and NBRAN have Web sites that list all dogs available for adoption at any given time. You can’t just talk to a person that’s seen your dog on the Internet to determine whether they’ll be a good fit for that dog. One of the steps in determining a home’s suitability is a home visit. That’s where a volunteer representative of the organization goes to physically meet with potential adopters at their home to make sure the people are fit to adopt a dog. Another step is the vet check, where your veterinarian is contacted for references.
Anyway… today I did a home visit for NBRAN in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I met some absolutely delightful people and several nice dogs. These folks are not only looking to adopt an NBRAN dog, they’re also going to serve as foster parents. Which is fabulous, because dogs seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days.
I rode my motorcycle to Shepherdstown and then continued on to the WV place, where Hubby and our dogs were going to meet me. Unfortunately, Hubby is really busy with work and can’t get away. So now I’m here all alone. No Hubby. No dogs. Just me.
It’s VERY quiet. And sort of lonely. I miss Hubby, of course, but I also miss my dogs.
Speaking of dogs, check out this neat picture I stumbled across on Flickr today. It’s a memorial to dogs who lost their lives liberating Guam in 1944.
If you have a few more minutes, you should read this short article about the War Dog Memorial. It’s touching.
Meanwhile, I’m going to go walk down the hill and say hello to CeCe. She’ll always be here with me.
CeCe in 2008, a few months before she died. Her cremains are scattered all around the WV place.
So, do you want to know what the world looked like after a 3-hour torrential rain? Not, like, the whole world. Just the smaller area around our WV place.
The storm was a real gully-washer.
They call storms like that “gully washers” for a reason. I’ve seen this phenomenon a couple of times, but it never ceases to intrigue me. “Amaze” is a bit strong for this situation, I think.
There were a lot of leaves in that gully on the left-hand side of the road. They’d collected there over a number of months. They were moldering and compacted. If I’d tried raking the leaves out of there, it would’ve taken some effort. Trust me, there’s a pretty long gully beside our driveway.
The leaves that didn't get pushed out of the gully were transported to the end of the road.
That was all done by rainwater.
A closer look.
The girls were not fazed at all by the storm’s aftermath. Actually, I think they kind of liked it. The younger two, anyway.
Belle
Belle loves running through wet grass. Actually, she loves running through grass, period. So wet grass is just a bonus. She loves it even more if there’s a bit of water laying around that she can splash through. I wasn’t able to capture any shots of her doing that, so you’ll just have to trust me.
K
K, on the other hand, isn’t crazy about getting wet. She’ll do it, mind you. She just doesn’t enjoy it like Belle does.
Meg
I honestly don’t think Meg cares one way or the other about being wet. For her, it’s just a state of being. Although several times during the storm she’d stick her head out of the doggie door, stop, and back-up into the house. It was raining HARD, though, so I don’t blame her a bit.
Meg didn’t walk to the end of the road with us on Sunday morning. Sometimes one or more of the dogs will veer off on a little side trip of their own. But she was waiting in the driveway when we got back.
So, other than lots of leaves being pushed out of the gully, the world just looked wet. It felt REALLY humid, too. In case you were wondering.
In my next post I’ll reveal something really weird that happened to me during my ride home.
This has definitely been the longest week EVER. Which is weird, because it was only a four-day work week. It was one of those weeks, though, where I had a pretty complicated work project due on Friday. On Tuesday morning, before I logged in and checked e-mail, I had a pretty good idea of what I’d do each day to get that project finished. Wrong. Something else crept up. Something else almost always creeps up. I should know better. Anyway…
There wasn’t a whole lot of spare time. And I couldn’t enjoy the spare time I did have because all week it was unGODly HOT. One of the reasons we decided to work remotely again this week was so we could get some motorcycle riding in. That and we just love working here. Even if we do have to share an office (GASP!). More on that later.
I decided to do something different this evening (I started this post last night). A blog post (this one) that’s more images than words. So I need to stop typing now and post some images.
Here goes…
One CRAZY Caterpillar
Our house is in the woods. The woods are full of critters. Some smaller than others. Some more alive than others, too.
Only two of the many trophies the girls discovered this week.
The girls are forever digging stuff up in the woods. They LOVE being able to run loose and explore. Thursday, while I was on the telephone, Belle and K came walking up out of the hollow. One was carrying a deer skull, the other a neck bone. Hubby was here so he retrieved the bones and disposed of them immediately. Unlike me. I like to leave stuff lay around for a while in high places and take lots of pictures…
Belle and her mystery critter.
With those bones in mind, perhaps you can imagine my horror when I saw Belle running around with THIS in her mouth. Maybe you can’t. I assure you, I was appalled. Because I knew I would have to be the one to get that thing, whatever gross, stinky, dead thing it was, away from her. This is what she usually carries…
Belle's favorite raccoon.
Belle LOVES that raccoon. She carries it around often. I could plainly see the mystery critter was not the coon. The horror soon turned to relief, however, when I discovered the mystery critter to be an old dog toy (bunny) that someone had lost in the woods at some point. We haven’t seen that thing for ages. It’s ears were both missing, which I found sort of amusing.
The office hubby and I share.
This is one of the reasons we enjoy being here during the week. Our outside office. We have to share, but that’s okay.
I really enjoy our outdoor work space.
If it weren’t so darn hot, it would have been perfect. Only the mornings were tolerable. Last week, I had to wear a jacket to work in this space in the morning!
The fans helped, but just a little bit.
We could never do this at the MD place. We live too close to the airport.
Hubby hard at work.
The dogs like the outdoor office, too. Until it gets really hot.
Break area.
The hammock is a nice touch, don’t you think?
Returning from one of our little strolls.
We did have a bit of drama yesterday. That project I’d been working on all week? The one that was due at the end of the day? At just before 5:00, I was getting REALLY close to being finished when it started storming. And the power started flickering on and off. My computer has a battery. But no power means no Internet. No Internet would have meant I was screwed. Big time. I’d have no way to deliver the completed files on time. My blood pressure was through the roof, let me tell you. I did manage to finish and get the files uploaded, thank goodness. And then I gulped a beer straight down to calm my nerves.
It rained HARD and for a long time.
We needed the rain. But still. It rained liked this for a few hours. There was one quick gap in the storm (thank you, Weather Channel radar) so I was able to take the girls for a quick afternoon walk.
The break didn't last long.Wet dogs."I don't like thunder, Mama."
Finally, I decided my time would be better spent making dinner than trying to stay dry on the front porch and watch the rain.
The girls waiting for their dinner. This was between storms.I had an audience.
Usually I’d shoo the dogs away, but by then it was thundering pretty loudly, so I let them hang out in the kitchen.
Hoping for droppage.
This tiny little kitchen isn’t big enough for me and three dogs. Luckily, everything I needed was at hand, so I didn’t need to move around much.
It stopped raining hard around 8:00 PM, I think. It didn’t stop completely until after we were in bed.
I think I’ll go see what the world looks like after three hours of crazy, hard rain.
After one of our most fabulous vacations ever, Hubby and I are home.
Now THAT is a soda!
Returning to America after two weeks in Europe has been a bit of an adjustment. Europeans do many things differently and typically on a much smaller scale. Take drinks as the first example.
Restaurants don’t typically serve ice water with your meal. If you want water, you have to ask for it. When you do, you’ll have to tell the waiter whether you want it with or without gas. In other words, do you want sparkling water (i.e., carbonated) or still water (i.e., not carbonated). The water is never free.
Fountain sodas are rare, too. As are “diet” sodas. It’s not that they don’t have lower-calorie sodas, they just call them light sodas. And even in a restaurant they do not typically serve drinks with ice. If you want ice, you have to ask for ice. If you do manage to get ice, it’s usually only a few ice cubes.
You don’t realize just how much you miss fountain drinks and/or drinks with plenty of ice until they are not readily available. Not that going without is a bad thing. In fact, America’s love of soda in large quantities is one of the reasons so many Americans are overweight.
The coffee is quite different, too. If you stop at a gas station for a “takeaway” coffee, there’s one size to be had and it’s about the equivalent of an 8-ounce drink. There’s also typically a person available to make your coffee. At one point, I thought I was being asked if I wanted a big cup or a small cup when what I was really being asked was if I wanted my coffee to be served in a paper cup or a in a ceramic cup (with a saucer!). I ended up with the ceramic cup, so we had to stand around the gas station while we drank our coffee. If there isn’t a person there, you get your coffee out of a machine. Not vending machines like we have in the US (think nasty hospital coffee), but cool machines that first grind your beans and then produce a cup of coffee that is not steaming hot (i.e., unable to be sipped for at least 15 minutes), but the perfect temperature. These tiny little cups of coffee cost about 1.5 Euros, which at today’s favorable exchange rate is just under $2 US.
Not only are the sizes smaller, coffee in general is much stronger. Hubby doesn’t like strong coffee. Or at least he didn’t before the trip. When I came downstairs yesterday morning, he warned me that our coffee now tastes like “hot, dark water.” Mine was fine because I’ve always taken my coffee much stronger than him. He had to add more coffee to his pot this morning.
There were many other differences, too, which I’ll talk about in future posts. Most of the differences were good ones. Like food quality. Those people across the pond know how to eat well. That does not mean they eat a lot, it means the food quality and taste is far superior. Even food served in everyday pubs is fresher tasting and expertly prepared. Eating out will never be the same for us again.
Anyway… more on that some other time. What was not in Europe, besides our family and American friends of course, was our dogs.
Meg missed her Mama.
We left our girls in very capable hands. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, stayed with the girls at our house during the two weeks we were away. She took very good care of them and gave them plenty of attention, but they still missed us. Meg, it seems, missed me the most.
Meg, at just under 50 pounds (22.67 kg), is a bit large to be a lap dog. She doesn’t usually spend a whole lot of time on my lap. But yesterday was different.
Meg missed her Mama.
I didn’t get a lot done yesterday. I spent much of the day in my favorite chair with at least one dog, usually Meg, on my lap as I sorted through pictures. Belle and K missed me, too. In fact, K has already been sitting with me this morning for about 30 minutes in what is usually Belle’s spot. Don’t worry, though. Belle just noticed that K moved and has resumed her favorite morning position at my side.
Meg missed her Mama.
As you can plainly see from the image shown directly above, when Meg is on my lap, there isn’t much room for anything else. But I was determined to at least get some of my pictures sorted and posted.
Finally, Meg figured out how to SHARE, not hog, my chair.
So, after a while, I did have to insist that Meg share my chair instead of monopolizing my lap space. She stayed in that position for quite some time, too.
The pictures I captured during our week of motorcycle touring are now available on FLICKR. It’s going to take a bit of time to sort the images from our time visiting with friends in Switzerland and Belgium. There was a lot to see. But I hope to get them posted soon. So stay tuned!
The other day she did something that made Hubby and I both chuckle.
It was lunchtime. I was on a teleconference and Hubby, who’d just made himself a couple of tacos using leftovers from the previous evening, was in his office eating.
About mid-call, K started whining. Every now and then she’d bark, too. Whine. Bark. Whine. Whine. BARK!
Finally, Hubby got up to see what was going on. I heard him saying “bad dog!” and “go lay down.” I was wondering what the deal was because it’s usually Meg who get’s the “bad dog” bit. But it was definitely K who’d been making the noise. (Yes, us dog owners recognize our dogs’ voices.)
After my meeting, I asked Hubby what had happened.
He’d left all of his taco fixings spread out on the counter while he was eating. Having lived with Meg-the-delinquent for many years, we know enough to never, ever leave food close to the edge. The second no one is watching, she’ll sneak in and steal the stuff in a heartbeat.
When Hubby came out of his office, he saw K in the kitchen with her front feet on the edge of the counter stretching her neck as far as she could to reach those tacos. They were just out of range.
She could smell them. And she could see them. But she couldn’t reach them. And she was getting pissed. Hence the whining/barking.
Amy and the kids spent the weekend with us at the WV place. Klondike, their very large, white German Shepherd came along, too.
This post is probably WAY too long for most readers, but I have lots of pics to share. If nothing else, just scroll through and look at the images. Be sure to click on each if you’d like to see a better (larger) picture.
The Grandkids: Joey (almost 3), Brianna (9) and Gaige (6).
The only big plan for the weekend was for all of us to do a bike ride on the C & O Canal. So one of the first things Hubby had to do on Saturday was install the bike seat on Amy’s bike. He put one on his bike, too, so they could trade off if necessary.
Pop's Workshop
Brianna and Gaige can ride their own bikes. But Joey is too little to be able to keep up with all of us, hence the bike seat.
The Seat Works!
Saturday was pretty hot, and we needed to do some shopping, so we decided to wait until Sunday for the bike ride.
K and Joey (he's got the devil in his eyes here for sure)
We all sort of just goofed around on Saturday morning. The kids spent most of that time outside playing. The dogs did, too. Our girls were a bad influence on Klondike.
Notice the dirty feet?
Amy and I walked Joey down the driveway. I asked him to pose on the little bridge Hubby made for me years ago for my pond. Since I no longer have a pond, I was quite happy to put the bride to use at the WV place.
Joey saying, "Cheese!"
Joey thinks the new gate is lots of fun. It was Amy’s idea to have him climb behind the sign. Check out the dirt on his legs!
Joey has always been a climber.
Brianna and Gaige were off “having an adventure.” They were exploring the woods around the house. When I told them not to touch any dead stuff they might find laying around, I think they thought I was kidding. Thank goodness they listened because they found the source of all the bones the girls have been finding over the last few months.
Amy and Joey
Joey, being a boy, loves seeing Pop and G’s motorcycles. Pop started his up, sat Joey on the seat and let him rev the engines. That’s no “cheese” grin in the picture below. That’s a “look-I’m-riding-Pop’s-motorcycle” smile.
Joey Revving Pop's Motorcycle
Gaige and Brianna were having a blast exploring our woods. I don’t know how many times they went down the very steep hill behind our house, which they then had to climb back up. Far too many times to count, that’s for sure.
That’s one of the reasons I have far more shots of Joey. Brianna and Gaige just didn’t sit still long enough. And remember that bike ride we were planning? It didn’t happen. Not for Joey and I anyway. He woke up with a fever that had him feeling really crappy. Once he had medication in him, he felt much better, but as soon as the medication started to wear off he’d feel bad again. So he and I stayed at the cabin while Hubby and Amy took the older kids for a ride. Hubby took my point-and-shoot camera along, too, and did manage to capture a few good shots for me.
Amy, Gaige and Brianna all ready to ride.
After the ride Brianna and I had back in April, the kids were REALLY looking forward to this trip. Amy was, too. They aren’t able to get out riding much at home.
Gaige and Brianna taking a short break.Gaige riding his bike, happy as a clam.
Meanwhile, back at the cabin… with a fresh dose of medication in his system, Joey was ready to roll.
Biker JoeyKlondike following Joey.
After riding for a little while, we took a cookie break then Joey got to play in some water. That’s an activity Amy thought he’d enjoy. She was so right, as usual. He sat there for about an hour and a half, happy as could be, making soup. What kind of soup? When I asked him, he thought about it a bit, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Regular soup.”
A Great Day to Make "Soup" (aka water play!)
Soup making was quite a hit with Joey.Joey was only slightly frustrated with these pushy taste testers.
Soup making is messy business. I had to hang Joey’s shorts outside to dry while he napped.
Joey's shorts needed time to dry.
Speaking of naptime, look what showed up outside our kitchen window while Joey was sleeping and everyone else was still away.
Pileated Woodpecker
The Pileated Woodpecker, which is about as big as a Crow, is the largest woodpecker in almost all of North America.
Pileated Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpeckers are extremely skittish/bashful, so this is the first time I have ever gotten a decent shot of one after five years of our living in the woods.
After the bike ride, Gaige and Brianna were more than happy to take over the water play. Joey was back in the house. His fever kicked back in while he was napping, but Amy returned literally just as he was waking up and gave him some more medicine.
Kids are never too old to play with buckets full of water.
After they tired of that activity, they tossed the football around for a while.
Future quarterback.
I’m not saying this because Gaige is my grandson. I’m saying this because it’s a fact. Gaige, at age 6, throws the football amazingly well. See his fingers perfectly aligned on the stitches? You should see the spiral this kid lays on the ball. And he throws it in a very purposeful, practiced arc right to his target. I was quite impressed. Really. I have never seen a six-year-old throw a football with such precision.
I could barely throw a Nerf football at his age. Granted, the ball he was using isn’t full size, but it is definitely larger and harder to manage than a Nerf ball would have been.
I have no idea how well he catches because Brianna can’t throw a football very well at all and I was too busy cooking dinner at the time to play with him.
K and Belle sharing a bed.
By the end of the day, even the dogs were exhausted.
Meg resting after a LONG day.
Sunday was a long day, but we still managed to squeeze in a campfire. I don’t have any pictures of that, you’ll just have to trust me. As warm as it was, I didn’t really want a campfire, but the kids would have been so disappointed had we not had one. During Brianna’s last visit, there was a statewide burn ban on, so we couldn’t have a fire.
Time to hit the road.
By Monday afternoon, it was time for Amy and the kids to pack up and head back to civilization. It really was a great weekend. But it went by FAR too fast. Hubby and I are already looking forward to their next visit.
I actually have quite a few more pictures of Brianna that I took while she didn’t know I was watching. While Gaige and Joey were playing, she was dancing. It was hysterical. I’ll try to get those pics into a slideshow and posted tomorrow for your viewing pleasure. 🙂
If you have a few more minutes, you should read this short article about the War Dog Memorial. It’s touching.
