Weekend Wrap Up

I think that I rather enjoy doing these little weekend wrap ups! It "allows" me to write something else up for Saturdays and then use today as a more exciting **disbelieving snort** summation of what we did over the weekend.

Yesterday was spent doing a whole lot of house cleaning. I really should have taken some before and after pictures of the kitchen especially. Hubby and I worked our tails off doing all that cleaning. The fabulous part about having such large dogs with smooshable, pendulous lips is that they tend to fling spit everywhere! We found slobber marks in areas that we just couldn't quite figure out how they got there. That is the power of the head shake! While there are still walls left in the house that need to be hit, I can say that I am currently not horribly embarassed to have people over to the house at the moment. Which is good, because my friend Marian is stopping over on Friday so that we can drive down to my parents' house in Silverton where we're going to stay for the Corky Vroom handling seminar.:o)


That was pretty much the entirety of our Saturday. By the evening we were so burnt out on cleaning, that we both just kind of vegged. I took the dogs out for a brief run in the evening because they really needed it, but that was about it.


Today, I got to go and visit Mia (this is Violet's new call name)!! She is still such a doll face!! I wanted to get a chance to work with her a bit because her parents have been nice enough to let me steal her away next weekend for the handling seminar. I really can't see Bess tollerating two full days of handling, so I asked them if I could also take Mia down with me. It serves two purposes. 1) Gives Bess a break from two days of non-stop handling. 2) Gives me a chance to work with Mia a lot and fine tune some things with her because I get to show her!:) And yes, I do realize that I am quite the lucky girl! I'm also really happy with how Mia is doing. It just took a little bit of warming up for her to let me stack her efficiently. She also gaited well for me with her parents sitting in front of her. This was something that I really wanted to test out because they really want to be there at every show and be able to watch her in the ring. In order for that to happen, it's my job to make sure that she's acclimated to that and knows to pay attention to me while in the ring. I'm happy to say that I don't think it'll be a problem. And boy can that girl bait! Makes things a bit easier! In summation, she's a very happy girl who is doing really well and I'm excited to take her into the ring in two weeks!


After I got done playing with Mia, I stopped off at JoAnn's Fabrics to get some material for one of our soft crates that Heffner did some damage to. While I was away at the national specialty last October, I had asked Adam to give the dogs some time in their soft crates while chewing on a bone each night. I was slowly getting Heffner used to being in a soft crate. He's not the best behaved dog in a crate of any sort, but we're working on that. Unfortunately, I don't think Heffner was comfortable enough in there yet and there is also a very real possibility that when my darling husband put the dogs in their respective crates and went into the next room to play some computer games, that he likely left the dogs in there for longer than the 15 min. that I had wanted. And in true Heffner fashion, he pawed at the crate door and managed to get his way out. In the process, he completely killed the zipper.


I have no desire what-so-ever to try and put a brand new zipper onto this crate. I have a feeling that it would end up being a lot more hassle than it's worth. Therefore, I decided that I'm just going to sew the zipper pretty much closed and place some fabric over the whole area. This also means that this side of the crate isn't as secure and Heffner can now no longer use it since he has that lovely dane tendency to paw the crap out of something. Which leads me to the problem of having two soft crates that are only useable by Bess. In the short term, this isn't a problem. And probably in the long term it won't be a problem either. Mostly it's just annoying.

Now you may be wondering exactly what kind of material I plan on using to cover the area with. Why, I'm glad you asked!>:o) I honestly went into the fabric store with the intention of getting a very practical type of cloth that was generally the same color. However, as usually happens, I get distracted by pretty, shiny, and interesting things.:) Which is what led me to picking out the purple snow leopard print!
Jealous? Yeah, I kind of thought so!LOL I should also have enough material left over afterwards to make something embarassing, I mean, interesting for the dogs.>:o) And as always, the dogs were my ever present and always helpful companions.
Bess has a thing about crates. She LOVES them! You open up the door of a new crate and she makes a bee line for it! I was transporting a ridgeback to a show at one point and I had his MUCH smaller wire crate in the back of the truck. For whatever reason I decided to load her up first and had the door to the crate open. Instead of leaping into the wide open space of the truck she did a VERY excited leap into the really small crate. Adam was right there when she did it and we both cracked up. She will seriously do that every time! Open space or crate? CRATE!! And trust me, I'm not complaining! It's just really hilarious. Though it does make things interesting when I'm wielding a needle and she insists on staying inside the crate and sniffing the areas where my hands are.
So that will be a work in progress over the week and I'll be sure to post a picture of the final project. Yes, Bess will have the most stylin' crate at the handling seminar.;) Whether she likes it or not!

That's pretty much been the excitement for us this weekend. Other than that, I took both dogs out for a run in the nice weather. I did snap a picture of Heffner next to some daffodils in the park near our house for the 52 Weeks for Dogs.
And with that, I'm off to do some scrapbooking and then work some more on the crate while we watch a movie tonight. I hope that everyone had a great weekend!!