M.I.A.

I am going to take advantage of a brief bit of down time that I have right now to try and update the blog and to also give out a heads up. I know that I've been pretty spotty with my posts for the month, which is very uncharacteristic of me. Unfortunately, that is going to continue for the rest of the month easily. I think that things should settle down towards the beginning of September, but I can't guarantee that. Things are good at home and with the dogs, it's just work that is killing me right now. My schedule is going to be all over the place and I'm going to have some pretty heavy weeks. To say the least, I'm not thrilled about this. I've got one day next week where I will be at work from 6:30am until, hopefully only, 8:30pm. That is, as long as everything goes well. Which it better. Or else I will seriously lose it. To top it off, I could have been puppy sitting a little 8 week old great dane pup. But that's out the window because there's no way that I could work in the needs of a puppy around a schedule that I have no control over. I will be lucky to get what time I can in with my dogs. Sorry for the rant, I'm just really frustrated and tired of being put in this position. On to happier things though. I do have some pictures from our camping trip this past weekend!


This past weekend was pretty bloody hot. I was looking forward to getting out of town and to what I thought was going to be higher elevations. Unfortunately the camp site wasn't the one I was thinking it was and we were about 3,000 ft. lower than I thought. So we didn't really escape the heat. At the moment, I can't even remember the name of the RV resort that we stayed at. I had taken the whole day off and was hoping to get out of town before things got too hot to travel with the dogs. That's the down side to having a truck for your dog hauler. Unfortunately, Adam was unable to take the day off, but was going to try and get out of work as early as possible. That didn't end up being early enough for me and we were really pushing it leaving town. It was smooth sailing until we hit I-84. Then it was a parking lot and I started to get pretty ticked off. I'm not a fan of cities in the first place and this is one of the many side effects of living near enough to a city, that just drives me batty. Luckily Adam used his iphone to get us around that mess and save us a whole lot of time and save me from utterly freaking out about how the dogs were doing. Once we got to our camp site, I felt a little bit better. As I mentioned previously, it was an RV resort so the tent camping areas were a little tight. Here we are after pulling in to the site.
Once we mostly unloaded, we headed up to the main building with the dogs for the family dinner. I hung outside with the dogs while Adam ran in and got us both plates of food. Needless to say, the dogs were quite the attraction from the family (who all already know we have the dogs) and the other people passing by. I will say this, I don't think I've had more people take pictures of the dogs at any other time than I did this weekend. And I'm NOT counting family members!


I should probably mention that the theme for the night was school colors. Adam's extended family is full of people who graduated from Oregon State as he and I did. There are a couple of University of Oregon people and other areas, but it's pretty predominantly Oregon State. Hence the abundance of orange.:)

After dinner it was time to head back to the camp site to actually get set up. The dogs got put in the ever handy x-pens and we set about getting things put together.


The kids were all pretty enamored by the dogs. Saturday morning Adam let our almost two year old niece take Bess for a "walk." I thought it was pretty cute! Heffner was mostly consoled by the fact that he got to hang out with just mom while they did their little outing.



While I did get up early enough to get a good start on the day and was thinking of getting a hike in with the dogs, the amount of running around and lack of sleep that I've been getting lately most definitely caught up with me. I managed to fall asleep in the chair I had set up inside the x-pen with the dogs. I didn't wake up until it was after 12pm!! By that time, it was really starting to heat up and any thoughts of getting in a hike were out. Heffner was also acting foot sore. I think it was due to all the rocks in the tent area. I tried putting his Ruff Wear boots on him, but that didn't seem to help him a whole lot and appeared to bother him more than constantly shifting his feet while standing outside of the tented area.

As things started to heat up, I decided to take the dogs down to the river that was relatively near by. It was a hot walk down and when we got there, the river was just jam packed with people stationed on the shore, in the water, and every where in between. I knew that it wasn't going to work to try and hang out with the dogs. There just really wasn't room for me to maneuver with two giant dogs. I doused the dogs with the wonderfully cool water and then we headed back to camp. Once we got back to camp I doused them again with water from our pump. I ended up dousing them several more times that afternoon. It was just ridiculously hot. It was so hot that Bess came out of the tented area and just lay down on the ground near my chair.
Heffner was hot enough that he wouldn't even sleep on the dogs beds. However, he was not so hot that was about to actually lay on the dirty ground like Bess (this is a characteristic of him that has been around since he was a puppy).
The heat lasted well into the evening. We took the dogs for an evening walk, but they were mostly zapped from the heat during the day. They're used to hanging out in an air conditioned house for the majority of the day. Being stuck outside in heat in the high 90's is not something that they're well acclimated to. Even with the repeated dousings.

By Sunday morning I think we were pretty ready to head home to our air conditioning and relax. I will say this though, I have never been to a place that allowed dogs where people were actually so considerate of everyone else and actually followed the rules! There were no unattended dogs. There were no loose dogs. Many people had tie outs that they would put their dogs on while they were cooking or seeing to other things around the camp site. But everywhere we went, dogs were leashed and people were considerate of others. I was honestly just blown away by this! It made for a more enjoyable stay, that's for sure!

I will most likely post a couple of short updates this weekend. I've got Bess entered in a CPE agility trial both Saturday and Sunday. I didn't enter Heffner because I figured that the heat in August would just be too much for him. As it turns out, we're supposed to have a pretty mild weekend. Oh well! Hopefully Bess will hold back on the zoomies and we can get some nice runs in. She certainly had the zoomies in class last night!

Anyhow, I hope that everyone is having a great week and I'm definitely looking forward to September when things will hopefully be back to some semblance of control and normalcy!