I started moving some of my seedlings out into their containers. I moved some cucumbers and a few of my tomatoes.  Here is a picture of a Super Sweet 100 in a pot which is at this point giant, but hopefully will be appropriate someday soon.  I’m not holding my breath because of last years blight.  To try to avoid it this year I mulched heavily, plan to water deeper, but less often, and bought some organic fugal spray.  All it needs now is a cage, the husband suggested I title the picture ‘Optimism’ and I’m trying to keep mine.  Just say no to blight!

I also got this picture of some of my Fernleaf Dill seedlings.  I love how delicate and sort of frilly they are.

Its vegetable growing season here in South Florida and I recently started a few things in seed trays, some direct sown into my raised bed, and then put in some peas.  I love growing peas you can eat right off the vine.  Once they start producing I tend to eat them for breakfast during my morning garden errands.  Last year I’m not sure anyone else got to eat any.  One thing I love about peas is the little twisty bit they put out to anchor themselves to anything nearby.

This is one of my pea seedlings which are just starting to send out their tendrils to grow up the string trellis.

We used to have the perfect area rug for our living room, the color was perfect, the size was perfect, everything was great…except that it the fibers were looped on the top.  Bleys does this thing where he rubs his head on carpet, in what looks like an attempt to itch his face.  The downside of this behavior is that if the carpet has loops they get caught in his collar and then he pulls them out.  This is what happened to our perfect area rug.  Oh well.

So we’ve been tile only in the living room for quite some time.  Then yesterday we got a new one which isn’t exactly the right shape, but is a great design, a great color, and best of all all the fibers are cut,  not looped.  Here’s hoping it lasts!

Here are Bleys and Wixer enjoying the new area rug in a totally natural, not staged at all, fashion.

Wixer has large teeth, he also uses them quite hard, flyball, frisbee, dock diving, it all takes it toll.  So at the age of two his canine aren’t looking so hot.

If he was eight and they looked like this I wouldn’t be concerned, but he’s only two.  So I went to see a canine dentist and decided to get his canines capped.  Its like a crown for people, but made of either stainless steel or titanium due to the uses the dogs put their teeth to.  I have the appointment set up for next month, but now I’m having major wishy washy moments.  I really don’t know what is best for him and his long term health and happiness.  I have friends who say their dogs had similar wear at a young age and it hasn’t affected them as they get older (other than their teeth are much shorter than they would otherwise be).  I’m not super thrilled with the idea of a dog with silver teeth either.  But I really don’t want to run into root canals later because he’s worn them down into the pulp.  If that happens he gets a crown anyway in addition to the root canal.

I’m very unsure what to do.

I’ve been having a hard time keeping track of things lately and its getting a bit out of hand. So I found a whiteboard calendar and accessories and after about three attempts finally got in on the wall.

Dave and I have started filling in the next month or so. Here’s hoping that this well help get things in line. The next thing I need to do is find some magnetic sheet metal to make my bulletin board in crafty town.

That latest thing I’ve been teaching Wixer is the cue ‘dead dog.’ The neat thing about this is that I can put whatever I want in front of it, as if I’m actually asking him a question, and as long as I put ‘dead dog’ at the end he will do this behavior.

Once again, Wixer is too smart for his own good because he started doing this behavior as soon as I said ‘would you…’ So I had to start cueing him with, would you sit, Would you down, would you roll over etc. so that we doesn’t know what’s coming after.

I’ve been doing a little trick training with Wixer.  He could learn much faster if I just spent more time at it, but ah well.  One of the tricks I taught him as the cue ‘be a spider’ and looks like this:

One of the struggles I’m running into is due to the way I train Wixer, by shaping. He tends to offer a lot of different behaviors in hopes of hitting the right one. I need to figure out a way to encourage him to really listen to the cues I’m giving him.

I made another purse cover today, this time with 100% more awesome embroidery from Urban Threads. There is the finished project:

The embroidery design is from Urban Thread’s Dark Fairytales collection, but I decided to leave off the words.  Being a crazy dog lady, I kind of like the feeling this gives that maybe Red Riding Hood is in on it with the wolf.

Today we were playing the Call Once and Collar Grab game with Wixer and one of his treats accidentally fell in the lawn (which has not been mowed recently and is generally not much grass) and he dove in after it.  He came up looking like this:

I recently put a post out on Facebook lamenting that I wasn’t able to find any canine conditioning equipment used and low and behold one of my friends has a set of Paw Pods she didn’t want anymore.  We even worked out a swap, Paw Pods for a collar.  I had this idea for a new design and thought it was the perfect opportunity to try it out.  Here is the finished collar, modeled by Wixer.

I think it turned out pretty well.  Next step figure out what color to make for Wixer to wear!