Let me start out by telling you that a sad thing happened to us in June that kept me from wanting to blog and kept me from wanting to take pictures and tell strangers and friends on the internet about what happened in them. I don't want to type about it. Our relatives are okay and relatively intact (see what I did there?) but our family is short a member and that's really all I can stand to put down in words right now.
Moving on.
To lighten our spirits and busy our minds, we've volunteered to become a small(ish) dog foster family. We have a local lady that keeps a herd of poodles, schnauzers, terriers, and assorted mutts of less-than-gigantic size. She works in cooperation with the local pounds and rescue groups to be a small dog no-kill alternative. We've offered to keep two of her dogs for a while and let them enjoy the kennel-free life and run in the pasture with our two monstrous wolves.
Yesterday we visited our Fairy Dogmother and picked up Kira and Festus. The borders of her realm are marked thus...
Having grown up with somewhat of a fascination with Gun Smoke and Matt Dillon (long before the Star Wars toys there were cowboy boots and sheriff badges. Toy Story? Yeah. That was me.) how could I resist a dog named Festus? Esther has taken to calling him "Fez" for short and that works too. Festus is some sort of wire-hair terrier thing mixed with pocket lint and Fizgig from The Dark Crystal.
 |
| Festus excels at looking happy. |
 |
| Festus and Kuma, enjoying a pee truce. |
Festus is moderately high-spirited. He does jump up from time to time, but is pretty good about landing his pads on you instead of his claws. He was very interested in finding the limits of the yard and marking the fence that surrounds it. Speaking of marking... he and Kuma have been in an arms race of sorts to see who can out pee the other. We watched them pee on the same patch of weeds no less than six times within the first hour of having him home. At one point all four dogs were in on it, all watering an otherwise nondescript patch of grass in turn.
Kira (pronouced with a long "i". Rhymes with spy-duh and fie-rah; as in "in the conflagration I caught my spy-duh on fie-rah") is Labradoodle/Muppet/wolfhound mix. She, like most the women on TV, needs a couple of cheeseburgers. She's a little too skinny right now but we're going to keep an eye on her and watch what she eats. She is a very calm dog and while she loves to be petted and will sometimes put her head into your hand, she's pretty content to just be her own dog. When she runs she gallops and she shares Jessie's love of abandoned fire ant hills for snuffling. She has the coat of an alpaca.
Both of the foster dogs have found the most mischief from cat chasing. This is something that all of our dogs went through until it wasn't fun anymore, so we're hoping that the cat-rasment will abate over the next couple of days. Jessie and Kuma were very leery at first and there were a couple of growls and snips over the food hopper but as early as this morning it was Jessie that was egging them both on to play with her like she did when she was a much younger dog.
Speaking of Jessie... she would like you all to know that she's still the prettiest girl in the yard.
These are all the pictures from the last two days, so no linky! To make up for that here are some of the other things that have been going on since I last blogged:
...and even more Robin Hood!
No comments:
Post a Comment