The School is going to the Dogs!!!!

Graduation day.....Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Today Daisy Adair graduated from her beginning obedience training class. Training had been going well but the final night was filled with stubbornness. We were to have a sit-stay contest and the dog who would sit for the longest won a prize. At home we had been able to get her to sit for almost 2 minutes without moving. However, it class she would not sit at all, we were out of the contest before it even began.

Oh well, she still graduated. Isn't she so cute in her cap.

























Also graduating is her friend Murphy, he is a handful but so cute.

and a good time was had by all....

This weekend, we traveled up to Dillard for our Aunt Mary Ann's birthday party. I dragged my drums up there and Dad brought his piano and we played a lot with Uncle David and his group which was a lot of fun. As an added bonus, that will serve as practice to our 1 "gig" that we play every year at the Tignall Fall Festival. Anyway, we got to meet a lot of Aunt Mary Ann's friends and visit with everyone who we don't get to see nearly enough, so it was a lot of fun.


Moving on to the dogs. We came home Sunday from running some errands and found Chewy covered with something sticky. We had no idea what it was, but it quickly became obvious that her ear was in a lot of pain. She was a mess, so we gave her a bath.




We also gave all of the other dogs a bath since they were due, so Daisy had her first one (and she wasn't very happy....)



We did give her the traditional "mohawk"



We took Chewy to the vet on Monday morning, and it turns out that she has a bad ear infection. We're putting drops in her ears twice a day, and we're already seeing an improvement. She is much happier.




On the Willow front, she went to the doctor yesterday and they removed the staples. They said that she's doing pretty good, but now we're going to start doing short walks and help her stretch out the legs to make everything work properly again. She has started to put her foot down a little, but not putting much weight on it yet. On the plus side, the lampshade is being retired and she can pick at her leg all she wants now :)

Chewy!

In the interest of equal time, I realize that Chewy hasn't gotten nearly as much time, which is really a shame since I have plenty of cute pictures of her. So, without further adieu:








and the big finish is Chewy playing hide and seek with Chopper:

Animal House

Willow is still doing good. We have to just keep her from hurting herself since she wants to be so active. It's hard to see in this picture, but if you look closely, you can see the scar on her knee. Unfortunately, they shaved her entire leg, so she looks a little unbalanced:


Also during this time, Tami's mom Mindy sold her house, so she's staying with us until she gets a new one. Which means the number of animals in our house doubled. Here are the new ones:

This is Millie. Millie is Willow's sister, so you will probably notice the family resemblence.


Next up is Mystic. She is about a year older than Daisy Adair and has a pretty similiar temperment, so they get along really well.


and finally we have Chopper. Chopper is the only male of the bunch and is still getting used to being an indoor cat.



Daisy Adair helps out with the cat by walking him and keeping him from jumping on the counters.... she has her work cut out for her.

Between the Benches

First off, the important stuff. Willow still appears to be very well. She doesn't move her leg much, but still doesn't appear to be in any pain. She is, however, very VERY stir-crazy being locked up in the cage. We take the lampshade on and off depending on if she is leaving her wound alone or not. Sleeping is another story since she is unhappy about being put in a crate at nice.... and the upstairs crate isn't nearly as big or posh.

Last night we went to game 4 of the Kelly Cup playoffs for the Gwinnett Gladiators. They have been doing really bad in this particular series and were down 3-0 in this best of seven playoff series. So it was do or die time. Fortunately, the team came out strong and ended the first period with a 2-0 lead. It was all good after that as they extended their lead and ended up winning the game 6-1 (the other team scored with around 2 minutes left in the game because they had a two man advantage power play.)

As if the game wasn't exciting enough, Tami was walking around after the Second period intermission and spoke with one of the staff that she speaks to everytime she sees them. Turns out, the person who had won the "Between the Benches" contest didn't show up where they were supposed to be and she had 2 minutes to get someone down there, so she asked Tami if she wanted to go. Anyone who knows Tami will realize that she was jumping up and down by this point!

For anyone unfamiliar with the "Between the Benches" contest, here is how it works. The winner gets to sit for one period on ice level in a little enclosed room between the benches where the home team and the visiting team sits. It is great because you are right next to all of the players, you can even see which ones are missing teeth!

and boy, did Tami pick a great game/period to get those seats. We got to see a goal, a big brawl, and even hear the coaches hurl obscenities at the refs..... good times! Towards the end of the game, the Penalty boxes were getting pretty full of players and a few even got ejected because of everything that was going on. Unfortunately, we didn't bring a camera with us to the game, so don't have any exciting pics to share.

That must have been some wild party!

Willow is home!

We picked her up earlier today from the vet and she is doing fine. She seemed a bit loopy from the pain killers, but once I talked with her, she recognized me and perked up. She hasn't acted like she has been in pain at all, but she's going to have a lot of medicine to help with the pain and make sure that there aren't any infections for the next few weeks.

The doctor said that 90% of his patients are in too much pain and don't bother to mess with the staples. So, or course Willow was already licking them before we got 5 miles down the road. This means that at certain times, we have one of the dogs with a lampshade on their head.







Willow is going to be confined to a crate for at least two weeks to keep her from running and jumping. Also, to keep the other dogs from licking her wound. We tried to make her as cozy as possible and got a really large crate (almost St. Bernard size) and populated it with the softest pillow that we could find and plenty of chew toys. I think she likes it as much as possible, she just hates being cooped up.

Willow goes under the knife

Another way overdue update, however to be fair, we have done much that was really exciting. We have started taking Daisy Adair to obedience training lately which has been going well. We haven't learned enough to convince her to leave our shoes alone yet, but we're working on it :)

Unfortunately, Willow is going in tomorrow for surgery on her knee. She has Patellar Luxation (her kneecap does not stay in place) and it's grade 3, so has to be repaired using surgery. We originally had it scheduled for June 15th, but found another doctor that was able to take care of it right away. This means that she's going to have to spend somewhere between 2-6 weeks in a crate without running and playing which is going to be torture for her. We'll find out how she does on Tuesday when we go to pick her up and I'll keep everyone updated.

Daisy Adair has gotten pretty big now, she's bigger than both Chewy and Willow. I have a few pics of the dogs (Willow and Daisy Adair, Chewy is being camera shy.)

First, a couple of funny ones:






WooHoo! We finally got all three in a picture without having to hold them:



Daisy Adair and Willow are still best buds:


and finally, a cute picture of Daisy Adair:

way overdue updates

Wow, it's been waaaaay too long since we've put a post up. I'm not even sure why since we've been doing a ton of things and had plenty to write about. So lets see, what have we been up to. A couple of weeks ago, we went down to Savannah with the family and hung out downtown and on RiverStreet. Then the next day we went up to Washington for the Tour of Homes that we go to every year.

Last weekend, we headed down to the Dogwood Festival which is always fun. They have tons of artists from all over the country with all kinds of things. Some are cool, a lot are waaaaaay to pretentious for our tastes, but its fun looking anyway. The thing we always enjoy the most is the canine competition. We mainly watch the frisbee catching dogs. It always amazing me. Whenever I try to get our dogs to catch a frisbee, they usually wait for it to drop, drag it off to the side and chew on it until it won't fly anymore.

This past weekend, we went down to Chastain Park to see the Black Eyed Peas concert. That was the first time we'd ever been down to Chastain, and it was a lot of fun. We stopped at Eatzi's, picked up some food and had a picnic at the concert which was very nice. I would recommend that anyone go down there, although the parking sucks. Also, the first round of playoffs for the Gwinnett Gladiators was this past weekend. We had to miss the first game (which they won), but we made it to the second game which was a real nail biter. They scored the tying goal with 22 seconds left on the clock to push it into overtime. They then won the game in overtime, so they are up two games in a best of 5 competition. WooHoo!

and what's a post without cute pictures of dogs?





vicious huh?


and some extreme closeups (Chewy wouldn't cooperate on this one):

Take me out to the ball game

This weekend, we went with some friends of ours to the Atlanta Braves baseball team's OpenHouse at Turner Field. It was pretty nice, we got to tour the dugout and even go back to the locker room (they have a putting green back there with life sized pictures of the Augusta Nationals gold course, which is funny since that is where we're from.) We even got to run the bases. The only problem was how that it was freezing

We made it onto the website of the AJC (the big newspaper in Atlanta) .... well, Tami made it, only my nose and my beer ended up in the picture :) You can find the picture here... although I think you have to register:
http://lpe.ajc.com/gallery/view/sports/2006/braveshouse/

Daisy Adair is growing at a fast rate now. As you can see, she's now as tall as Willow.



We bought Willow a dog house since she loved Jake's crate. She seems to like it since she takes a nap in it at least once a day:


Here is another picture of the newly shorn Chewy.... .She doesn't look very happy in this one.


and finally, a picture of all three of them napping. I'm still looking for a really good picture of the three of them together, but so far, it's not happening.

Not much to report this week. Daisy is growing bigger and bigger and Chewy and Willow are teaching her all of their bad habits. Many people called us on the fact that our picture of all three of the dogs together from the last post had a set of arms in the picture holding some of the dogs in place. BUSTED. We still can't get all three of them together in one spot long enought to take a picture. When we do, we'll post it here.

Chewy got shorn on Friday, which means that Daisy Adair now looks bigger than her.



and here are a couple of cute pictures of Daisy Adair and Willow.

More info on the jerseys

If anyone is interested, I found a nice article which talks about the charity auction for the Gladiators Jerseys here http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/hall/newfullstory.asp?ID=101996

Hockey Jerseys

Sunday night was the " Operation Military Thank You Post-Game Jersey Auction" night for the Gwinnett Gladiators where they auction off the Jerseys that they played the game in. This picture was supposed to be Tami holding up the Jersey that we bought:



As you can see, we didn't end up with a Jersey as we quickly determined that people were willing to spend a lot more money for a Jersey than we were. The cheapest one went for $650 for a player that had been traded earlier in the season. That was the only one that went for less than $1000. The rest averaged between $1800 - $2200. The goalie, Sean Fields, went for $6000. It was for charity and they raised over $46,000 which is good... but we really wanted one of those Jerseys......

Daisy is doing well. She's getting bigger and bigger (especially her nose.) All of them are getting along really well. Chewy is sooooo happy


Willow gets plenty of exercise and has to rest a lot....




But all and all, we are all one big happy family.

table dance

Well, not too much to report today. We had a very hockey weekend, going to two Gwinnett Gladiators games and watching them kick the crap out of the Ice Pilots (yes, minor league hockey has some of the worst team names....) We found out that some friend of ours, Brad and Paola, are going to be moving to Philly this week. We're sad that they are leaving, but we're already planning a trip up there to visit them. Brad put up a blog of his own, so if you knew him from high school and want to keep up with him, you can find it here: bradwalton.blogspot.com.

Without any thing else exciting going on, I figured I would post some more cute pictures of Daisy Adair so everyone can see how she's growing.








Greg

Puppy Power

Well, we made it through the week with having five dogs. As you can see, by the end, we were getting pretty comfy together:


But, with Jake and LD (we could only call him little dog for so long) gone, it was time to relax, something which Daisy Adairis good at:



That's not to say that she's not full on energy at times and can play. She'll happily go over and steal Stumpy from Willow as you can see below:



Also with Jake and LD gone, Willow and Chewy have really started to warm up to Daisy Adair. Here is a pic of Willow and Daisy playing tug-o-war, which is both of their favorite game.




Daisy had her first vet visit yesterday and everything checked out fine. She goes back for more shots in three weeks. Hopefully by then she'll be able to sleep through the entire night :)

Greg

meet Daisy, Daisy Adair

Valentine's Day was another adventure this year ended up going to supper at the SunDial which was a lot of fun. Basically its on top of the Westin Hotel in Downtown Atlanta and it's on the 72nd floor. The entire restauraunt rotates 360 degrees to allow you to see a spectacular view of downtown Atlanta. It was a bit expensive, but the food was amazing and it was worth it as a rare treat. If you ever go, try to get there before sundown and watch the sunset. After sunset is when the city is really beautiful, with all of the lights.

But, to get back to the main topic of this post. As her main Valentine's Day gift, I told Tami that we could get another dog. So, we went yesterday to Atlanta Pet Rescue and got Sissy, which we have renamed Daisy Adair (yes it's a weird name....like our other dogs, Daisy Adair was named for a character on a show that we used to watch.) She is a beagle/chihuahua mix (so we like to call her a cheagle.)

Here are a few pics of her:





Here are her and Willow sleeping next to each other:




and our attempt to get all three of them into one picture.....



With a new puppy, you can imagine things are hectic. To throw more logs on the fire, we're watching Jake and the as yet unnamed "Little Dog" for Tami's Dad and Gail. Here they are, Jake is the big dalmation:



Wish us luck!

Greg