April 5th Easter Weekend

Was a gorgeous weekend with spring in the air, flowers blooming, turkeys gobbling, birds everywhere, even the family of hawks by the creek making noises. The grass is sprouting up nice and blue-green (this is the Blue-Grass Region after all), horses and donkies in the distance whinny, bray and kick up their heels. Everywhere there is the celebration of spring and new life.

Silver was picked up Saturday by her new owner, and though we will miss her, we know she is going to a great home with a fellow musher. It is a sweet sadness, but I know we will see her again at events and such.

Saturday I spent some time in the yard with the fence, and finished up abour 3/4 of the back where Samantha and the pups have dug out. Happy to say that we haven't had a jailbreak since, but I'm sure our self satisfaction won't last. Samantha and Freya both came in to standing heat over the weekend which has made life a bit tricky, but not unmanageable. With Yukon being our only adult intact male, it has been fairly easy to keep the girls separate from him. The boy puppies haven't really figured out what to do, but we keep them supervised when the girls are out with them. The girl puppies we have kept a close eye on, as they will be due for their first heat in a month or so at the earliest, but the pheramones might trigger them early.

We have a kennel that we put Yukon in for a few hours a day in the morning so that Samantha and Freya can run around the yard and sort of socialize with him through the fence, but most of the time he is inside when they are outside and vice versa. It is a canopied kennel, so plenty of shade, water and food. With Demon and G'kar neutered, life is a lot easier and the girls get to run and play with both fixed males and all the puppies (6 left, 4 that we are still looking to find homes for).

The rest of Saturday was spent either grilling, socializing with the pups, and enjoying the weather.

Sunday was crisp and chilly in the morning, so while Yukon was in the house and the girls were out, I thought that a quick morning run would help settle him and me for the day. He was excited and happy when I brought out the harness and put him in it. We went for a quick 2 miler, but by the time we got back the temps had risen nearly 10 degrees! Both Yukon and I were hot and ready for a long cool drink! Lucky for me I can shed a sweatshirt, but poor Yukon just needed to cool down, so we fired up the AC and let him relax in the cooling house as he drank out of the water bucket. When he had cooled down, he was very eager to get out in to the yard (mostly because his girl Freya was out there), so I walked him to the kennel. Poor boy being frustrated, but no puppies this time!

I spent a few hours scooping and cleaning up bits of things that the dogs and puppies dragged out of the house and had a ball tearing in pieces and leaving around the yard. Kind of like my own nasty easter egg hunt. But with $75 burning a hole in my son's pocket, he just had to go out and buy a video game. To my astonnishment, when Jim called the game store, it was open! Ah well, off to the showers and then the game store.

It was such a lovely day though, that when I got back, I dug out our shade pavillion and set it up in the side yard, dragged out our viking chairs, and a cooler for a table. I put a puppy harness on Moon and she, Jim and I sat out in the side yard enjoying the weather and the scenery (we live in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains). Moon had a ball chasing butterflies and I believe moles or beatles in the grass, and Jim and I simply enjoyed the cries of the hawk family, the woodpeckers, a few cardinals, a host of wild turkeys, and many other birds we did not identify. The temperature was around seventy-six degrees and there was a nice breeze blowing.

After a while I fired up the grill again for hotdogs and hamburgers, and we had a nice grilled supper. The only downfall of the weekend was discovering Moon had a flaw that will keep her from the show ring if we are unable to get it corrected. For some reason one of her eyes appears to be a "Lazy Eye", and doesn't follow and focus as well as the other. We will take her in to the vet to ensure it is not genetic and to see if it is correctable. This is the first time it has been noticeable, so I'm hoping it is correctable. I will be doing lots of research this week though, to see if this is an underlying symptom of something else.