Teq does not yet get full access to the entire house for safety reasons (she is pretty small) and she also doesn’t get full access to the backyard like the other dogs yet.  So when she gets to go out in the full back yard we say she is thinking “wow this is a really big room” (yes we are anthropomorphizing, it’s part of the fun of owning a pet)

She burns a lot (A LOT) of energy in “the big room” so I am starting to let her go out there more often now that she is a bit older and has shown she has no desire to try and get under the deck or any of the other teeny, tiny places that small dogs shouldn’t be going, but Papillons all seemed to think were the best places EVAH when they were puppies (I finally learned by the time we got the chihuahua!).

Here are some pictures of the Chihuahua and her Papillon siblings in “the big room” over the weekend (some comments follow):

Pictures of Bun without headgear..it’s a festivus miracle!  Poor Bun, hopefully the allergy shots will start working and he can be permanently headgear free.   I’ve managed to keep some fringe on him despite the headgear (not an easy feat), so you can imagine how much fringe he’d have if he wasn’t wearing that thing 24/7 for the last couple years.   He’s a good boy.   You can see Teq taking advantage of his temporary headgearlessness to jump on his head.   He prefers to play with her WITH the headgear on (I don’t blame him, her baby teeth are sharp).

Kendall is getting so red, which I do not understand, because I don’t see her incessantly licking , but from the looks of her legs you would think that is ALL she does.  She is going to be 9 and is a pet, so it’s not really a battle I am planning to fight, but it’s slightly perplexing.

A picture of camera shy Obie with his *great* front *cough*   That was one of the few times when he has actually posed for a shot.  Usually he runs when he sees the camera. Maybe the prozac is working.

When Teq was very little, her Aunt Lisa sent her a great thermal shirt made by a woman named April from The California Chi.    A while after that, I emailed April about ordering some shirts and then I asked if I could send her some fabric and have her make me some shirts from that fabric.   My original intent was to get a couple Pirates and Steelers things that John would like to see Teq in.

Because I am me, that turned into something much bigger than a couple Pirates and Steelers shirts     When we were done, it looked something like this:

I haven’t even gotten all the stuff out of the box yet and gotten pictures of Teq in everything, but over the next few days, I will be sharing pictures of Tequila in her fabulous new wardrobe.

She particularly loves the sleeveless shirts.   I have to fight with her to take them off once I put one on her.   She wore one for 3 days in a row once before I finally forced her to let me remove it     Usually she will strip herself when she gets too warm or tired of wearing a shirt, but she loves her some sleeveless t-shirts!

Teq and I braved the outside world and went to one of John’s softball games.  Actually 2 games, as it was a double header.   It was fun, but the temperature was approximately the same as the surface of the sun!   We were both quite ready to come back to the air conditioning by the time it was over 

Teq had a great time, though.  She thought everyone was there JUST. TO. SEE. HER!    Anytime someone walked up to the xpen, she would throw herself down for a belly rub.  I suggested that maybe everyone didn’t want to rub her belly, but she assured me that I was being silly and of course everyone wanted to rub her belly..duh!

I was ambitious prior to going and wanted her to have “team spirit” so set out to make her a harness in the team colors.   I drug John to the fabric store and set him loose to find the proper green, which was a good thing because I would have gotten the wrong shade.  He, on the other hand, got the perfect shade.  Her harness matched the towel he has perfectly

I also got a O and U to sew on and I wanted a kitty paw (the logo they used when John went there), but had no luck finding one anywhere.   Anna suggested a pin and as luck would have it, I collect hat pins and happened to have an OU “kitty paw” one, so stuck that on the harness to cover the kitty paw aspect.

Some pics from the games:

It was hot!

See, perfect match on the fabric

Did I mention it was a double header?

Run faster dad!

Couple pics of John since we were at his game

Our 10th Anniversary (!) was the 23rd.  We had a pretty mellow day, as we are still having a bit of a rough time over the recent loss of Pippi.   We went out to eat (Golden Corral, John’s favorite new place.  It only took me 14 years to get him to try it.  lol) and watched a movie (The Rite).

I got John the by now, probably expected, Nancy Pinke pet portrait!    I had planned a bit of a different schedule for the paintings, but Cajun’s passing moved him to next in line.  Nancy is so wonderful to work with.  I quickly sent her pictures the day Cajun died and said something like I don’t need this for a few months, but won’t be able to look at pictures, so I’m sending them to you now.

I think this is perhaps the best one she has done for us.  John says the Zach one is still the best.  They are all very good, but the Zach one really captured the Zach-a-roo.  I think this one is very close, if not on the same level as the Zach one.

We had to let Pippi go on June 18th.  This was completely unexpected and a total shock to us.  Pip has been fairly healthy given her somewhat rough start.  She was in a “rescue” in Texas that was letting her have puppies and we were unable to get them to release her to our organization for quite some time.  Eventually, we sent someone down to do an adoption to get her out and by then she had heartworms.  She was flown up to our area, went through the heartworm treatment, which in itself is a very risky treatment and was eventually adopted out through the organization (she was not fostered by us originally).

Her adoption fell through a few months later and she was returned to the organization, so we were asked to foster her temporarily.    When time came to move her, I told the rescue chair (who was my friend) that she was going to have to be the one that pried Pippi from John’s cold dead hands because I was not going to get in the middle of that   She decided that Pippi had already found her forever home.    It turned out to be a good decision because Pip started having seizures soon after that, though they never got bad enough to need medication.

So Pip had been very healthy for the 8 years we have had her and we have only had her in for 1 non-routine vet visit (a slab fracture of a tooth which abcessed, which likely happened before we got her because I don’t allow the kinds of chew items that would normally cause a slab fracture.  It can also be from chewing rocks, but she never did that here either).     Saturday, she was a bit “off,”  nothing really big, but John was off and wanted to take her to the vet.  Our regular vet was off, so was our back up vet and our back up, back up vet.   The girls at reception were nice enough to give us an “urgent care” appt. which is $40 cheaper than the emergency walk in fee, but we did not get the vet we were supposed to, which was a bit annoying.  We got the ONE vet at our practice that I am not fond of.

I figured that Pip had hurt her back because her tail was down and she wasn’t too interested in moving around, but she was still eating/drinking and generally acting fairly like herself.   She was trying to follow John around, but you could tell she wanted him to just stay put so she didn’t have to move a whole lot.   Everything looked like “back” to me.  I figured it would be a metacam script and 2 weeks of crate rest (which we have been through with various dogs before).

What is was, was multi-system organ failure     The prognosis was not very hopeful and at that point Pip was not suffering so we decided it was better to let her go before it got bad.   We just lost Cajun in February to heart issues (one of the systems that was failing) and watching him slowly die was horrible for us and I’m sure it was no picnic for him, either.

We got her a memorial stone from Adirondack Stone Works, like we have with everyone else.  They really do such nice work and they ship the stones out very quickly.

We got her remains back in a lovely wooden box with her name on the side.

Our vet did the paw print thing again.  Pip’s is a bit different than Cajun’s was.   They did both her front feet and she got different charms on her’s.  It’s nice that they seem to put some thought into them when they make them.   Pip’s was also in a little pink net bag for storage.

RIP PIPPI

9/1/99 – 6/18/11

You will be missed!

Well I am far behind again in my blogging.   I was doing really well and then…not so much.   I am going to be trying to catch up over the next few days as we have had some changes here, unfortunately      2011 is turning out to be a hard year for us.

Here is the obligatory Chihuahua picture:

Tequila in her favorite napping position on my lap

Miss Teq is going to visit her favorite person (other than us), our vet, Dr. Julie.    I decided to make a post of pictures since Teq’s last visit to make it easier to pull them up on John’s blackberry than trying to scroll through a bunch of different posts.

This is a new “feature” I’m going to try doing on my blog.   It sounds like a good idea at this moment, but like blogging (which also sounded like a good idea at that moment), we shall see.   I’m calling it What I’m Reading, but I guess it’s more accurately, What I just Read.  That doesn’t sound quite as good though.  I may have to play with that title a bit

So, as you can see from the title, I just read Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years.  I don’t usually post or even talk much about my political beliefs because it just leads no where good when people talk politics or religion.   However, people very close to me know that one of my guilty pleasures is following all things Sarah Palin.

She is like the gift that just keeps giving.  A trainwreck that you can’t look away from no matter how hard you try.  She moves from one gaffe to the next with seemingly absolutely no self-awareness.  How can you *not* love that.

Imagine my excitement when not 1, not 2, but 3 “tell-all” books are slated to come out about her this year and that does not include the one by Levi Johnston her former son-in-law to be and a brand new one on “babygate” that is supposedly coming out sometime around September or something like that.   It’s a good year to be a Sarah Palin watcher!

Ok, so the Blind Allegiance book.   It’s pretty good!   I wasn’t sure what to expect really, other than I hoped a bit of entertainment because after a kerfluffle earlier this year in which rival author Joe McGinnis leaked a copy of the first rough draft of manuscript to several media outlets, some bloggers and who knows who all else it’s been known that the book contained unredacted copies of Palin’s emails sent on the yahoo accounts she made to keep govt business secret.

Almost three years later, those emails have still not been released thanks to the amazing foot dragging by the Department of Law in Alaska.   They are slated to be released very soon, so it will be interesting to see if anything made it past the black marker of the redacting hammer, but I digress.

Blind Allegiance is co-written by Frank Bailey (a Palin staffer, who was with her in her run up to winning the election), Ken Morris (who I know nothing about other than he bid on a dinner with Palin once and it ended in a kerfluffle of some kind, as does everything connected to Palin) and Jeanne Devon (a/k/a AKMuckraker of The Mudflats blog).

I have to say that even without the emails, some of which were pretty juicy, in a “I can’t believe she actually said that!” kind of way, the book was quite good.  The emails were just gravy for me by the time I got a couple chapters into the book.

Sarah comes off as likable in the beginning and when I told one of my friends that I was reading this book and that at the point I was at, she was likable and I could understand how someone could be drawn into her circle, he suggested I read the book backwards and watch her grow rather than read forward and watch her disintegrate

Unfortunately, Sarah being likable doesn’t last for very long.  She shows her true colors, admittedly lightly even before the primary and I suppose one could write some of it off as the pressure of running a campaign on a grassroots level with a shoestring budget.   By the time the general election rolls around, there is no denying that she is just plain bad news with no morals, though.

Bailey comes off as fairly sympathetic.   He did some *really* bad stuff for Sarah, as did all her inner circle.   To his credit, he readily admits he did some really bad stuff for Sarah and he doesn’t play the victim card, unlike her.     He is clearly wired a bit differently than I am because I can’t imagine being *that* loyal to someone and I am a pretty loyal person myself.     Bailey took a few trips under the bus for Sarah during their time together and he kept getting back up and dusting himself off for another go.     His wife is the real saint in this story.   I would not have been shocked to read that he got divorced during that time, but somehow his marriage survived, which I think says more about his wife, than him, to be honest.

The book does a good job of portraying Sarah about how she seems if you have followed her story at all since she stepped foot into the National spotlight, as a vapid, vindictive, mean girl that cares only about herself, fame, and money.

I don’t want to give too much of the book away because it is a good read, but a few of the things that are revealed include (“They” is Palin and her inner circle):

• How they used software to rig online polls in their favor;
• How they wrote letters to the editor and then had people put their own names on them;
• How they spent very little time actually governing and so *much* time on vindictive payback schemes;
• Quite a bit about Troopergate;
• Illegal action during the campaign for Governor by having contact with a 3rd party that was running ads (the RGA).

I think this book should be required reading for anyone that thinks she is qualified (emotionally, intellectually, mentally) to hold *any* political office.   It does not paint a pretty picture.

So I am terrible at marketing my store(s).  Terribad.  I hate it.  HATE!  I am so uncomfortable doing it, I can’t even express how much I dislike it.  Ugh!   Mostly I do not do it and surprisingly, I’ve done pretty well for myself considering that I don’t do it.   However, one of my (very) soft goals for the year is to struggle through some self-promotion.  UGH!

Just the thought makes me want to crawl into bed for a week.   *deep breath*     I have several friends online that are such great self-promoters and do the best. marketing. evah!  I am so jealous of them because they make it look so easy and effortless.   Several of them have taken time to email with me over the years and they have been really helpful and they make it sound so easy, breezy and UGH!!!

Tonight, I decided I *had* to make some kind of progress on this (very) soft goal because we are almost half-way through the year and I’ve done pretty much doodlysquat so far.  In my defense, I had a kind of shitty start to the year with losing Cajun.  That pretty much sucked the life right out of me for several months and I am still not back to 100%, but it’s time to get moving in this area.

So tonight I set up a Facebook page for my Etsy store and added the widget over there to the right.   I also did something I swore I would never do and joined Twitter.

It’s a start.

Here is a cute Chihuahua picture for your trouble

I usually keep several of Teq’s different clothes items in a basket on my desk, mostly out of laziness.  Her “dresser” is the bottom drawer of the organizer next to my desk and it’s sort of a pain to get into it, so it’s just easier to keep the stuff she wears the most on my desk.    She will dig through the basket and pull out what she wants to wear some days, just like she hands me the container of cheerios when she wants to train (or be fed cheerios).

I had John pick up another basket so that I could put all her clothes in it and she would have some more options to choose from.  I have custom ordered her some clothes from The California Chi, so wanted something for when those get here (which I’m very excited about, as an aside).

So when I was pulling stuff out of the bottom drawer, I decided to see if any of the stuff I bought for Teq when we very first got her fit her yet.   It was all WAY too big when we got her and I wasn’t sure she would ever grow into some of it.

Yes, I will be sleeping with one eye open for the next few days, in case you were wondering

As always, click on the images to make them larger.

Just so you don’t think I was being horribly cruel, I did not make her wear the bunny ears hood for any longer than it took to take the pictures and once cheerios were involved, she decided the hood wasn’t *that* bad.  Several of the pictures where it looks like she is mad, she’s actually either eating a cheerio or looking at me holding a cheerio off camera

The one that surprised me was the full body jammies.  I did not think she would particularly like those, but when I tried to take them off her, she threw a fit and wanted them left on.  She ended up wearing them most of the afternoon and was happy with them, even though they are still slightly too large.   It was a bit rainy, chilly that day though so that may have influenced her.  She really likes to be pretty toasty.    She will go under blankets even when it’s quite warm out.