Friday, April 08, 2011

Puppy Love

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Yep, we have a new addition to the family! Meet Max. She's a Border Collie. Yes, she. My son was in charge of the naming ceremony, and six year olds don't have a real firm grasp of gender-specificity. We'll just assume it's short for Maxine, okay?


My mother also got a new puppy at Christmas. She's a Shitzu. Her name is Sammi. Yes, the kid was in charge of that name, too. So here for your Friday evening viewing pleasure is the World Federation of Puppy Wrestling championship bout. After much debate, the judges called it a draw.



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Sunday, April 03, 2011

The Definition of Insanity

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Sigmund Freud said the definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Which is why someone ought to come and take me away for entering yet another winter rodeo.

(Yes, I am aware that it is supposedly spring. That's where you live. Here, it is late winter. As opposed to early winter, which runs from Labor Day to Halloween, and The Dead of Winter, which encompasses November through March.)

As I was saying...I entered a rodeo last April. Paid over a hundred bucks for a health certificate to get my horse into Canada. And spent that particular Saturday slogging around in knee deep snow tracking down calves that had wandered off in the massive blizzard the day before and watching the snow plows rumble right on past my driveway without even slowing down.

But here I am, a year later, once again dragging the rope horse in from the far pasture and trying to remember where I stashed my rope when I packed it in at the end of last summer, which was right around the first of August. I'm having a hard time getting excited about this because I fully expect a winter storm watch to pop up two days before we are due to head north to High River, Alberta. But I'm a sucker, and yes, slightly insane, so I will practice, and I will drag the horse to the vet and pay out another hefty chunk of change for health papers then use them to start the woodstove while I sit in my house and sulk and watch the snowflakes fly.

And next year, I'll probably do it all again.



Wrangling the Wild Bunch
(As you can see, it is a touch difficult to produce high quality video from the back of a horse. Especially when there's a herd of other horses blasting down the hill toward her.)
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