The days go by one and then another in glorious sunshine. We spend our days outside, mostly, trying to clean up our yard and get ready for the oncoming tourist season. We’ve found new hobbies: Travis has been taking a part old sleds, sanding them, and re-staining the wood. I’ve been pretending to be a gardener. Our greenhouse is full of young plants that I still have nowhere to put. They ache for the sun.
Madison’s recovery is slow going. He keeps us full of laughter The other day as I was coming in I got told, “Stay outside! I have to vaccuum up some maggots!” These are words no one wants to here. Apparently, Madison found a bone while out on a pee break and Travis let him bring it inside only to find that it was decomposing. The worms apparently got spread out all over our kitchen floor — but thankfully I never saw this.
We’ve been entertaining him with dog toys. His knew favorite is a pink hippo with a rubber kong inside of it. He parades it around proudly by its dangling streamers as if he found it. This is after the moose we got him — he accidentally tore that to shreds — and then was somewhat depressed that his “buddy” was gone. He is, for the most part, a good spirited happy dog who, I think, we have finally house-broken.
We haven’t run dogs much. They are recovering. This is their time off — between Iditarod and Summer — where they can rest and relax. We’ve been doing some of that too — though not much and have gone on a few runs with our pups. I forgot how wild puppies can be when they first start running. They are gawky, awkward athletes who often trip over the lines. They pull, they always pull, but they do the things a seasoned veteran doesn’t which is mostly get tangled, especially during hook up.
As the runs stack up, they learn to channel their energy better. They jump over lines less and don’t seem to get quite as tangled. But for now, they are a chaotic mess of limbs and high-pitched barks. The neighbors can hear us coming; these dogs like to bark and run which is unusual for us.
Our two youngest females are still running loose in the dog yard — Shark and Hoover — and it’s been fun watching how they play. Their brother, Mr. Clean, is tied up now but every day his sisters go to visit and play with him, usually for several hours.
Faraday, our wandering Siberian Husky, usually stays outside but has lately been seen crawling through our doggy door. While this is certainly allowed it always catches us off guard. Why, after two years, are you coming inside? We’ve been asking her. She never stays in long but occasionally finds a patch of rug to flop down on for an hour or two. When she’s outside, she plays with the pups — occasionally taking them on adventures they shouldn’t be having. Still, we are before the summer, before the tourists and what freedom we can give the dogs we will.
Our goal for the dog lot this year is to put in a big free run pen so we can let dogs loose to play on a regular basis. Unfortunately it will take a lot of work before we can get to this point — bringing gravel, buying fencing, putting it all in….I am excited for the end result, less excited for the work leading up to it.
We have a few small pens now and routinely put a few dogs in there to play. They enjoy being loose together and the more we loose run our dogs, the more we want to be able to do it on a routine basis. It’s good — not just for the puppies — who, if its not tourist season, run wild and free — but for the adults too.
Anyways, that’s where we are at. I’ll try to post more (I always say this) but I often find myself unsure of what to write. It’s easy during Iditarod, etc when we are constantly running the dogs and have “news” and although there are often things I want to write about, I wonder how relevant they are. I mainly try to keep our posts about our dogs, etc but have been wondering more and more if I should just write about the adventures we have both with dogs and without. Input here, from you readers, would most certainly be welcome