mistressofmuses

Monday evening, we got notice from the apartments that we were having another "annual" inspection on Wednesday (today.) This is the fourth annual inspection this year! (Wish they'd just combine some of these.) So we had to spend the rest of Monday evening and a big chunk of yesterday cleaning, making sure all the surfaces were cleaned off, that floors were vacuumed, etc.

We did decide to take a break yesterday and go out for a walk. We picked a local lake that we hadn't ever walked around before. It was very windy, but nice out, and I'm glad we had a chance to get outside for a while.

Because it was so windy, Bella got to encounter ~waves~.


She was interested in them, but not overly bothered.


A bee on a wild rose.

Fourteen more pictures:

Globemallow. Having a good year this year.


A mushroom!


A heron in flight.


Just trees, but liked how green they were against the bright blue sky.


Red-winged blackbird, sitting up tall.


Dead tree. There was a woodpecker hole up near the top, with maybe some nesting material sticking out.


Another red-winged blackbird.


Ladybug larva on a wild rose.


Another ladybug larva on another wild rose.


I wish this little damselfly had been in better focus! But such a nice blue.

Back at the eastern shore of the lake, Bella got to take a look at more little waves.




She was very interested in the noise the water was making.


Bella blep.


And another tree with bunches of woodpecker holes!

Glad we got to go out and be outside for a bit!

Today we had to get a pair of tires for the truck, but before that we headed over to my mom's, to wish her a belated Mother's Day, since I had to work yesterday. Alex picked out an orchid, and I gave her a rooted cutting from my begonia. We'll do more later. Usually I give her plants to plant in the garden, but it's still just a touch early (we had temps in the 30s just over a week ago!) She's going back to New Mexico next week, and won't be back until the end of the month, so won't be doing any serious gardening until then. I think we're planning a trip to the Botanic Gardens once she's back in town.

Two pictures from mom's house:

While there, we appreciated her lilac.

Which is hiding...


A praying mantis egg case! (Technically an "ootheca".)

After getting the tires, we went to Pelican Pond for a walk. It was very warm today, in the mid 80s, and it was lovely to be outside. While it was to far off to get a decent picture of, there was a pelican today!

There were lots of flowers blooming:


Honeybee on honeysuckle!

Five more pictures of flowers:

Globemallow, with a sweet pea in the background.


Bluebells


Chokecherry


Blue flax


Another of the honeybee on the honeysuckle.

Also quite a few birds!


I really liked these three crows.

Four more pictures of birds:

Geese and goslings! One of the parents was hissing at us.


Red-winged blackbird! You can see his nice bright shoulders.


No actual bird in the picture, but you can see the woodpecker hole! I have seen flickers nesting there in previous years.


A crow!

Bella in the water!

Some things found on the shore:

Small claw.


Much bigger claws!


A very pretty shell. A lot more color than these usually have; typically they're very plain, matte white.

Less nice, I did find two different fishhooks, with their lures and lines. There are a bunch of fish line disposal receptacles all around the park, so it frustrates me to still find them just discarded along the shore. :/ Of course I took them and disposed of them, but I'd hate for a dog to find them with a paw, or a bird to see the lure and try to swallow it...

There's a little... water management structure at one end of the lake. I've never seen water through it, but it looks like the intent is to help control the flow of water into the reservoir. But there are some murals there now:

Two more:

They all appear to be views of the lake. Very nice!

It was a lovely day to go for a walk, though Bella was again very tired by the end of it, haha.

Yesterday, after stopping by the vet to get Cy's sample foods, we went on a walk along the greenbelt. (Not with Cy - these sorts of longer walks are too much for him, anymore.) It was a nice day, fairly warm but not terribly hot. I did get my first sunburn of the year, and I think even poor Bella got a little burned on her nose. (Not badly! Some aloe and we're all good today.)

The usual spot we park at was going through repaving, so we started our walk at a different point, and went the opposite direction that we usually do, so we saw a slightly different stretch. We still looped back to see a few favorite points along the part we'd been originally planning on.


Nice dramatic tree, with the smaller flowering trees in front. (These are the ones that remind me of the plums in our yard as a kid, but I think they're actually sand cherry.)


The creek and a lone female merganser. She had a pretty great mohawk.

( Fifteen more pictures: flowers, birds, etc. )

(Cy and Bella, sleeping.)

Today was annual vet visit day for both dogs. (It's a little hard to believe it's been more than a year since Cy's emergency vet health scare.)

They each got their physical exams and their leptospirosis shots.

Cy is only down about a half pound from last year, and while I'd *like* him to gain a pound or two, that's pretty good. Bella has dropped a couple pounds, which is odd, because she doesn't look like she's lost weight. But we'll try to get a couple more pounds on her. (She's close to the weight she was when we first brought her home, and she looked *terrible* then; she looks pretty good now.)

Both of them were very good for their exams. Cy of course always is, but even Bella handled it well. She is NOT a fan of getting her temperature taken, and jumped pretty hard when she got her lepto shot, but she did great. Cy was just happy to be getting so much attention and didn't react at all to his shot.

Cy appears to have a lingering mild ear infection. He had one a while back (started right before the handful of days I'd stayed at my mom's) but we thought it had cleared up. There wasn't any visible gunk and he'd stopped the head-shaking. It's not serious, but still there. The vet gave him a topical antibiotic (a nice tube of goop squirted into the ear). She also showed me how to clean out his ears and gave me an easy recipe to mix up to help with it. (I hadn't been going quite deep enough when I was cleaning them, turns out.) Can't clean it out for two weeks, as the antibiotic is supposed to stay in there, so he's gross and slimy with antibiotic ointment until then, haha.

He also had a little gum inflammation around his bad teeth, though not nearly as bad as it has been in the past. He's too old to want to do a full tooth-cleaning under anesthesia, but she did as much tartar removal as she could. He also got a short course of antibiotics for the gums + the ear.

We'll get the results of his bloodwork in a few days. He has a refill of his Rimadyl, but the results of the bloodwork will determine whether we can keep him on it. (I hope so - it seems to help him quite a bit.)

The tech said he was just so good for his blood draw and his teeth cleaning, ha. (I believe it for the blood draw; I am more skeptical that he was good about his teeth.)

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Bella also then got to go on a long walk around a local lake (after Cy got dropped off at home), so she had a Very Big Day.

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Of course, the very day that I had to drop several hundred dollars at the vet, the truck very suddenly started sputtering and running EXTREMELY rough and the check engine light came on. Fuuuuuuuck.

So we will have to take it in tomorrow and find out what the problem is. It could be anything from "replace the fuel filter" or "replace a spark plug" to "your fuel injector is fucked" or "your catalytic converter is fucked". So I'm really hoping it's on the simple end instead of the "we're fucked" end, but I am very afraid to find out which it is.

On Saturday, everyone returned from their respective "trips." I have lots to catch up on.

Alex went to a model show in Kansas last week, so I brought the dogs and stayed with my mom and sibling for a few days, Wednesday through Saturday, since I didn't have access to a vehicle at home, plus didn't want the dogs to be alone for 9+ hours while I worked.

Berry Mad got to stay home alone, though we of course made sure she had a full pond and she got the last of the most recent batch of crickets.


She's so cute! Standing up all tall.

I was very worried about the extended time with the dogs in the house with Jaspurr, the new cat. Not so much because I expected anything to go badly, but just knowing that if something did go wrong, it could go extremely wrong.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened! Really... nothing much at all happened.

Jaspurr did stay upstairs basically the whole time, but he also didn't seem distressed about it. He did not hide or get anxious. He just didn't want to be around the dogs, though it seemed like he sort of enjoyed watching them. That was a relief, because that was basically my ideal scenario: cat with his own safe zone to stay in without needing to be confined, with no evident stress for anyone.


This was basically the whole three days: Bella in motion, Cy oblivious, Jaspurr judging from the railing of the upper floor.

Bella noticed the cat a few times, but was more jealous that mom would go upstairs with treats for him and to play with him than upset/interested in reaching him. Cy also noticed him a few times, and he had a meltdown about it every time, because he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs (as we had the bottom of the stairs blocked off.) Cy loves cats, ever since he got to "help raise" some orphaned kittens our friends were bottle feeding. Cy has some of the strongest paternal instincts I've ever seen in any animal, and he loved those kittens.

Cy did realize that sometimes he could specifically see Jaspurr in the hallway mirror, which reflects more of that upper floor than is visible from the living room, so he would just stand there and stare at the mirror and cry about it.

More pictures of the dogs:

Saintly Sister Belladonna, true martyr.

The dogs and I slept downstairs in the basement, so that we could shut the door on the dogs and give Jaspurr his house back overnight.


Cy was pretty happy about the basement sleeping arrangements, since the couch was wide enough for him to sleep on it with me.


Bella was a little less enthusiastic about the basement, because you can hear everything else going on in the house so loudly. I'm not sure if she knew it was people walking around upstairs, or if she thought the ceiling was haunted, haha. She'd walk around trying to figure out the source of the sounds.


Bella in the living room with the rainbow banana.


Dogs on couch.

Some pictures Taylor sent me while I was at work:


Couch dogs.


The saddest beast the world has ever seen.


Cy, helpfully assisting with opening the bathroom door.


Cy watching the oven dog TV.

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Alex's drive out to Kansas on Thursday was fine, but unpleasantly windy.

The hotel he stayed in was quite nice for a relatively inexpensive hotel. Dated, but clean and everything worked. (Which was better than we can say for the one we stayed at in South Dakota, damn.)

The Breyer Midwest model show was on Friday.

Alex did pretty well!


18 placings out of 50 models is pretty good. 6 NAN cards and one sectional champion! (Sectional champion also came with a prize model, "Sorry Not Sorry," which was a special run from BreyerFest last year. However, Alex already had this model, so he sold it to his table-mate, since she wanted one.)

BreyerWest/now BreyerMidwest has, for the last several years, had an event-exclusive model. These are only available to people who attend the event themselves: you cannot have someone else pick it up for you. This year was a glossy version of the portrait model Marc of Charm!


He's so shiny!

This is one of my favorites of Breyer's recent sculpts (sculpted by Jennifer Scott, an artist who lives fairly local to me, and who by utter coincidence is a mutual acquaintance of a DW friend of mine!) The regular Marc of Charm model is part of the general Breyer line, and we have wanted to see him in gloss ever since he was released. (Breyer sometimes does special gloss runs of other regular run models, but while others of his release year were, Marc of Charm was never never included in those events. We were SO EXCITED that he was the event model this year.)

The drive back from Kansas to Colorado on Saturday was also apparently very windy and unpleasant, but uneventful. Alex is super wiped out and unfortunately hurting pretty badly, but it was a good not-quite-weekend.

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It was nice to have a couple days that I got to hang out with Taylor and my mom, and while I started off being very stressed and anxious about the dogs and the cat, it all went just fine.

Had a weirdly productive day. Well, weird for me, lol.

I've been neglecting my at-home cleaning projects, so I knew I wanted to do some of that today. And I did!

I dusted the stuff on the wall around my side of the bed, and finally got my bedside table cleaned off. Hauled it away from the wall enough to pull out some stuff that had fallen behind and gotten stuck. Then I even cleaned out the top drawer. Often times the drawer is pulled out and basically serves as a "shelf" that extends the table surface (mostly it's where my pens and books and stuff live.) I got it cleaned up and to the point the drawer closes!

We ran a couple errands. We went to pick up Cy's meds from the vet, then tried to go to our independent pet store, but today is apparently the ONE day they're closed for inventory. So then we went to Petco for one of their supplements (since two of the last four times I ordered it online, the package hasn't been delivered, with some bogus message about being "left in the mailroom," which does not exist.) We also got crickets.

I took a nap. Then I woke up and Alex took a nap, lol.

I also got the lights taken down from the little Christmas trees, and put away all of the bigger ornaments, including the ones that have their own packages and such. The trees themselves still need to be put away, and we have to *get* to the closet to really put things away, but it's just about done.

Then I emptied the dishwasher.

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Other "eventful" thing that happened: Alex fell asleep before the time we usually take the dogs out, so I took them out on my own. Not usually too much of a problem, though wrangling one super energetic dog + one that's old and slow and completely deaf is sometimes a challenge.

We barely got outside the building when a woman yelled out "Watch out for that dog! It's aggressive!"

A big husky was running over at us. Collar, but no leash.

The other woman came over and said that it had attacked her dog earlier. I was trying to get both Cy and Bella wrangled back to me, and the husky just kept running around and at us. (Its body language wasn't super aggressive, mostly playful, but that can change VERY fast.)

I was worried about Bella - she isn't aggressive, but she does not like dogs running up to her. While she's never started anything, she is very quick to react if another dog makes any aggressive moves toward her. I was shocked that she *didn't* snap at this dog, because it at one point ran up and started posturing at her, shoving its chest into Bella's side. Bella had hackles a mile high, and growled a very little bit, but she was extremely good. Cy just wanted to play, and then ignored everyone else to go pee in the snow the instant my attention was focused on Bella's interaction with the stranger dog. And then he peed on the husky because it tried to duck under him.

The woman even remarked that she was so surprised that my dogs weren't getting upset or going after this other dog.

The other woman was on the phone with someone else, and told them that she'd reported the dog. According to her it belongs to someone squatting in one of the abandoned buildings in the area, but I haven't seen the dog around before. She tried to help distract the dog away from us (while understandably not wanting to try and grab it or anything), until I was able to pull both of them back inside with me. (I wish I'd said more to the other woman; I thanked her for the warning and the help, but wish I'd asked after her dog. I was just so focused on trying to get Cy and Bella away from it before anything went badly.)

We had to go out the basement garage to let them finish their business out back.

Ugh. I am so worried about things like that happening. Because even if MY dogs are leashed and behaving themselves, if they defend themselves against another dog that starts something, it's all too likely that they'll still be the ones in trouble because they're pit bulls. But at least this time everyone was lucky, including the husky.

Then we weren't back inside for more than fifteen minutes or so when there was a very loud car accident right outside the building.

Fun times!

Cy, sleeping in his bed and cuddling a guinea pig toy.


Bella blep, cozy on the bed.


Berry Mad was staring at the cricket habitat again, so I gave her more of them. She has since reburrowed.

Happy new year!

Dog tetris.


A little Bella face.

While Alex and I were out shopping for some Xmas stuff earlier in the month, we found a fairly inexpensive dog bed. Cy loves beds, and while he has a nice memory foam one, he used to have a softer one to layer on top of it. (That one was unfortunately ruined some time ago.)


It seems like a winner.


So cozy!


(Alex took this picture.) Bella seems to like it, too!

We had a pretty nice Thanksgiving.

I took a half day on Wednesday, and then went over to my mom and Taylor's. Taylor still had to work, but I hung out for a while. My mom made pumpkin pies.

On Thursday, Alex was going to make stuffing, then join us partway through the morning to come help cook, but... his morning was a rough one. He was having a bad pain day, and then Cy was sick, and it pretty much just kept spiraling. Ultimately he made it over, though!

We did our usual: mom got a turkey breast rather than a whole turkey, since there were just the four of us. We made mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce... pretty much the classic stuff. It was all very good!



And of course, Bella was the helpful-est dog in the entire world.


The most helpful creature ever to exist.

Cy helped by getting on my mom's couch and then not budging. He hurt his back again early in the week - not sure how, but he's definitely had a hard time getting around. He also decided that he no longer wanted to eat much of anything. Somehow he managed a few bites of turkey being hand-fed to him. (Spoiled monster.)


The saddest creature ever to exist.


Bella found the whole day very exciting, and she did many zoomies around my mom's house, including flinging herself onto the couch and back.


Even Cy eventually sat up.

The day was nice. It was mostly pretty low-key, and I do enjoy the chance to make a bunch of food that we wouldn't normally cook.

I was pretty jealous of mom and Taylor, who both had Friday off, but alas.

Today we went up to Estes Park so that Bella could compete in a FastCAT competition. (Hosted by the Husky Kennel Club.)

FastCAT is the AKC's "Coursing Ability Test", where the dogs run 100 yards after a lure. One person lets them go at the start line, and someone else catches them at the finish line.

She went to one up in Cheyenne with Alex a couple months ago, but I was at work. Her times were... not amazing, haha. Her first run was 29.99 seconds, and her second was 35.69 seconds. Oof. She had been really distracted, and while Alex was there to catch her, a stranger was releasing her to run. (Which was helpful! But he didn't really psych her up or anything.)

So today, since it's a sometimes holiday for some people, they had a Monday competition! Which meant I could go!

Estes is lovely anyway, so that'll get its own pictures and post, but this one is just for the competition.

Bella did two runs today, and got her participation ribbons. :)


Here she is!

Her first run... wasn't great. They *very kindly* allowed her to restart, because the first time Alex let her go, she just sat down and looked up at him, like "aren't you coming?"

She did run after they let her restart, but stopped about halfway down the course to check out the van parked over on the other side. (I'm not sure what the people over there were doing, but it was something with the event, so they were there on official business.) We did get Bella to start running again, but her first time was 31.69.

(Everyone was very nice about her terrible time. [For comparison, the good scores are closer to the 8-10 second range, lmao. The best of the best are under that.] Everyone kept saying "Don't worry, she'll get it! She'll learn how it works!" and giving her little "Aw, Bella, you tried!" pep talks.)

We did her second run a little later, and while she did slow down in the middle (she may have been getting tired), she didn't stop and she did pick it back up when I kept calling for her. Her time on the second run was 14.21 seconds, which is certainly not *amazing* but I am *delighted* by for her! I know she could get a faster time, but I'm really happy with it, and it was definitely her best run, and the closest she's come to "getting it" in terms of what to do.


Her times on her ribbons!

( Three more pictures below the cut: )

Which is really all to lead up to the single best picture I have ever taken of Bella. I'm fairly sure it is the best picture that ever will be taken of Bella.


It captures her so well!

She often looks so noble. This is certainly a better representation of her inner dog.