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Tessa Earns a Nap, Dexter Fails at Geography and Solo Goes to the Darkside

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Tessa is the last remaining puppy from her litter – although I suppose I can’t even come close to referring to her as a ‘puppy’ any more. It doesn’t really matter that she’s thirteen and change – to me, she’ll always be that little red and white trouble maker I tucked inside my coat and brought with me every where I went.

 

It’s not that I don’t realize she’s getting older – that’s obvious. She moves slower, sleeps more, and occasionally wanders into a room and forgets why she’s there (I’ve compared it to those moments when I get to the kitchen and think “What the heck did I come in here for?”). In spite of that, she’s still pretty perky for her age. Playing with the Grandkids (Fanny is an honorary Grandpuppy) gives her something to do, and probably makes those fireplace naps that much sweeter.

 

Here’s a video of her wrestling with Dexter, Fanny, Paris and Bunny.

 

 

Dexter is living up to the Frenchie family tradition of getting stuck in stupid places. A few nights ago, we heard him bark-bark-BARKing outside, so Sean came down to investigate. Seems Dexter had gone out the dog door, and around the corner of the house into the fenced play yard (probably following his ‘girlfriend’, Tula, who he shadows almost everywhere). Once there, he got a bit confused, and stood outside the ground level windows of our downstairs bathroom, yelling for someone to let him in. That’s where Sean found him, after walking around the house in his slippers – through three feet snow drifts. Dexter seemed pretty happy to be back inside.

 

Here are a few new photos of Dexter snuggling with his mommy Bunny, along with some lovely profile photos of Paris, and two that show how incredibly similar Sailor’s markings are to Dexter’s. Barb calls it ‘the mark of the Devil’. I don’t think Dexter is ready for a career of evil just yet – he should probably stick to figuring out how to navigate the backyard before he takes on total world domination….

 

 

Lots of new photos of Solo to post this week, including some of his exercising his ever growing ESPP powers, and a few worrisome ones where he contemplates going over to the darkside. More on that this week…

 

ESPP Fridays – It's another Solo Video

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It’s ESPP Friday, and that means it’s time for a Solo video!

Here he is playing with his toys, with Sean, with his ‘brother’ Dexter, and with his Aunt Ellie (who can’t wait for him to leave, and would prefer it if he took all the other dogs with him).

Snowy Day Solo Video

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Snowy days make me want to break out the video camera (well, actually they make me want to break out the credit card and book a trip to Costa Rica, but this is cheaper and doesn’t involve my freaking out over the Atlantic because we’ve hit turbulence and I think the plane is about to do a “Lost” and plunge into the Ocean, which causes me to rip the top layer of skin off of Sean’s arm with my nails because he was stupid enough to try and hold my hand to ‘console’ me).

Umm, anyways.

Here’s a video of Solo, doing cute stuff. Bonus feature – Banjo music!!

(Oh, and what do you think of the new theme? I needed something with a wider layout, no matter how colorful the old one was. Input welcome, please!)

More Solo Photos & Some Experimental Video

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It amazes me sometimes how many tricks and features my lovely Mac computer has that I remain blissfully unaware of.

I only discovered Boot Camp (the utility that allows me to partition my hard drive and run either Windows XP or Vista on the second partition) after watching a Tech show on TV, and I know for a fact that I’m still not using a quarter of the features available to me in iPhoto. I had started out using Mac computers almost exclusively, but I then spent almost 15 years working in the clunky, non intuitive environment of PCs, and the learning curve of the Mac operating system had left me in the dust in the intervening years.

Other than my graphics and web design software, the bundled program I use most on my Mac is definately iMovie. Faster and more fully featured that Windows Movie maker, it takes all of the guess work out of making small, simple web friendly movies – perfect for the dog hobbyist who, like me, has a video camera addiction.

Over the weekend, I made a new movie of Solo, which I linked to in an earlier entry. Intrigued by the shutter delay feature on my XTI Rebel camera, I threw in some gratuitous stop motion still shots at the very end of the movie, and started toying with the idea of doing more time lapse videos. Hey, who doesn’t like seeing big chunks of time compressed into a single minute? The problem was, I had no intentions of standing in one place for an hour so I could take a billion photos, and I’m too impatient to take a single dog photo a day for the next ten years. I decided to go looking for hardware that would let me accomplish the same thing, and discovered that for just under a thousand dollars, I could get a camera remote with a timer.

Umm, maybe not.

I then discovered that I could get a nifty piece of software that connects to my camera via USB and collects timed still images that can be knit into a movie. Perfect! But it only works on Windows.

Another hour of googling, browsing, downloading and being disappointed, and I finally stumbled across Mac Docs link that pointed out that iMovie came with built in time lapse photography capture.

Oops. I guess that’s why we’re supposed to read the manual.

Anyways, I spent some time this afternoon capturing video of Solo, and of the bed area where my dogs spend most of their time. It’s in front our family room bookcases, and nicely close to the fireplace, so they sleep, roughhouse and stash toys there, making it a good place to shoot time lapse.

You’ll find links to both videos below, and embeds after the cut.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XwTAHMkbtM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVepFq5D4Kw

I also shot some new pix of Solo playing with Dexter. It’s so nice to see that he finally has a buddy to spend some time with, and Dexter is being so gentle with Solo that I’m well and truly impressed.

Solo with SnugglePuppieSolo has another new friend – his SnugglePuppie. Solo’s friend Judith sent it to him, because she is obviously powerless in the face of his ESPP. The SnugglePuppie has a heart beat, and can contain warming packets. You can even insert a bottle into it, and let the puppy nurse directly from the toy, in a way that more closely simulates natural nursing.

We put Solo on his new best friend just after lunch, as soon as we’d unpacked the SnugglePuppie and set it up. He literally did not move from it for the next four hours. He’s usually a restless sleeper, but sleeping next to the warm, beating presence is obviously soothing. Thanks so much, Judith! Here are some pix of Solo and the SnugglePuppie, sleeping the sleep of the content.

Embedded video after the cut.

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