Mooo-oooooo!

Ahhhh, a weekend off. Two full days...in a row! It was looking as though I was going to have to work yesterday, but fortunately someone stepped in, and I was off the hook. It's a good thing, too, since we were running dangerously low on dog food. I spent the day yesterday preparing the ingredients (cooking veggies, crock pot full of beans, measuring & bagging dry ingredients) and today made two big pots of rice, and mixed everything up and baked 12 meatloaves. The dogs say "Yummy"!

This afternoon, we went to visit our vet at his farm. He has a new addition to his farm-- a baby cow! Yep, a cow!

This little baby is "Blue". Isn't he cute?He's actually 4 1/2 months old now, so I guess he's not a baby any more. He's also a boy, so I guess he's technically not a "cow" either. Who cares what he's called - he's a cutie pie!

Long-time readers of the BritKnitter blog might remember this momma with her sweet little lamb from last April:

Well... Awww, they grow so fast!

Special (Creepy) Guest for Dogs on Thursday

For this week's Dogs on Thursday post, I give you this creepy critter:

That thing is the biggest walking stick I have ever seen! Throughout the summer, lots of little ones make an appearance, but they're usually about two inches long. This guy has to be, I don't know, maybe 8 inches? Could be more. (By the way, the quarter is taped to the siding for size comparison. I normally do not have quarters taped to the side of the garage.)

Tonight I was scrolling through previous posts, and I realized that I've been a bad blogger this month. I have barely managed to get Dogs on Thursday posts done and posted, let alone anything else during the week. My only excuse is that I've been working weekends this past month, and my whole routine is out of whack. I was going to upload some pics from the camera and post some knitting projects, but who can resist this sweet face?
Yup, that's Tara with her favorite toy, her squeeky bar bell. How can I sit at the computer when she is giving me that hopeful look? I've got to log off now and go play "Mommy's Gonna Get That Skeeky Toy" with my little Tattie McTata Dog.

Shelter Dogs on Thursday (and cats, too!)

I first heard about The Animal Rescue Site a couple of years ago, and for a while I went there faithfully every day, but then got lazy, and have only been doing it maybe once a week or so. Shame on me.

For anyone who hasn't heard of the site, you can go there and click on a button, and that provides food for a shelter dog or cat. That's it - just click and you're done. You don't have to register, or give them any information at all. Just click, and you get the warm fuzzy feeling inside that you are helping a little soul in need. Plus, while you're at the site, you can shop for some great pet gifty-items and with each purchase, you feed even more animals in need!

The other day my sister forwarded an email to me about the site. It seems they are having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of getting free food donated every day to abused and neglected animals. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate food to abandoned/neglected animals in exchange for advertising.

Needless to say, I will be going to http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/ and clicking on the purple box 'fund food for animals' every day, without fail! It takes less than a minute, and means to much to hungry dogs and cats. Go ahead and try it, and I guarantee you'll get a warm fuzzy feeling, too!

Naughty Dogs on Thursday

Today's Dogs on Thursday post is brought to you by Cooper.







What, no pictures of Cooper? Nope. I will, however, show a picture of his handiwork:


There, in Cooper's favorite chair, is what remains of my sister's fishing magazine. Astute readers may remember this post from last month which shows Cooper lounging in "his" chair. In that post, I talk about how much Cooper loves his chair, and mentioned that:

"He loves grabbing ahold of the loose cushions and shaking them like a shark. I know I should discourage this behaviour, but he enjoys himself so much, I just can't tell him 'no'. "

I should have listened to the wonderfully wise Sonya, when she commented:

"Now don't get mad at him if he takes the shark impression a little too far."

Oh, well... Would'a, should'a, could'a, right? At least it wasn't a knitting magazine! Whew!

Last but not least, the multi-talented, awesome dog-mom Nichole presented me with this award!
Thanks, Nichole! If anyone made it to the end of this post, I would like to pass this award along to you. Hey, if you're reading this blog, you've gotta love dogs!

Mr. Bones

For this week's Dogs on Thursday post, our special guest is Mr. Bones.

My niece brought this little man to my attention, and asked me to spread the word about him on the blog. Bones has been living at Best Friends Animal Society in Utah for many, many years. Something like 13 years. Best Friends is a wonderful place - that's where National Geographic's "Dogtown" series is filmed, but still, that's a long time, especially in dog years.

Anyway, Bones has been adopted by someone living on the East Coast, but due to health issues, Bones is unable to fly. They are raising funds to get him transported across the country to his loving forever home. You can read all about him at http://www.firstgiving.com/milesformrbones

Good luck and Dog-Speed to you, Mr. Bones-y McBones.

Happy Labor Day!

Labor Day is a day off for most people in the United States. Not me. Nope. I was working. One of the "joys" of working at a non-profit. Oh, well. We all had a very nice day yesterday, so that kind of makes up for having to work today.

Pitchfork Boy and his family came down and we all went to Fortescue for fishing and fun. It was a wonderful day. If I had it to do all over again, there isn't a single thing I would change about that day. The weather was perfect, the kids were fabulous, the fish were biting, what more could you ask for in a summer day?

Here is daddy Luis fishing while Zach and Danny are playing in the water.

Zach (aka Pitchfork Boy) was the official "Releaser of the Fishes."

In between "releases", he also did quite a bit of exploring. Here he is with one of his finds - a horseshoe crab.

Here is little brother Danny doing his "babuskha woman" impersonation.

And here is mommy Kris and little Lexi playing in the water.


Beautiful day!

P.S. No fish were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Say it ain't so!

Oh, no. Not Bill and Star! I was really hoping this pair would win the Greatest American Dog title. Sadly, last night they were voted off the show. The theme for the episode was "courage", and the stupid judges felt that Star failed. Harumph! Not in my book! Star was just too smart to jump off that high platform. Hey - that thing was like a zillion feet off the ground, so what dog in her right mind would take that leap? Just because most of the other dogs jumped, that just shows that they are not as smart as Star! But don't take my word for it. In case you missed it, you can watch last night's episode here. Stupid judges, stupid show. I'm not ever going to watch it again. Until next week's episode.

Now for some really sad news. This past week, a dear blogging friend Chan lost her little prince, Mugsy, this week. This brave little man was victim to a series of spinal cord strokes. You can read about it on Mugsy's blog.Good bye sweet Mugsy. I wish I knew you in person. While you are running (yes, running! without wheels!!!) and playing on the other side of the rainbow bridge, if you run into a big Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Scupper, or a Brittany named Katie, Scarlett or Melanie, tell them mommy says hello and she loves them very much.

Will I ever learn?

I saw this on both Sonya's and Chan's blogs, and had to join in. I love to read, and simply cannot fall asleep at night until I read something - anything! I always have a couple of stacks of books on my night table, either waiting to be read, or waiting to go to the used book store. Anyway, here goes:

***********************************

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

*Look at the list and bold those you have read.
*Italicize those you we intend to read.
*Underline the books you LOVE.
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Thirty seven books. Not bad, but not great. Of course, some of these books I've read multiple times. Yep, even though "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility" send me into a soul-sucking depression every time I read them, I keep going back. What does that say about me? No, I'd rather not know.

No "if"s, "and"s or "but"s...

But plenty of BUTTS! For this week's Dogs on Thursday post, I give you Cabooses! Derrieres! Hineys!



Have I developed a sick fascination with doggy hineys? No! I just want to speak out against the barbaric practice of "docking" what would otherwise be beautiful tails on Brittanys and many other breeds of dogs. Yes, I've heard the arguments that it's "necessary" for working dogs, and that it doesn't hurt...Bull! Would any of us volunteer to have a portion of an appendage cut off, or our ears trimmed to make them pointy? Sheesh! Emma was the last dog that I purchased from a breeder, and we offered to pay in full before the puppies were born if the breeder would keep the tail on one of the puppies for us. He declined, because he didn't want to have one of "his" brittanys with a tail out and about in the world. Because of this, and of course the many, many dogs needing homes, I will not buy another brit from a breeder.


My first rescue brit was Tara, and she came with her beautiful tail intact! Just look at that lovely tail!

Of course, Cooper the new-comer has no tail, but hey - he needed a home, and I wasn't going to turn him away! Why is the United States still condoning the practice of docking tails and cropping ears? This is done for purely cosmetic reasons 99.99999% of the time, and should be outlawed just like it is in so many other countries. Just look at this list I stole from borrowed from Wikipedia.

Legal status of dog tail docking by country
Argentina: Unrestricted
Australia: Banned in all states and territories as of June 2004. Restricted to veterinarians, for welfare, not cosmetic.
Austria: Banned as of 1 January 2005

Belgium: Banned as pf 1 January 2006
Brazil: Banned for cosmetic purposes
Canada: Unrestricted
Chile: Unrestricted
Croatia: Banned
Cyprus: Banned in 1991

Czech Republic: Banned
Denmark: Banned as of 1 June 1996, with exceptions for five gun dog breeds
England: Restricted as of 2006 - can only be done by vet on a number of working dog breeds
Estonia: Banned as of 2001
Finland: Banned in 1992. Exception on tail docking, although banned on dog shows
France: Banned as of 4 August 2003
Germany: Banned on 1 May 1992, with exceptions for working gun dogs
Greece: Banned in 1991
Hungary: Banned
Iceland: Banned as of 2001
India: Unrestricted
Indonesia: Unrestricted
Ireland: Banned as of January 2008
Israel: Banned for cosmetic purposes in 2000.
Italy: Banned in Rome and Turin
Latvia: Banned
Lithuania: Banned
Luxembourg: Banned in 1991
Malaysia: Unrestricted
Mauritius: Unrestricted
Mexico: Unrestricted
Nepal: Unrestricted
Netherlands: Banned as of 1 September 2001
New Zealand: Unrestricted
Northern Ireland: Unrestricted tail docking, Ear Cropping Illegal.
Norway: Docking banned since 1987
Philippines: Unrestricted
Portugal: Unrestricted
Republic of Ireland: Unrestricted for dogs.
Russia: Unrestricted
Scotland: Banned as of 2006 for all breeds.
Singapore: Unrestricted
Slovakia: Banned as of 1 January 2003
South Africa: Banned as of June 2007
Sweden: Banned as of 1989.
Switzerland: Banned as of 1 July 1981 for the ears and 1988 for the tail
Taiwan: Unrestricted.
United States: Unrestricted (some states, including New York, and Vermont have considered bills to make the practice illegal)
Virgin Islands: Banned as of 2005
Wales: Same legislation as England

Come on, United States---join the many other civilized countries in the world who have already banned this barbaric practice!

OK, I'm getting down from my soapbox now. Whew!

Yes, I have been knitting!

I knew it had been a while since I posted anything about knitting, but I didn't realize it had been way back in June! Shame on me!

So, here goes. This pair of socks is made from Online sock yarn.


The pattern is my standard mix of bits and pieces from other sock patterns. It occurred to me that I have never written it down, so here goes:

• With size 0 needles, CO 80 stitches
• Rib 2x2 for 24 rnds
• Knit for 62 rnds
• Garter stitch heel from Lucy Neatby's book Cool Socks Warm Feet worked over 60% of stitches
• Knit for 62 rnds
• Toe from Nancy Bush's St. Peter Port Stripe pattern from her Folk Socks book.

There, now it is written down for all eternity. Not that anyone else cares, but I'll know where to find it when I am old and senile, but still knitting away in a corner somewhere surrounded by my many dogs.

I received the book, yarn and needles for this pair in a swap from The Knitting Wildflower. (Thanks again, Cheryl!) The yarn is Island Jewels by Zona Blue Designs, and the pattern is "Twilight" from 2-at-a-Time Socks by Melissa Morgan Oakes.
The final three pictures are of caps that I made for Nichole's Chemo Cap Drive. Both of her parents have been diagnosed with the "C-word" recently, and are thankfully doing well. Nichole is collecting caps to give to the cancer center where her parents have undergone treatment. I used the Ripple Brim Chemo Cap pattern by Katherine Vaughan, and just jazzed it up a bit with some patterning.



Nichole, if you're reading this, I'll be putting these in the mail to you tomorrow. Hopefully.