Yard Work

Finally - what a beautiful spring morning! Duncan started off the day with a bit of exercise, by chasing some imaginary balls in the baseball diamond. He always seems to know just where the ball would have landed, if it actually existed. Apparently that last throw didn't go very far:

But we couldn't play all day; we had to get to work. The long winter left lots of yard work to be done, and Duncan was a great help with it. He did NOT attack the rake. He did NOT lie down in the grass I was cutting. He ate all the leftover ice cubes. He did NOT attack the yard waste bag.  And most of all, he helped with pruning the shrubs. (After all, pruning means new sticks!)

Just one small problem: he realized that he was being stalked by somebody with a camera. Very annoying. Well, a guy likes a bit of privacy, right? So he took his branch and moved to a quieter corner of the yard, where he settled in for a chew:

Enjoying Spring!

Finally! It's a beautiful early spring day, mild and sunny. And Duncan loves it. In fact, he has been outside for most of the morning, just prowling around, chasing frisbees, and getting reacquainted with the yard now that the snow has all disappeared.

Oh, and enjoying his latest stick:

A couple of weeks ago, Duncan was extremely upset to discover a man in the neighbour's tree. Men don't belong in trees. Birds belong in trees, and possibly squirrels (although they really should stay on the ground to be chased.) But not men. And this one had a very noisy chainsaw, with which he was attacking the tree.

One of his anxiety pills later, he felt much better, and was actually able to go outside and watch this evil man without stressing, which was a huge achievement for him. And he got his reward: one of the smaller branches fell on our side of the fence, along with a few other sticks. And we all know that Duncan  -  loves  -  sticks  ! 

His plan seems to be to start and one end of it and work to the other, so I have a feeling this stick will last a long time!

First Day of Spring

Spring starts today after a long, cold winter (sorry, Erin, I know you just had a couple more snow days!) and Duncan was ready to celebrate.

First, we went to the baseball diamond in the park on our walk this morning. For the first time in weeks it was neither knee deep in snow nor ankle deep in mud. I wish I'd taken my camera, because he ran and ran and ran! It was so much fun. There were several good sticks, too, which had been nicely broken in by other dogs, so he chased them and chewed them to his heart's content.

As soon as we got home, he went out to explore the yard, which is rapidly reappearing from under the snow. And guess what - his rabbit buddies from last year are back! He played with them for nearly half an hour.

Perhaps I'm suffering from spring fever silliness, but I'm imagining a little rabbit track team practicing sprint starts to fake him out: "Good job, Peter! You got him all the way to the step. Too bad, Benjamin, he only jumped to the tree that time." I'm pretty sure the rabbits know they're safe down there.

Halting the Haltering

Dr-to-be Megan is home for the weekend, and caused some trouble for Duncan. She needed to practice for next week's Clinical Medicine final exam, in which she has to demonstrate various skills in examining both large and small animals.

Unfortunately for him, Duncan is a small animal. So he got a free physical checkup, which he didn't enjoy very much. Finally he was pronounced physically normal, if uncooperative, and escaped. He thought that was the end of that. He was wrong. We moved on from dogs to cows.

Apparently vets need to learn a lot of knots to tie up various parts of cows during physical exams. Human legs and arms can be used to practice the "lifting the cow's leg" and "getting the cow's tail out of the way" knots (which actually have more technical-sounding names), but human noses aren't big enough to practice making temporary halters.

Enter Lamb Chop II. Duncan's Lamb Chop II! He wasn't pleased:

Eventually, he allowed Megan to tie the halter. But he was still worried. It looked awfully tight around the nose:

So he solved the problem. If having a big nose was getting Lamb Chop tied up, Duncan would simply remove the nose:

He really does enjoy unstuffing his stuffies – you may even have noticed a few clumps of another toy's innards under the table in that first video from an earlier incident.

This Morning's Exciting Walk

First of all, I need to apologize for not posting more. Duncan's friends Owen and Cerys came for a playdate last week, and it was pointed out that I have been negligent. So here we are, back with an exciting report of Duncan's walk this morning.

It was so nice and mild this morning that we ventured off the ploughed bike path through the park, which has been our default walk since the snow came. We crossed over the creek, then stomped our way through the still-pretty-deep-and-quite-crusty snow, down the path between the creek and the ball diamond to the second bridge:

Often when we go this way, we continue along that path behind the other ball diamond and the tennis courts. It leads to Pauline Johnson school (Megan's alma mater), where there are many interesting smells and sometimes doggy friends to play with. Today, though, after we crossed the bridge, we stopped to sniff that big willow just off the path. And we noticed Something Wrong:

I took this photo later. There wasn't time on our walk. Keep reading to find out why!

A Christmas tree. In the middle of the parking lot. In March. Duncan was Not Pleased. We had to investigate. So we cut up toward the parking lot instead of continuing along the path. This was lucky, as you'll see... (The tree is the blue dot on the map up there. Keep that in the back of your mind until the exciting conclusion to this thrilling tale...)

It turned out that the tree was harmless, and in fact smelled quite interesting. While Duncan sniffed, I looked around. I noticed another dog sniffing the garbage can over by the path (the red dot).

It took a moment to realize that it wasn't one of Duncan's usual dog buddies. In fact in wasn't a dog at all. It was a coyote.

Wikipedia's version of a coyote. Ours was darker and much more handsome.

Luckily, I'm not sure that Duncan even noticed it. But I think we may need to time our walks in the park a bit later; this is the route the high school kids tend to take when they walk to school, and any sensible coyote would be sure to be safely tucked up in its den before dozens of teenagers appear, about half an hour or so after we were there.

** catwalk = walkway between the houses that leads from street to park. We had to learn a whole new vocabulary when we moved here.

Duncan Develops a Taste for Knitting

Literally. He finds knitting very tasty indeed:

These are the remains of would be my nice warm dog-walking mitten, and Megan's Christmas knitting project: fingerless glove-to-be #1.

For the culprit's sake, we didn't break the news to her until after she'd finished sticking him with his allergy shot this afternoon. I hope he appreciated it!

Catching up after Christmas

It was a busy few weeks for Duncan, as all his human siblings and his feline buddy Jax all came home for Christmas!

Jax is beginning to feel a bit more at home, finding comfortable places to settle down for a nap:

He's even beginning to learn to play, something he didn't seem to know how to do until now. He prefers yarn or scrap cardboard to actual toys:

Christmas morning, of course, meant presents! Jax checked out the tree looking for his...

...while Duncan preferred to wait on the couch until someone delivered his to him:

Duncan got a new Lambchop II toy, among other things:

And Jax got a nice new cat toy. He wasn't at all impressed, and totally ignored both the toy and the catnip we sprinkled on it.

Duncan, though, was quite entertained. His cousin Taz may possibly have been laughing at him in the background:

By the end of Christmas Day, Duncan, Jax, and little Taz were all exhausted!

The afternoon of New Year's Eve, Cerys came over for a playdate. It was a cold day, so they ran in and out of the house every few minutes, but they had great fun playing constantly for almost two hours. We love having Cerys come to play; Duncan sleeps so soundly afterwards!