Plant Friend

In honor of Deaf Dog Awareness Week (September 16 - 22), we thought we would make you aware of some of our dogs' strange habits...

Shaak Ti (our middle child) is an odd dog with some odd habits. One of the strangest, is her ritual with plants (indoor and outdoor), and especially with our plant we have named appropriately: Plant Friend.

Specifically, Shaak Ti likes to walk very slowly forward and backwards underneath plant leaves as they tickle/rub her back. She will sometimes spend up to 10 minutes "bonding" with Plant Friend, especially in the wintertime, which we have interpreted as her need to interact with green, growing things - a true gardener's dog.

Unfortunately, this summer Plant Friend suffered a fairly large injury. One day I walked by him, only to find that one of his two plant "heads" was decapitated. As always, I didn't witness this atrocity, but I believe that Shadowfax and her vigorous playing was to blame. I put the "head" in water and we're waiting to see if it will sprout roots so that it could be re-potted.

 

In the meantime, Shaak Ti is looking a bit sad - like she lost her best friend. She told me that she was going to stay in bed until Plant Friend was fixed.

New kind of foster parents

One of my friends here in town had three very imaginative and creative daughters. Last week the girls found one abandoned squirrel and while their mom told them to leave it alone, they brought it into their garage one night (it was somewhat chilly that night). The next day their mom found the squirrel and told them to take it back to its tree. They did and wouldn't you know it, there were 3 other babies there.

The girls left the squirrels in and around their tree, and their mother encouraged them to leave them alone, but the girls were very diligent in feeding them and giving them water with syringes. Very quickly the squirrels apparently decided that the girls were their "moms". As soon as the girls get close to the tree, they run down and then climb up the girls' legs and arms.

They apparently like to use the girls like mini jungle gyms or trees.

And when the squirrels get to the girls' shoulders, they try to go to sleep.

My friend is torn between being appalled and being somewhat fascinated by this process. She is hoping that the squirrels are almost old enough to be on their own. And for those health-conscious readers, she did do some checking into whether baby squirrels would have some crazy diseases (like rabies) and supposedly the babies are much less likely to have any issues.

School started this past week and so my friend was hoping that school would lessen the girls' interest in their furry friends. No word yet though, on the squirrels' progress.

Puppy's New Pool

Keeping Shadowfax cool this summer has been a fairly intensive process. First we bought her a cheap kiddie pool, and then she destroyed said cheap kiddie pool. But as everyone knows this summer has been a scorcher and the puppy does not do well in the heat, and it's also so downright funny to watch her play in the pool that we couldn't go for too long without a new pool option.

So, John had the idea to go get a livestock feed/water trough. I took a field trip over to the local Tractor Supply Company store and initially wandered around without finding anything much larger than a washtub (not big enough for the puppy). The helpful sales associate asked if I had been outside to their sales yard, and I had not. And sure enough - they had all sorts of options for a much more heavy duty puppy pool. I chose the 4 foot long by 1 foot high pool. They also had a 6 foot long one, as well as both lengths in a 2 foot high version. We felt that this pool was more than adequate for our needs.

I was a bit concerned that the puppy wouldn't be as excited about this pool since it is so different from what she's used to at daycare/puppy camp, but I shouldn't have worried. She hopped right in it while it was still filling up (hence the hose still in it) and splashed around.

I will be honest in that this steel/metal pool is MUCH heavier than the plastic one, especially when filled with water. It's a two handed job, plus remembering to lift with your legs and not your back, when emptying it.  But despite being heavier, this pool should last to close to forever.  Short of going back to school for a welding degree, there's no way that that puppy should be able to destroy this pool...famous last words. 

Puppy's blueberry field trip

The end of July is blueberry season in North Dakota. No, blueberries are not a cash crop here, but one of the local Hutterite families takes an air conditioned trailer to Michigan and picks a large number of blueberries to sell back to us here in North Dakota. We had to pre-order so that they knew how many to pick - we opted for 35 pounds. Shadowfax and I took a field trip up to Grafton (about a half hour North) to pick up the berries. We met my mom at the pick-up site, as she was also getting some berries for herself.

We met my mom at the pick-up site, as she was also getting some berries and then we decided to go for walk in the Grafton city park. I wished that I had remembered to take pictures of the city park, as it was quite lovely. I'd say there were 20 different flower beds, each one maintained or sponsored by a separate individual or business in town - what a good way to farm out the work of park beautification!

Anyway, when we got home, I had to get down to the business of packaging them up for freezing for the year. I had lots of freezer bags and the crates to put the berries in so that they wouldn't get squished in the freezer.

What to do with dehydrated zucchini?

Last year we had an abundance of zucchini, so I opted to dehydrate it, with some Mrs. Dash spice flavoring, and then freeze it. Through the year, we have added some of the zucchini to casseroles and soups, which is pretty good. Zucchini time has come around again and we still have some zucchini left, as well as some dried eggplant.

My one issue with the dried zucchini is that when it's in the casserole, it can be a somewhat unmanageable chunk, so I had the idea to try to blend it down into smaller chunks, with the hope that they would be less obtrusive in the dishes. Note: it makes a bit of a dusty mess...

From all of those jars and baggies, I compressed the zucchini and eggplant down into 1.5 jars of zucchini and .5 jars of eggplant. We added all the eggplant to our most recent batch of spaghetti sauce, and bits of zucchini have been put into a corn chowder, with very little visual reminder that it was present. So I think that this experiment was a success!

The Demise of Puppy's Pink Pool

So while the puppy loved her pink pool, she would often get very frustrated when it wasn't filled up. I made the mistake of resting it against the tree (again) to dry out, and Shadowfax decided to give the pool the business.

I was talking with my mom at the time so I do apologize for the talking on the video. Eventually, I went out to stop the carnage, but unfortunately, the damage was too great. You can note the duct tape from her previous exploits with the pool, but at the top left of the pool, you can see a large gouge - that one was too big to be mended.

A close-up of the carnage. Currently the pool is sitting in our garage, taking up space. Anyone know of a good use for a gently used kiddie pool with lots of holes?

Keepin' cool in the heat

North Dakota has been in a drought all summer and along with the lack of rain, has been excessively hot temperatures, which are often accompanied by high humidity. Not a nice combination anywhere, but when you live in a 98-year-old house (on the National Historic Registry, no less) with no central air conditioning, this can be a downright disaster. We bought our house in 2009 and for the past three summers, have suffered through small to medium bouts of heat and humidity.

Finally, this year, we decided to do something about it. It wasn't going to be easy though, because with the old house, comes hot water heat (hot water runs through pipes in radiators throughout our house). I love our hot water heat: it's clean (no dog hair blows around), it heats up fast, and it heats pretty consistently throughout the house. Unfortunately, it means that we don't have vents and had not option of just slapping a central AC unit into the system.

We had various Heating and AC companies come out and we finally decided on a system where there are two interior AC units hanging on the wall.
One in the office.

And one in our bedroom.

And these are connected together to an outside compressor unit, which is so quiet that I often have to look at the blades in the fan to see if they're moving to make sure the thing is on and working.

These work great. Both units are upstairs and we keep them at 72 degrees and they are able to not only keep the upstairs nice and cool, the cool air sinks and keeps the main floor of the house cool enough that we put away our old portable window AC unit, which keeps the living room from looking so cluttered.

There are a few drawbacks to the system, which I feel weren't well explained to us ahead of time. One is that there is an external pump/water storage unit for the bedroom unit. I assume that this is because the two units are connected, with the office unit flowing directly outside. It's not too annoying, but when the unit is full, then the pump turns on to send the stored water out the pipes and so it randomly gurgles for a minute or so.

What probably bothers me more is the fact that it's just sitting out of the wall, in a fairly ugly fashion. Currently with my dresser in front of it, it's not so bad. If we ever move the dresser, I think we may have a carpenter build a little box/table thing to enclose it.

The other issue is that the water is piped out of the house in plastic tubes and the installation guys just left them to drip right at the base of our house's foundation. I noticed very quickly that the ground all around these tubes was really wet and I got concerned that it would eventually start leaking into the basement. So, me being the crafty girl that I am, rigged up a fairly ghetto gutter/log combination to drain the water away from the house.

 
It's been working well for the past two months and the dogs appear to leave it alone. I think eventually we'll have to figure out a more long-term solution, but for now, it keeps the house dry.

While this system wasn't cheap, I honestly don't know if we (or the dogs) would have survived this summer. It's been exceptionally hot, and this was a great investment in our quality of life. I would definitely recommend this as an option for anyone who has a hot water heating system.

Shaak Ti Shakes Sherman the Sheep

As if we didn't already know, it really appears that our most popular postings are videos of the dogs. Anyway, here is a short video of Shaak Ti showing Sherman the Sheep what she's really made of. The puppy was at daycare so Shaak Ti had full run of the house with Sherman and he didn't stand a chance.

Watch out world - Shaak Ti could be coming for you next!