B'n'B for D'n'D

Make it count, Soldier. It is the last food you'll see till
tomorrow evening. 

We finally managed to nail down a vet to do the spay operations of 3 year old Westie bitch, Poppea and young tom-cat Soldier. They were booked into a practise in town for Friday morning so for them (and all other dogs and cats because it is easier that way) starvation from 6 pm on the Thursday evening. This is not a problem with the dogs who are not used to food between meals, but the hungry young cats live a life of harrassing us into feeding them at any time of day or night by just making nuisances of themselves, climbing the shelves, lying on your computer keyboard, pushing things off tables to see if gravity works, climbing all over your lap, shoulders and head purring madly. Subtle in their demands they are not and the only way to shut them up is to realise that it must be HOURS since their last feed. Days maybe. Weeks even....

Poppea, still very woozy from her operation gets sniffed
by the other two. 

Well, we held our nerve and managed to do a convincing job of being forgetful about breakfast come the morning. Come 9 o'clock, we extracted Blue from the cat basket so that we could put Soldier into it and got a collar and lead onto Poppea and her out of the door without the other two joining us, I ran Liz to work and went from there on to the vet's in Castlerea. The patients would be 'done' in the afternoon and we'd get a call to say we could come and collect them.

The makings of a very fine gumbo

We collected them at 5:30 pm, by which time Pops was trying to come round from the anaesthetic under a cosy heat-ray lamp in one cage, and Soldier was still sparko in his cat basket. The cat woke up that evening and was up and running, eating and wanting to go outside very quickly. Our little drama queen is a bit of a different story and is milking it over the whole weekend for all it is worth. She even went all day Saturday without eating and had her first breakfast this morning. We don't mind that. She's not going to suffer for lack of walking for a couple of days and we just have to keep the other dogs from being too boisterous around her. Poor little mite. Get well soon, Pops.

D and D in da house.

Main event this weekend, though, was a superb first-time visit from a second-cousin and her man, these two with very similar names so called, for the purposes of this blog, D and D. She is the daughter of one of Liz's very close, same age cousins from their childhoods, Cathy. Although Liz had met her a few times, she mainly remembers her as a pregnant 'bump' so this was going to be a nice chance to get to know D and her 'fella' better. D is young yet (well, compared to us!) but is madly in love with the idea of small holdering when she retires and keeping livestock. I expect there will be such a project in her future but she had read all about us on Facebook and in this blog and was really looking forward to meeting the animals.

Paté, then slow roast pork, then chocolate mousse with
raspberry coulis for supper.

D-the-man knew, obviously, that she wanted to come back to Ireland where she was born ( she left when she was only tiny) and had conspired deviously with various friends, contacts and family, including us, to organise this whole trip in secret. We had her completely fooled. She did not know till the morning that she was going on holiday and was a bit fed up with her normal friends for being all non-commital or "otherwise engaged" over what looked like being a lonely, boring weekend. D presented her with a simple map-of-Europe jigsaw  and announced that they were going on holiday to the country on the missing piece. Nice one, D!

D falls in love with the turkeys

They had a stop in Dublin to catch up on the friends and rels that end and then headed down this way to arrive about 3 pm. Liz LOVES all this kind of thing - hospitality and hosting and was ready with a menu fit for these honoured guests. They were going to have a quiche and salad stop-gap on arrival, then a superb supper of paté followed by slow roast pork with a dessert of chocolate mousse, raspberry coulis and cream. Breakfast was going to be 'dippy' goose eggs and toast soldiers and/or soda bread with smoked salmon. As many as possible ingredients were from our own produce and there was, naturally, a good but sensible amount of drink about the place.

D's "selfie" with Rambo.

They wanted a good show around the 'farm' and to meet the livestock. D thought she'd like the geese best but ended up being swept off her feet by our charming turkeys. They also seemed quite taken with her and followed her around chirruping happily and in one case even let her stroke his head. She was quite taken with Rambo too, who came loping over to see her every  time she appeared at the gate, 'asking' for her to stroke and scratch his head (Yes, now down a bit.... ooh, and just that bit behind my ear.... ). If a ram could purr, Rambo would be purring. D even took a 'selfie' picture of the two of them on her phone. D and D also asked if they could help on the first feed and release rounds. No problem, but I have to admit I doubted whether they'd get up in time. They did, and were even dressed and with wellies on. There's enthusiasm from a volunteer.

This rose bud came on a branch which had snuck in under
the shed roof so was in the dark out of the weather. 

We'll call that a successful visit, 'topp hosting' from us and perfect 'guesting' by D+D. Everything you could want from guests - they enjoyed everything we did, ate the food, fell in love with the animals and were pure pleasure to "entertain" (i.e. no bother at all to keep happy). Their next stop is Galway and then Bunratty Castle where they are booked in to a medieval banquet. We took them on a quick diversion out to the Sligo rebuild house to show them the more scary end of the "buying a place in Ireland" spectrum (serious buildering) and then set up their sat-nav for our scenic route to Galway through Clairemorris, Cong, Maam Cross and the mountains of Connemara.

Dippy goose eggs.

We went back home to a standard Sunday, dog walks and tidying up after a visit, gently recuperating the patients and sympathising with the turkeys who are behaving as if they have lost a close friend as well as enjoying all the Facebook stuff put up there by D+D. That is, I think, our last inbound visit in 2015, though we do have a couple of away-games to come. We do love these visits and the chance to do hospitality so a huge thank you to our guests and you know that you are always welcome back.

The Lady with the Lump

Noooo... not Florence Nightingale - I said "lump" not "lamp". This is, though, a tale of sickness and ministeringAngels of Mercy, plus maybe a Drama Queen as well.

The lump is mine. Half way along my spay scar Dad has noticed a small (thumb-nail sized) hard lump come up, and suspects it may be a hernia (rupture), maybe where the abdomen wall is not fully mended, so we're back off to the lovely Larissa, lady vet who did the original op.

Lady Vet is concerned too, but stands me on her table and pokes, prods, pulls and palpates the area. She is now relieved. It is "almost certainly not a hernia" she says, because it feels detached from the muscle wall, instead it is in the sub-cutaneous fat layer. Probably a hard bit of scar tissue, she says, as a reaction to one of the internal stitches.

She also says (probably too much information here) that when it is a hernia, you can generally slide your finger back up inside the hole.... Oy! That's my guts you're discussing, you humans. She shows Dad how to stand me up the right way so that whole area relaxes, and then feel the size of it, and that it's loose from the muscle wall. Keep an eye, she says, and check it twice a week, make sure it's not getting any bigger - it should fade away by itself.

Allegedly

Am I free to go, now Doc?

Deefer

Stitches Out

Just another quick pic of the Birthday boy, Haggis.

I mentionned "birthday cake" the other day. Regular readers will know that this comes in the form of raw pork ribs with plenty of meat still on. These are seen as "safe" bones - they do not shatter into sharp bits and we dogs spend happy minutes gnawing and grinding, slurping and chewing them up. Ever wondered where that chalky white dog poo you used to see everywhere comes from?

When Mum and Dad first had Meg and the H, there was much talked about on the net, a system of feeding dogs called (S)ARF, which meant (Species-) Appropriate Raw Food diet. It might still be "out there" - we'll have to google it. These people reckonned that modern tinned foods and mixes are full of in-appropriate cereal, rusk, veg's and other rubbish, that a wild dog would never get hold of. Not sure how purely true this is, as certainly the foxes round here eat blackberries and other fruit.

The ARF types advocated feeding the dog entirely on raw meat from species appropriate to the dog's size - for example a Westie might have raw chicken, rabbit and so on. I hasten to say that we are never given any "long bones" of poultry, but we are commonly given "chicken-backs" - Dad spatchcock's the chook cutting alongside the spine either side with kitchen scissors, so we get from parson's nose to neck, taking in pelvis, lumbar and thoracic spine, neatly lopped into 3 thirds, one for each of us. The ARF people seemed to be getting hold of regular supplies of "chicken backs" in bulk from their suppliers, but the specific ones we talked to were American - not sure how possible that is "over here".

ARF advocates swear that after a few days and weeks of feeding only raw food their dogs are in superb condition, good immunity, glossy coats, healthy guts and their poo that hard chalky white. The theory further goes that ARF dogs never get that problem (nor do we, thankfully) of impacted anal glands - the straining to push out the more solid "waste" self-strips the oily fluid from them, emptying them at each "evacuation".

Read all about it and make your own mind up.

Meanwhile, I'm over to the vets today to have my spay stitches out, and I'm a very brave girl, and do not utter a single squeak.

Deefer (Arf arf)

Quick update - Deefer's Op

(Deefer's assistant writes) : "Deefer would like it known by all her readers that she is successfully through her spay operation and is back home and recovering on the spare bed. She is too woozy to write tonight as she is still heavy with anaesthetic and pain killers. She has managed a small amount of supper and has wagged her tail rather pathetically a few times. She has been issued with her very own lamp shade, although she has not tried it on yet. Her scar is two inches long and she has 6 neat little stitches, which come out Saturday week. She has a very pink, shaved belly. She asks that her readers bear with her through this incapacity, and she hopes to return to the keyboard tomorrow"

Flower Pots and Washing Machine Dosing Balls

Real Mum (Mollie) went in to vets today for her spay operation. Recovering well. Reported to be "sitting up in bed". Must find out name of Hospital Ward and visiting hours, so that I can take along bunch of grapes, well-thumbed "Womens' Own" mags and a bunch of flowers which the nurse will refuse to put in a vase. That's it for Mum in the pups dept, but she scared everyone to death by getting milk-fever badly when we were about 4 weeks old. Luckily all ended happily

Good things for pups to chew. 3 inch plastic flower pot. Nice satisfying stiff "give" to the needle-sharp teeth. Given enough chewing and biting you can splay out the rim of the flower pot with a pleasing Nottingham lace-work effect. Disadvantages are when gripped by the lower rim between puppy teeth, upper rim, at 3 inches higher is outside puppy eye-line, hence entire face effectively buried in pot. Not so good when evading Haggis at speed, due to impaired vision. Collisions with door frames tend to damage forehead, neck and street-cred

Slightly better, washing machine plastic dosing-ball (well rinsed). Same al-dente bite and semi-transparent, so can see door frame approaching at speed but large shiny sphere enclosing entire nose tends to look like a circus clown false-nose and draws comments from humans like "Look at that muppet!". Not good for street cred either, but hey, I'm a cute white pup.

Have heard comment to the effect, my bum is a little crusty tonight, and Dad waving beard-trimmer around muttering stuff about Brazilians. Also landing strips. Not sure what that's all about

Stair-count maximum now 5 (bottom 5)

Deefer