Doggie Day Care

Nina asked what Doggie Day Care is?

Doggie Day Care is just like day care for children. You can drop them off in the morning and pick them up after work already pre-exhausted for you. A boon for those days when the weather is too bad for walking, or you're busy in the evenings, or you're just too lazy for a hour or more of walking / playing after a long day at work. The energy needs of a young puppy are often more then many of us can handle on our own.

Plus, there are benefits for your doggie in terms of socialization with other dogs. They play together in big groups and learn doggie culture - something us humans can't teach.

These pictures are from Country-Side Boarding, Grooming and Day Care. One of the staff is a very adapt photographer, and they often post pictures from the day care.


It's not something we do every day. We need to go on walks for ourselves, and throwing the frisbee is fun from this side too. But it's a great relief to have back-up in raising a highly energetic young puppy.

Shoutout

Still there? Probably not. I don't believe anyone reads me anymore.

*shrug* Oh well. I'll just blabber on anyway.

I was reading last few posts and thought I'd catch y'all non-existant readerly types up.

Thoka is now only occassionally the dog-from-hell. He's mostly a very sweet puppy who's exercise needs sometimes outstrip my ability to keep up with him. He's even sometimes lapsing into 'companion'. Doggie Day Care is so very yuppy a concept but I'd go crazy without the extra help.

Or maybe it's the spring, and I have more energy for endless walks and frisbee throwing. He really loves that frisbee.

Or maybe he's actually getting me .... *gasp* healthier. More capable of more walks! Nah, can't be that one. It's not like I have any weight loss to show for it. Yes, yes, I hear muscles weigh more then fat. Big fricking deal.... would it kill the scale to give me some achievement markings once in awhile?

Anyhoo.... the trip to Gotland to go on an archaeological dig is still in the planning. We leave in less then a month. The most frustrating thing right now is that the field school is incommunicado. Two months ago, they said they'd contact us with final payment  and more information in the middle of May, and well....you might have noticed that in a typical month averaging 30 odd days, that the 27th isn't generally considered "mid May".

If they need us to bring something specific - like steel toed boots maybe - then they need to give us enough time to find and purchase said object. If there's a pre-requisite reading list, then they need to give us enough time to find and read said books. If they want a final payment for the school, they need to tell us where to send it. Sleeping arrangements would be good to know. A map of where the school is, and which office to go to when we arrive would be good. I can google the school's address, but which office to go to isn't something Google can tell me.

Ya know... little things, like details. I've been married to a Project Manager for too long perhaps. Of course I've always liked to have plans.

This post picks up where we last left off, but peters toward incomplete at the end of it. I think the whole 'bloggging about the fitness thing' isn't necessarily working.

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I know we walked on Monday, but apparently I forgot to note how long it was and I've completely forgotten the route.

1.2 km.- Tuesday - Thoka, as always, totally annoying without Neil on the walk

2.7 km - Wednesday, I was feeling energetic and we went early in the evening, the weather was so fantastic.

1.9 km - Thursday, good walking for the humans, but Thoka was crazed and I had to hand him off mid-walk for the sake of my blood pressure.

1.2 km - Friday, both of us were incredibly tired. End of a long week and I actually brought work home. Thoka appears to agree, being asleep now.

Hmmmm.... seem to have lost the weekend. I think we both skipped saturday, and then on sunday, Neil skipped out on the flimsy excuse that giving a lecture and helping students make beads all day long was exhausting. I stayed home and entertained the dog all day, which is pretty exhausting in a way too but Thoka and I went for a walk in the evening too. I was afraid of losing my own habit. But we just did 1.2 km.

Have no idea what happened on monday, but on Tuesday, Thoka and I went to our first puppy obedience class. It is.... I don't know yet. I'm of mixed mind.

Wednesday night, Thoka and I walked 2.3 km. Neil joined us for the last 1.2 km. :)

Thursday - haven't the foggiest.

Friday - haven't the foggiest.

Saturday - Bogenschutzenfest! Thoka came with us - so many new smells, so many new people to con into believing that he's cute and adorable and needs to be petted.

Sunday - I stayed home and made pumpkin pie, and green tomato salsa. And did a lot of laundry. Thoka and Neil went to the Wareham Forge for the day to play with smelting like things.

Monday - Down to the parentals for turkey dinner! Brought the dog but had to leave him outside all day because my Dad is both allergic and asthmatic. It was a nice day, we could be outside much of the day with him.

Tuesday - Home sick, but had to take Thoka out for a walk before his hyperactivity killed me. 2.1 km. Puppy obedience class tonight - I don't know how I'm going to make it through that. I'm not at my best, and I'm ready to kill the damned dog after spending all day fending off his.... energetic.... approach to life.

Puppy obedience class that night was pure hell. He was such a frigging pain in the butt and I was so afraid of him peeing or pooping in the class (he did) that I couldn't focus at all on what the instructor was saying. I held it together til I was picking up Neil after his night class, and then bawled all the way home.  Spent the next two days avoiding the dog altogether.

Note to self: don't spend the whole day at home alone with the creature-from-hell just yet.

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Okay now... a whole other week has gone by and I like the doggie again. There has been walking. I have neglected to keep track of it.

My sinuses have been somewhat unhappy for ....say... the last 8 weeks. Is it the month we spent in Newfoundland clearing our systems of Ontario's pollution? Is it an allergy to the dog? (I didn't have that much of a problem with Leif.) Is it the change of seasons? The furnace coming on? A cold?

Karen

still more fitness and doggie - with flowers

1.2 km - Thursday

3.0 km - Friday - doggie was psycho, weather was fantastic

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No walk on saturday. We went to Oakridge Acres Fall Farm Day, and spent a ton in the store. Thoka went along for the car ride, but it was too busy there to let him out.

In the afternoon, we had friends over to build a bead furnace and they brought Bella. Bella exhausted Thoka, and vice versa.




Neil found building a bead furnace to be physically challenging, and Karen's only excuse is pretty marginal in that her sinuses are trying to kill her.

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We did a ton of housecleaning today.

2.5 km tonight. Thoka was relatively well behaved. Or I was channeling Ceasar Millan. Can't figure out which.

Karen

Thoka helping out in the garden, more exercise

This is our first weekend with Thoka when we first discovered his 'talent' in the garden. Took a bit to convert the file. It's a bit grainy, but still funny.

Here you go...


Thoka Video


Walking on tuesday night was just 1.2 km, but Thoka was much better behaved tonight.

Had lots of sushi for lunch today - went with friends. :)

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It's wednesday and I'm looking back.... it's only been a week since I started this walking everyday and tracking it thing? It feels so much longer.

Well, I guess that's why I'm tracking it.

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Tomorrow, Thoka will have been with us for 3 weeks. That makes him 11 weeks old. He's gained 4 pounds (I have never managed to convert to metric in measuring my weight), and 3 inches in height. He's gonna be a big doggie.

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Vandy asked me if my camera was broken. Apparently I'm not posting enough pictures of the doggie recently. I will endeavor to correct that oversight. :)

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Did 40 flights of stairs today. Up and down.

Where 'flight' is defined as 'all in one direction, two flights per floor'. 10 floors, twice up and twice down. Took about 15 minutes. Definite increase in heart rate.

Was able to report to facilities that the air quality on 5, 6, and 7 is seriously diminished. Turns out they knew already but still.... I should get a gold star for attentiveness or something. It's not an everyday occurence.

Both the attentiveness and the air quality problem, that is. :)

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Aren't you glad I don't have a Twitter account? At least this is one long post of seriously disjointed thoughts posted all at once and not millions of discontinuous thoughts throughout the day.

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1.9 km tonight.

Karen

Monday walking

Got an awesome letter from UW's food services, explaining which guidelines they use to calculate the sodium content in their meals. References and all!

We just disagree a little about the guidelines that should be used. But that they did some research and returned my letter is amazing. One so rarely expects that kind of service in bureaucratic institutions.

The long and short of it is that they are working from the old standard guideline based on an upper average of 2390mg per day, instead of the more current 1500mg per day. The Government of Canada has set new standards, and says it's working with food producers on a voluntary compliance basis to bring sodium levels down across the board by 2016.

Well.... good luck with that voluntary compliance thingy.

If I was in charge of the world, I'd make compliance mandatory. Better yet, I'd wave my magic wand and....

Anyhoo.... walked around Ring Road at work again today. The short version this time, cutting off one corner of it.The total was 2.4 km.

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Tonight's walk with Thoka was just 1.7 km. He was psychotic, and we were both tired and wanting to get back to a new line-up of tv shows.

Castle returns from it's summer hiatus tonight! House was.... amusing.

Sunday walk

2.5 km today. But it seemed longer. We were working on correcting and controlling Thoka such that he will walk calmly in a way that doesn't entangle our feet.

He's a problem.

Remember those digging skills I mentioned last weekend? He demonstrated then again this weekend. Right in the middle of one of my more finished gardens. With rather fierce determination. Ample correction has been applied.

We think there might be mice in garden. He means well.

Fitness again, and Thoka

Short walk Thursday night, just 1.1 km.

It was just me again, and the weather was lousy. That is, I was the only human. Thoka the pup was along for the ride as well. He's a real pain when Neil is not on the walk with us. Thoka wanders all over and seems to prefer 'sideways' and 'backwards' to 'straight ahead'.  Yeah, I know, I'm never gonna end up in a sideways pocket of the universe this way.

But I'm really looking forward to puppy obedience classes in October so I can get some training in dominance behaviours.

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2.5 km on friday night. Pretty much the longest route we can do in this small town, without repeating some part of the loop. Neil was with us tonight and Thoka was much happier.

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1.01 km on saturday, but we did some work in the backyard, and to be fair, it was quasi-raining. Neil had his usual weather luck in that it opened up into a much heavier rain just as we arrived back at our own front door.
Thoka was all tuckered out after the time out working in the backyard -  His persistence in digging is ... quite remarkable.

I'm finding that I'm feeling better after a walk. I still resent the time it takes, know that this small town will bore the crap out of me soon enough, and I won't be quite so eager in the oncoming Canadian cold weather...... but I like the feeling of the lungs getting some sort of workout.

And as I gaze at my napping puppy..... I know that "a tired puppy is a good puppy".

Day 2: fitness reporting

I'm just arbitarily gonna call it Day 2 of fitness reporting. This isn't by way of promising that I'll blog every day like the esteemed Grondzilla, but I need to track the fitness thing somehow.

For breakfast, I had the Tim Hortons' breakfast sandwich - bacon and egg on an english muffin. Their nutrional information calculator kindly informs me that the sodium content is 710mg, with 3g of sugar. Yes, sugar is bad now too. :(

http://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/menu/nutrition-calculator.html

I had sushi for lunch - while not the exact version of what I had, a similiar package is nutritionally calculated at 860mg of sodium and 12g of sugar.

I then walked around the campus Ring Road (sort of, I elongated it in places). This really neat newly discovered gadget calculates my walk at approximately 3.13 km.

gmap-pedometer.com

Highlights from that walk were the skinny little size 0 passing me when I'm at my briskest pace! and noticing that Concrete Blonde makes really good walking music.

Supper tonight was two very fresh pieces of corn on the cob and we won't even talk about the butter and salt that is necessary to it's enjoyment, and a homemade mini pizza (bruscetta and cheese on a pita).

And tonight's walk with Neil and Thoka was approximately 1.9 km.

I hear that if you can get through the first 14 days of any new habit, it's supposed to have a better chance of sticking. Wish me luck, send me kudos!

Tonight's walk

Thoka was very scared of everything without Neil's dominant presence on the walk tonight. I nearly had to drag him around for most of the walk. Of course, we did try a new route and there were people, and other dogs, and people cutting their lawn.

It's hard to get Google to tell me exactly what the mileage is but I figure it's approximately 2.2 kilometres.

Thoka, exercise, changes to Blogger and my Blog

Thoka and I weeded the comfrey bed, of the comfrey, today. He helped by terrifying me with his digging skills. I think I am going to be using the NO word loudly and frequently when I'm trying to plant in the spring.



Blogger has made changes to the editor, and (also in the range of terrifying) --- I like it!

Also in the way of news - I've been worried about my health for a few years now. Long and short of it is that the Doc says I need to lose weight. More specifically, I need to exercise. I'm not good with that.

I mean, I'm not good at it. I make a lot of excuses. Anyhoo..... new puppy. New leaf to turn over?

Thoka is definitely a purebred mutt, but there's a lot of Australian Cattle Dog in him. This breed needs a lot of exercise.

I need to keep a fitness and nutrition journal. And frankly, the easiest way for me to do that is to blog about it. So.... dear readers, I'll be posting more often, but you may find the content more boring.

Today I walked approximately 3.8 km. And well.... ate 96% percent of my daily recommended intake of sodium at lunch alone. I looked up the nutritional info after I ate the sandwich.

I'll try to do a picture a week, just to keep it entertaining.

Oh, and by the by, I went to the Kitchener Knitters' Fair on saturday and tried out a few spinning wheels. I'm circling around to making a decision. Soon.

Thoka

Yes, we're back from Newfoundland and starting to get unpacked. The weaving is back up on the loom and surprisingly, I'm still willing to work on it.

So... two days ago, himself says 'want to go and look at puppies when you pick me up from work?' And....

Meet Thoka. The name is Icelandic for 'fog'.



He's 9 weeks old, 16 pounds, and a cross between a Mom that is mostly an Australian cattle dog and a Dad that might be a collie. So far, he's beyond adorable.