HELLO JACK? WHATCHA DOING?

I was sleeping you moron. Go away.

BUT JACK JACK!! Okay fine, I’ll stop pestering you.

Aggie’s breeder had an English Shepherd gathering at her place. One of the activities planned that day was a duck herding course. We signed Aggie up, I was sweating bullets she was going to eat one, and then Lee took her out. She went through the course two times and ended up being the beginner dog that did the best. We were encouraged to take her to some herding classes. Lee and I are very happy to see this part of her breeding and personality come out because we hope to use her with herding animals we plan to get in the future.

Besides doing well in the duck herding, she also took the Canine Good Citizen test. Much to our surprise she passed the test. Who would have thought our little puppy would have so much talent inside her.

Somebody got in trouble at our house. Lee and I came back from town and we found a mess. There was dirt on the couch, dirt on Lee’s desk, dirt in our shoes, dirt basically from one end of the living room to the other. The somebody had gotten into my tray of seed starts and gleefully played toss and destroy.

She had five squirrels teasing her at one point. The squirrels would turn their backs to Jack and pretend that they didn’t know she was there. They would let her get about two feet away before they would scurry off. After she narrowly missed one, they decided to stop pestering her.

Jasper, meanwhile, was taking a snooze. He really has no interest in the outdoors. A squirrel could come up and punch him in the nose and he would just stare at it blankly.

I guess she is stock piling vermin for a rainy day in case she runs out of kitty biscuits. I burst out laughing when I saw this lovely little pile by our back door. Not bad for a cat with a bum eye.

Aggie got spayed today and now she is the most pitiful looking mess of a dog. I always feel so guilty when one of our pets comes back from getting fixed. They just look so miserable. We don’t want any puppies though and last time she went into heat we had to keep our two dogs on separate floors. Edgar thought she smelled wonderful even though he is fixed. We didn’t want to have to go through that whole hassle again. Poor little thing.

We are slowly getting ready for some more fencing projects. This new fence line will run from the corner of the garden to the chicken pen. It will be around 200 feet. Unfortunately, there was a huge pile of limbs that we had saved for firewood which was right in the pathway of where the new fence will go. (There are other obstacles that need to be resolved, so don’t expect the fence to go up tomorrow.) Lee decided to attack the limbs with a bow saw and in just a few hours he had cleaned up the whole mess.

It actually added up to more wood then what I thought it would–almost half a cord. When we finish super insulating the house as we plan, then I foresee the possibility of keeping warm on just a little bit of gathered wood like this.

I really am glad to get rid of that eye sore of a mess. This is our new view where the pile of limbs were. Okay so it’s not super grand yet as we still have a TV out there from the previous tenants. Most the the previous tenant’s stuff is gone, but not all of it yet.

Oh well, I can live with one rotting TV for a little while longer. It sure beats what it used to look like when we bought the place.

Oh yes, I have to add another picture too. It makes me feel better about how far we have come since buying this place. You can see why one little TV is no big thing after all the work we’ve gone through cleaning up.

After we had finished cleaning up our limb mess, Lee started sweeping debris off his tractor and found a vine growing up it. I didn’t realize these vines were growing yet. Lee’s tractor has been parked since he finished moving the chicken coop into the garden about a month ago.

This vine is about five feet tall and very determined that it wanted the tractor as a trellis.

I have no idea what type of plant this wild vining species is. When I saw it growing last spring I didn’t pull it up as it reminded me of a squash plant and I wanted to see if it would grow any sort of fruit. Now granted, when I showed it to my mom her advice was just to pull it up. It never did anything last year, so this year I will just pull them up. That is unless someone tells me otherwise about what an amazing plant this is.

The first of the bleeding hearts are up finally. Now, didn’t I tell you they were the matronly color of purple and not the pretty two-tone ones you can buy in the store? Oh well, I still have a special spot in my heart for them.

Finally, on a wonderful, amazing, spectacular note, Jack, our little one eyed throw-a-way cat is becoming a mouser. We keep finding dead bodies at our back door. We love our little black Jack cat. I hug her all the time much to her dismay. (She secretly loves it!)

I don’t seem to take pictures of our cats very much. Lee and I were out working on the front porch and the cats were keeping an eye on us. Since I had my camera handy I figured I would keep an eye on them instead.

Jack had been forcibly ejected from our bed a little bit earlier. So she is still feeling thoughts of hopefulness in these pictures about her chances of reentry of the house for some more snoozing. You can really notice her bum eye in these pictures. Her butt is growing to amazing proportions due to her biscuit addiction and her strict exercise routine of sleeping on our bed. It has been about six months now since she was abandoned on our property.

Jasper is feeling quite grumpy because Jack decided to pester him. Jasper will be 16 years old this year. We adopted him when he was 10 years old. Lee felt sorry for Jasper because he didn’t think anyone would adopt an old cat. Jasper has never forgotten that. In turn Jasper has an intense deep love that follows Lee around, much to Lee’s dismay when he is trying to accomplish something.

Our English Shepherd Aggie doesn’t have any sheep to herd, so she makes up for it by using Edgar as her own personal practice toy.

Here she starts out all innocent and full of love.

Then she acquires her target…

She starts to suggest that her target get a move on…

…or there will be repercussions.

The target’s ears shoot up in horror as he tries to declare he is not a sheep.

The target then tries to stampede…

…with little success.

Then the sweet little face comes back. The sheep have been put in their proper place.

It’s that time of year again. Edgar managed to grow his hair out and needed a trim. Only, due to an unfortunate series of events he managed to get the worst haircut of his life. He doesn’t know it thankfully. Here he is posing with Aggie before I slaughtered his hair.

I left his nice dog clippers outside when we had all the renovations going on and I never took them back inside. Then when I went to go get them there was rust on two of the blades and the clippers didn’t want to work. Lee got the clippers going again thankfully, but the blade I usually used on Edgar wouldn’t cut. So I poorly worked around that. Then my thinning shears went kaput and wouldn’t close due to some weird issues. The poor dude looks like one patchy wreak. Best not to have a full on body picture of him or you might embarrass him by your laughing. The front is bad enough.