gabriel and caesar

Ten years ago they came into our lives...those little bundles of brown sweetness we fell in love with at first sight.  One came from Tennessee, the other from California, and our lives have never been the same.

They were so cute and cuddly, for about two minutes.  Then they entered the chewing stage and that lasted about as long as my furniture held out.  They chewed every corner on everything.  Gabe was the worst.  We thought buying rawhide chews would make them stop chewing furniture.

Wrong.  They finished those in seconds and went back to the furniture.  Then Gabe changed tactics.  He started chewing the cedar siding on the house.  The high point came the day I heard a noise and found him stripping the phone cables and wiring off the side of the house.  After that, they became thieves, and stole so many things from the neighbors yard we had to incarcerate them in a dog pen with limited and supervised exercise times.  This meant Stevie Wonder turned them out into the yard and they ran for about 5 miles through the woods while he spent the whole time whistling and calling, trying to get them to come home.  They always did, eventually.  As for the stolen goods, which included clothing, hoses, and even some PVC plumbing (I don't want to even contemplate how they got that), Stevie did the right thing.  He made a pile of the stuff at the end of our road a quarter mile away and put a sign up with a big question mark on it.  We couldn't look our neighbors in the eye for a long time after that spell.

The boys finally grew into adult doghood, but are still high energy. I could tell many more stories of things that have happened...but instead I will share a few photos, and let those speak for me.

They are the lights in our life, and warm our hearts every time they look up at us and grin.  We can't imagine our life without them...

gabriel

caesar

...life is good. ~cath
find me @jonesbabie on Twitter

snips and snails and puppy dog tails

My house is looking pretty ratty and rundown.  I haven't painted in years, I need a new couch, new carpet, new ceilings, and to finish the remodeling that has been going on for the past 20 years or so.  We do have a new roof on our deck, and screen around it, so I guess that makes it a porch.  New cover for the hot tub should arrive soon, and two new fans to buy and install for the porch, then all I need is new furniture for the porch.

The inside of the house might be finished by the time I die.  I was getting pretty depressed about it, then my darling Stevie Wonder decided to give me a hand getting started with the redecorating on the inside.

He bathed the dogs.

Gabe the sleeping angel

These are not your average dogs.  They are Labrador Retrievers.  Anyone who has a Lab knows what I am talking about.  They look like this when they are little:

Gabe at 12 weeks old

And then they grow overnight into monsters.  Gabe weighs 100 pounds.  One hundred pounds of hard-headed determination.  When Steve told me he was bathing the dogs, I breathed a sigh of relief.  Labs tend to stink.  And ours are normally outdoor dogs, which means I don't have them right under my feet.  Right now Caesar is recuperating from ear surgery (a grooming trip to the vet for the Labs and Biscuit, our other dog that ended up costing us about $850.00), and so we have to keep him in to do post op care every day. Caesar is a calm, well mannered Lab and weighs in at about 75 pounds.  We were getting along just fine until Steve decided he felt sorry for "poor little Gabe" and let him in too.  They were both freshly groomed, but started smelling like dogs, so he knew he had to fix that, or I would throw Gabe back in the yard.

And that is why he bathed them.

Still ok, until he told me (on the phone, because he didn't want me to be too surprised) that while he bathed Caesar, after he had bathed Gabe, that Gabe had decided to give me a hand with the redecorating.

Redecorating done right always begins with painting.

I think you see where I am going with this.

I had leftover paint from the art samples I had done over the weekend for our studio in California.  And I had left the leftover paint on the palette laying out, because I planned to paint some more.

my art table

Gabe got there first.  This is what I came home to:

my wall

Gabe's palette

my couch

This was the paintbrush he used:

Gabe's paintbrush

And this is the look on his face when I gave him the stink eye:

guilty!

waiting to be banished

You might think I threw him outside.  Steve's cleaned up most of the evidence, but we are still finding brushstrokes everywhere.  His tail is still green.  And the artist in me appreciates his free spirited technique. 

I learned two things:

1. Labs are like a 2 year old...never ever leave anything where they can get to it.

2. Never underestimate what a Lab can do with his tail.  Especially when he spends most of his time wagging it.

My whole house resembles an Impressionist painting.  Monet would be proud.

And Gabe is still an inside dog.  For now.


~cath
Twitter @jonesbabie