It's all about Aisling

And it really is.  In order to show you that, let us discuss her beauty.  So we have to have a comparison.  Here is a sunrise that we saw this week:

A little fuzzy but you get the general idea.  It was just gorgeous.
Now here is Aisling:

There truly is just no comparison, is there?  :)  We call her the Beautiful but Evil yet Terribly Misunderstood Aisling.  Why?  Well, rather than reinventing the wheel, here are a couple of posts about her on another of my blogs, go and read these before reading on:
http://thewatchingstory.blogspot.com/2009/10/beautiful-but-evil-yet-terribly.html
http://thewatchingstory.blogspot.com/2009/11/further-adventures-of-tbbeytm-aisling.html
Now you are familiar with what she does.  There are so many stories of her stealing food. She gives the whole corgi food stealing thing a new level.
Two weeks ago she got into the pantry and passed out red potatoes to everyone.  Jerry came out and wondered why I gave all the dogs apples.  :)  A couple of months ago it was granola bars.  She convinced me that she was doing quality control, there were apparently holes in the packages and she just wanted to check them out.  There have been other incidents.  The pantry now has a lock on it.
And now there is this past week.  
I came home from doing errands and had left the two youngsters, along with Aisling and her sister, Charlotte loose in the house.  I heard a suspicious crinkling noise and turned to see the pantry open.  The last person in there (me) had neglected to close the lock.  So I went to investigate the source of the sound.  Aisling was in a crate with the remains of a bag of semi sweet chocolate chips.  These were on the FIFTH shelf up in the pantry.  Worse, there was a second empty bag.  And a third bag of butterscotch chips.  For those of you unfamiliar with dogs, chocolate is toxic to them.  A few M and Ms or a bit of a Dove bar is fine.  But a lot is very, very bad.
I didn't have time to take a photo but she looked like she did when she was pregnant:

And she had three puppies in her at that time.  I grabbed the first aid kit since the vets were all closed and dumped some puking inducing stuff down Aisling and Charlotte but not the youngsters, they weren't fat at all and I know the selfish sisters would not have shared anything with them.
And the puking commenced. And commenced.  And commenced.  Fortunately they were out on the front porch and it could be easily hosed off.  Charlotte, according to the evidence, had mostly partaken of the butterscotch chips.  And Aisling had all the chocolate to herself.
Thankfully she did not bother to chew and so most of it came up still in chip form.  Unfortunately she also got very thirsty and drank water which then came up but still had chips in it.  So maybe that was fortunate.  The more chips out, the better.
I put her in the hallway with towels so that it would be easy to clean up in the morning and during the night, she climbed the baby gate and drank all the water in the kitchen bowl. Then puked that up.  Then she climbed the baby gate to the front room and drank all of Cookie's water and then laid on the couch, feeling miserable. When that couch was all puked up, she moved to the other one and did it, too. Then she puked in Jerry's boots.  Which he found the next morning with clean socks on.  Amazingly little of it made it to the floor, how thoughtful of her.  We did not have to treat the couches in the yard with kerosene and matches, though, we do keep them covered with a waterproof pad and blankets.  This IS a dog household and the first rule of dogs is that they puke.
I hosed off the worst of everything and then washed, missing a little bit of chocolate puke which wound up in the dryer. So had to clean that up.
Lastly, yes, we were at the vet's in the morning before he opened for fluids and anti puke medicine. She spent the day there convincing them how misunderstood she was, and when they brought her to me later that day, told me how beautiful and sweet she is.  :)  Her pancreas was inflamed from trying to keep up with the huge amount of digestion.  But she will live.  She feels great now and will go on her regular diet tomorrow.  As well as constantly checking the lock on the pantry, I'm sure. Anyone who says that positive reinforcement is not the way to train has no idea what they are talking about.  :)
I might also mention that these were two bags of chocolate chips that I bought on sale after Christmas.  Damned expensive chips, let me tell you.
The one good thing is that the house smelled like chocolate.  When she pooped, it smelled like chocolate.
And she will do it all again, given the chance.

More Spring (and some puppy videos!)

This week we saw quite a bit of spring, and sadly, I didn't have my camera with me.  I did get a couple of shots of fat buds on the trees here in the yard, though:

We think the one below is a variety of Magnolia, what I used to call a Tulip tree when I was a kid. These buds are just aching to open up!  Driving to work this week, we saw a blooming forsythia, a lot of very green willows and the tops of many trees are covered in red buds that are starting to open.  How welcome this is to see at this time of the year!  And remember that the beginning of this week it was still FEBRUARY!  We would not see this in Northern Michigan for 2-3 more months.
Here is a photo of a robin, not a very good one:

OH!  That's not a robin!  That's a guinea!  Here's the robin:

I really had to zoom in and lose my clarity when I do that.  The other day at lunch, Jerry and I counted about a dozen zooming around the park we were eating at.  It was sprinkling and the worms must have been coming up for air. I have never seen so many robins in one place before!


Here is a lovely sunset that I took a photo of this week:

Every one here is so beautiful, even the "plainer" ones without the clouds to bounce the sunshine off of.
We did have a storm come through this week, everyone was freaked out about it. Sheesh.  I am so tired of the weather being news.  We had about 30 minutes of hard rain, a stiff breeze and then drizzle all day.  Hey, folks!  It's a rainstorm!  Get over it!  :)
Here are what my daffodils (called Buttercups down here) looked like early this week:

They have grown a couple of inches since then.  There are several unexpected beds of these around the yard and I could not be more thrilled.  I planted some different pink tulips for some color this spring in the little garden out front and they are peeking up, too.  I hope to put ever bearing roses out there in a month or so.  They have some gorgeous ones that bloom and bloom all summer.  Finally I will have a rose garden!
There is a vacant lot in town with about a million planted there, I thought I would go and swipe some.  No one even lives near by there so I am hoping that no one minds me doing that.  However, you may all contribute to my legal funds if I am caught.  :)  They are blooming like crazy.  Oh, I am not taking the bulbs, just a few of the flowers. :)
Now for the main event!  Here are the pups with their first cardboard box. Today they will be introduced to Fort Box, where they can play CowPersons and First Nation (what Canada calls their native people). We must be politically correct, mustn't we?  :)  I will try and tape that later on when I give them their first real box.

And then there is the one that I took last night, dizzying fast pups, playing with the awesome new toy I got for them.  It's a Nylabone brand one and they really did like it a lot!

Have a great weekend, everyone and more Spring Things will be posted next week!