Hair of the Dog

Photo from the Daily Telegraph I’ve often said, badly paraphrasing Mark Twain: “Everyone complains about dog hair, but no one does anything about it.” Well, now someone has — and at the exact moment when it can help alleviate the ecological disaster of the BP Gulf oil spill. Turns out there is an innovative charity called A Matter of Trust that has figured out...

Terrier Riders On the Storm

California has been pounded by rainstorms this week, complete with thunder, lightning and lots of power outages. Add one nervous, neurotic terrier and it’s a recipe for disaster. Or at least a week of no sleep. Lucy would be that terrier. And from the first loud clap of thunder on Tuesday, she became the shivering, hyperventilating poster pet for animal medication. The problem...

The Ears Have It

Terriers have so many uses. My macro lens is having trouble focussing. So I grabbed two of my favorite short focus subjects for experimentation. Terriers have such long noses that, if they will cooperate, you can focus on the end of their noses and at F-stop 1.8, your focus is blurry by the middle of the nose. But, unfortunately, photos of the dogs are a sensitive subject. It just...

Meeting the Trickster God

When we first bought this land, we had nothing but a tent cabin to sleep in. Every night we used to hear the coyotes howling. However, we only saw one once. He was large as a German Shepherd, glossy and completely unconcerned as the dogs jumped up and down on the tent cabin bed barking at him. He threw them a disdainful glance and loped past us down the path. We haven’t seen or...

This Post Pre-Empted By Oscar’s Em...

This post was supposed to be about more winemaking technique. Or maybe about my latest adventures in cooking and canning with the produce I’ve grown. Instead young Oscar got stung on the nose by a wasp and precipitated a tour of Sonoma’s veterinary clinics in search of a place that would take him on an emergency basis. It all started as I chatted with John the Baptist and...

A Dickensian Terrier Tale

A famous critic (and I can’t remember who) once said that Dickens SHOULD be a bad writer, except that he isn’t. This was based on his incredible coincidences that always seemed to move the plot along just when you thought all was lost. Kindly Mr. Brownlow discovers at the last minute that Oliver Twist is his long-lost nephew. Lady Dedham suddenly figures out that Eleanor...