Varmint Shock and Awe

People ask me if I’m ever afraid living part time in Sonoma surrounded by wildlife. “Ha!”, I say, “the dangerous animals are in the City!” Yes, we had another raccoon stand-off. Yes, it again involved Oscar, our youngest terrier. And this time it took Andy, our carpenter friend Dino, San Francisco Animal Control, and assorted power tools to bring everyone...

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...

Busted for Running an Illegal Dog

Just got a note from the city informing us that we are being cited for owning an illegal dog. Seems little Oscar de la Hoya the Terrier has not had his license renewed on time. Poor Oscar. Just another illegal immigrant in San Francisco with a Hispanic name. This latest news just adds insult to his most recent injury. We’ve Oscar-proofed all the drains in Sonoma to stop him from...