Thursday, December 15, 2016

Ears

Lewis P. Wellington has a nasty ear infection.   I noticed it right away and brought him to the vet, but it's since gotten worse. So today we upped the meds in the hope that he's feeling better soon.

There's a lesson in this for me.   Lewis is groomed every month by an excellent groomer.  She's been doing my dogs for 20+ years with very few problems, but unfortunately she is human.  It appears that she missed plucking the hair in one of Lewis' ears on the last groom.  One ear was good and hair-free, but the other (the one with the infection) had clumps of hair growing in it. 

The lesson for me, is that (as somebody who is learning to groom Gemma myself) ears are important!  You have to stay ahead of them - and apparently do them often -  or the dog suffers.

Ears are hard for me.  I'm scared I'll stab Gemma in the brain with the hemostat when she moves around, so I've been cleaning weekly and getting help from other groomers to do the plucking once every two or three weeks.   I think that after this, I'll work harder on getting more comfortable doing it myself, and keeping on top of it every week.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Stretch

It makes me happy that she hasn't grown out of this pose (yet).

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Cold night in

It's -30C outside tonight, and predicted to get colder before it warms up.  If you need us, we'll be under a blanket on the couch, with a fire roaring.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Location scouting

Every week since Gemma came home, I take a picture of her with Lewis on the stairs of the back deck and post it on Facebook.  It's been fun to watch her grow from smaller than Lewis to 4 times his size, and now each picture shows her getting lighter and lighter in colour.

Unfortunately, the lighting is getting harder to deal with as winter settles in.  The sun is directly behind the stairs in the mornings, the light reflects off the snow and gives the pictures a blue tinge in the afternoon, and it's dark in the evenings.  So, I have been thinking about shooting the pictures in another spot.

I took this one last night.  It didn't work out so well - I had to use a filter to clean up the colour again because there was too much of a red tinge.


I swear, Apple used to let us adjust the white scale in pictures between blue and red, but now it just intensifies and reduces the colours.  I guess what this means is that using my cheap point and shoot camera or my iphone won't work.  I'll have to bust out the good camera, and make those adjustments before I take the shot.