The Snowpocalypse That Wasn't

Happy End of the World! As you can plainly figure out for yourself, we are still here and the world didn't end today on this, the last day of the Mayan calendar.

This day also coincided with a "giant storm" that turned out to be pretty sad (at least in terms of Wisconsin winter storms). Don't get me wrong -- we had snow and we had wind, but it was far from the epic proportions they were obsessing over on the news.

We ended up with a sad little 5" or so that mostly got blown into drifts here and there. It was also fairly wet & heavy snow, not the fun fluffy stuff that the dogs enjoy so much. No worries, though, they are making the most of what we have. Yesterday morning Secret plunged face-first into the snow that was building up on the deck. Weirdo.

I was scheduled to have the morning off yesterday (Thursday) due to Secret's vet appointment, but with the blizzard in the forecast I elected to shuffle my days off around a bit so that I could avoid driving and just stay home. That means that I don't go back to work until Wednesday now! The dogs seem to think it's pretty awesome to have me home all day.

Secret and I just walked up to her vet appointment yesterday because I hadn't cleared the driveway yet. It was a quick & easy appointment. I did her bordetella vaccination at home before we went - this was an epic failure last year and I figured if worse came to worse I could say screw it and just have them do it when we went. She still put up a stink over the whole thing, but I think I actually got the majority of it up her nose this year.

With that out of the way, Secret wasn't actually due for anything other than her annual physical and heartworm test. Easy-peasy in and out. I discussed her chiropractic schedule with Dr. Randy and he didn't really have anything to add to that -- we agree that she is freakishly long and there isn't much we can do about it.

Today I tortured the dogs with a Christmas photo shoot. You'll have to wait for those pictures, although if you are on Facebook you've already seen them... Since the pictures turned out kind of cute, I decided this afternoon to make a Christmas card -- something I haven't done in years. I made treats to take to the vet's office, though, and I thought it would be nice to have a card to go with them. I thought Dr. Marta and crew in Viroqua would like a card, too, so I'll be sending that off in hopes that it reaches them before Christmas.

Tomorrow I'll blow a bit of time delivering our Christmas goodies to our favorite vet staff and then I suppose the dogs will expect me to entertain them. Tonight they convinced me to take them along while I did some last-minute Christmas shopping. Yeah... That was fun. Actually, I was kind of glad to have the company as I spent 40 minutes attempting to get out of the parking lot at Farm & Fleet. It probably would have been a bit better had I not waited until everyone got out of work to go shopping...

On a somewhat training-related note (since we have done zero agility to speak of since the last trial) --- Since Secret is doing so well with her pre-dinner tugging, I decided to switch it up and change out the toy. I've been able to use either tug leash successfully, but had not tried other toys yet. Yesterday I pulled out an udder tug. Square one. Very interesting! Guess this little game will continue for a while, changing out toys until she happily & immediately tugs anything presented.