CONLEY

 

This is First Class Tonic With a Twist. Aka "Conley" He has several AKC points toward his Championship and then he decided the ride was over and quit putting his tail up. The rule is "no tail, no ribbon".  Bassets, like Beagles, are supposed to appear overwhelmed with joy at being in a dog show. Conley's opinion of dog shows was NOT joyous.

 

He will be 5 or 6 the 29th of this month. Of the three Bassets, he is the only with testicles and while he has never had the opportunity to use them as intended, it does a lot to explain his attitude. And he has one.

 

 

 

This is also Conley in one of his favorite places and one of his favorite positions doing one of his favorite things. There is that song, "These are some of my favorite things" and there are only two or three things:

eating

sleeping

tormenting the Belgian

ignoring commands, demands or suggestions.

 

Not necessarily in that order.

 

As a puppy, Conley had a Thing for knives and scissors which he would take off the counters and carry around the house, daring Nigel and Llewis to play with him.

Conley Scissormouth.

 

 

He has a Thing...

 

 

...for the backs of furniture.

This is the couch. He has fallen off that perch several times and been trapped behind the couch, but has never gotten hurt.

 

Conley is the most photogenic of the dogs. (Ssssh. Don't tell.)

He has an ego that demands that he be in front, on top, up high, first in line. This has recently caused some abrasive incidents between Conley and our still-growing Belgian, who also sports  testicles and is just beginning to grow into them. As yet, Doc the Belgian tends to give way, but I can sense that this may easily change someday soon.

 

 

Conley, not a big fan of really cold weather, nonetheless loves to play.

 

 

 

Puppy Conley. He was a real cutie.

 

Meeting the Black Dog before he became a BIG black dog.

 

Things were not always good even early on. Doc had baby teeth.

Conley did not care for them.

 

Conley discovers the advantages of stairs. This is one of my favorite photographs of him. Barely visible, he had been up and down the stairs several times and finally, refused to leave the top. It was quiet, and it made him, literally, TOP DOG.

 

NIGEL

This is Bonsai's Quietly Making Noise, TD "Nigel". This was taken right after he went down in the rear and we were buying a cart for him. He had a huge sebaceous cyst on his neck right where the harness would fit and so with unusual foresight, we had the cyst removed and he had to wear this inflatable collar.

I picked this photo especially for the expression. This is standard Nigel expression. His sense of humor is not the best. His sense of self is easily offended. He was always the "top" BAsset, if not by attitude then by sheer size. He is not huge, but is the biggest Basset we have had.

He was born here moments before or after Llewis to be honest, I do not remember. I think Llewis is actually older, by a few seconds, but Nigel believes he is, and tell me to argue with that face.

This is Nigel after Llewis has just told an hilarious Basset joke. You can see that Nigel enjoys laughter and is not paranoid enough to think all the dogs are laughing at him.

This is also Nigel. He is listening to the other dogs discuss Pet Insurance plans.

 

Before he went down in the rear Nigel did a few shows. I liked him because (I'm sorry) I liked his tail. It prevented me from looking at his front which, a breeder and very good friend told me once was the worst front she had seen in years. (Good friends do not tell you these things. They let you go on showing while the knowledgeable among them roll their eyes when they see his front.)

 

This is Conley on the left (I think) and Nigel on the right. If you compare, you can easily see that Nigel looks similar to a Mack Truck bearing down on you, while Conley appears to be a pick-up. I believe the term is "Loaded shoulders". Built like a semi, but mostly in front, Nigel was badly balanced. We quit the show ring and began tracking.

Tracking was something Nigel understood from the absolute beginning. I had tracked with Mitchell and he was GOOD. Nigel made him look dull. From the very first track it was obvious that this dog was born to do this. Any mistakes he made were mine. He got his TD but failed the TDX twice: once due to a sleet storm that soaked up both to the skin in an instant and afraid and lost, Nigel came back and sat on my feet and refused to track. The only smart one among us.
The second time, he breezed through and then did something he had never ever done before-- took a cross track. Shortly after that, he went down in the rear. This is a dog who could probably have gotten a VST without a lot of wear and tear.He already tracked across streets and drives and sidewalks. Lay a track and he could do it. I wonder if he dreams of tracking.

Somewhere

Someone

is

Cooking Food....

LLEWIS

Llewis  is Bonsai's Gravity Storm according to his papers, but is Lewis Lewis according to us or Llewis which is easier to write.
He was born here, in this room, one very hot summer morning very early morning with my friend MCBeth attending (Vet). I had the windows open it was so hot in the room but I could not run the window a/c unit for fear of chilling the little bratwurst with feet.
Nothing says sausage as much as a newborn Basset.

This was probably around 12 days. Eyes not open  but starting, and ears as well. . All the puppies were great. Ate well, Zelda was a great Mom, and they grew like weeds.

Eyes just getting there. Probably taken the same day. Such cuties.

And then we began to notice that Llewis was having trouble moving around with the others. We were told oh, he'd be fine. But we weren't so sure. This was my first (and only ever) litter so I was depending on others to tell me what to do. Finally, I decided to do something myself and took little Llewis to see the Vet, who thought it looked like a "Swimmer puppy" and it did. So we taped his back legs together in hobbles, and actually, he did better.

But they had to be taped. When the tape came off, he went right back to his hobbedly gimpy tumbly self. Nahh...there was something else going on.

I took him one afternoon to the home of one of my other Vets. This one has horses and is perhaps a bit more attuned to lameness. She watched him "walk" and fall and trip, drag one leg, hoisting it at a funny angle, and when she palated his rear she said she didn't think there was a femur there!

So off we went to the University of Wisconsin, and they poked and prodded and xrayed and palpated and their official diagnosis written in his chart, was that he was "a mess". The femur did not reach the hip socket which was basically not there anyway, and the patella was either so far out of place and misshapen or not there (to be honest I do not remember) that he could not properly bend that back leg at the hock.

 

 

If you look at these, you will see the problem. We knew we were going to keep him. I picked his brother Nigel as my future show puppy even tho his shoulders were a bit heavy and his front wide...

Off we went with Llewis to a doggie Re-habilitation place. Not for drugs, but physical re-hab.
There he became a clinic favorite as he ate frozen peanut butter while they did acupuncture and chiropractic, and we had a state of the art brace made which he wore awhile. And after awhile, the re=hab place asked us to have him re-evaluated by an orthopedic specialist because nothing much was happening.

So we called in Dr Lou. We showed him the U of Wisconsin xrays, showed him the puppy, let him do his own exam and at the end he said "Take that brace off of him, take him home and let him run around and be a puppy. He needs to USE those muscles..." and so we did.

 

 

He has learned to use his disability to his advantage.

 

This is one of his favorite toys, a carrot. He has had it for years altho I think Doc has pretty much destroyed it now. He uses just his incisors on toys and kind of gnaws on them.

 

That silly leg just won't bend and won't do what he wants.

 

 

 

All the boys, back when everyone's legs were working better.

 

 

 

 

 

SQURLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

​This is about Doc and his neverending Quest for squirrels.

 

About 10 feet behind our back windows there is another structure which has become the neighborhood blight and fire-trap. (Seriously). Years ago squirrels gnawed a hole in the soffit and began nesting in there. We paid no attention and sometimes in the morning I would see the babies poking their noses out of the hole, watching me watch them.

 

 

 

 

 

Nigel discovered them originally and set up the first Squirrel Patrol long before Doc was even born.

 

 

 

 

                                  (Nigel on squirrel patrol long ago.)

 

 

 

Now, apparently, the baton has been passed.

 

This morning, when they were outside, Doc discovered a squirrel IN the "summerhouse" (not hard: no screens) then it ran out, up the drainpipe and into the nest site.

 

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! and right in FRONT of him!!!! Berserker time. OMG he went totally insane trying to get up a ladder, trying to get into the summerhouse, leaping straight up in the air maybe 4 feet off the ground, snapping and (of course) screaming.

 

I made him come in. I have no photos of what happened next, alas.

 

Doc ran inside and stood, forepaws on the windowsill, staring at the summerhouse. Inside it was a squirrel. Doc tapped on the window. The squirrel ran out of the summerhouse, up the drainpipe, across the roof and leaped onto the windowsill of our house, separated from Doc by a window and screen.

 

THE NERVE AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAIEEEEEEEEEEEE

right in FRONT of him OHMYGOD!!

 

That we have a window left is miraculous. The squirrel dashed along the sill past the kitchen window and there was Doc trying to climb into the sink, all the time screaming, bellowing, leaping crashing-- you get the idea.

 

And when I walked back through the dining room after picking up dishes and dish towels and mopping up water, I glanced up at the summerhouse and

 

Oh no.

 

Oh please no....

UNLOADING/UPLOADING/DOWNLOADING

I had to do some stuff for the Gallery website, and some things for my son's SO. It involved going through old photos. And ohhhh, I found some doozies!!

 

I don't know who these people are but I think I was related to them.

Once upon a time I really looked like that. Look at that! I'm wearing heels!!!

 

 

Back when Nigel(nearest to the camera) still had all fours that worked. Llewis is in the middle. Conley at the end. You think they want in?

 

 

Who knows which is which?

                              

Smothered

 

 

 

 

For some reason I really like this picture. The composition isn't very good, everything is in the middle, but it isn't terrible, either.

 

 

 

I went to the Iowa State Fair every year for about a hundred years, but I never saw a reindeer there before. But there it is.

 

 

Standing on the second story of the Industrial Arts building, looking down and out at the Iowa State Fair. The butter cow is down there someplace. On the far right I think, but you can't see it from this photo.

 

 

There she is. Every year. Handmade. Pure butter. Honest.

 

 

Mr.Biskit when the boys were babes. That's Mitchell speaking to him about the situation.

The only thing that's changed is that Mitchell is gone and the dogs laying on Mr.Biskit are much bigger now.

STUFF

My husband bought an espresso machine. A real one. We had a Mr. Coffee espresso machine and it made espresso that tasted like it had been made in a Mr. Coffee machine: a touch stronger than real coffee but a lot weaker than real espresso.

Starbuck's makes real espresso.
Dunkin Donuts makes almost real espresso.

I drink coffee, when I drink it at all, black. Very black. The stronger the coffee is, the happier I am with it. Most people cannot drink my coffee because it is too strong. And I do not drink decaf. What's the point in drinking coffee at all unless it has some caffeine in it? It's like drinking non-alcoholic beer. (I think beer tastes nasty after the first few sips, so I am biased anyway.)

It was very weird because I had been looking at these very expensive espresso machines but had not said anything to him because they were...well...very expensive.

I kept thinking how much dog food it would buy.

My dogs would not have to eat sticks to survive. I could buy real food for them.

 

I thought of how many dog show entries it would be.

How many books would it have bought.

How many groceries.

How many bottles of my Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay.

 

 

How many Basset Hounds I could have.

 

But instead, we bought the espresso machine.

 

And I have to say, it makes damn good espresso. I will never go back to regular coffee, and my consumption of Coca Cola has even dropped a bit. (I go through a 2 liter bottle a day, usually.)

 

So if you want real espresso, come on over.

 

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It snowed.

Not a lot but enough that there was some on the ground and Doc was absolutely thrilled.

 

He doesn't look thrilled in this photo but he was very happy, and oddly, so were the Bassets for about 15 minutes. Then they all realized ( all the Bassets) how cold and wet it was and that was the end of that. Which is why Doc is looking dejected: the Bassets all went in the house.

 

He laid outside by himself chewing on a stick which is his favorite toy.

This is about how much snow there was. Not enough, according to Doc who, even though he is from Texas likes his cold weather.

 

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