Little Bit of a Let Down...Yet Not

A friend said to me today as we were lamenting our "back to reality" feelings this week, that the first week of the new year is always a "little bit of a let down" after the holidays. I had considerable time off work, with some short interludes spent in the office, over the past month or so. The dogs are not adjusting very well to "back to reality". On the other hand, it is exciting to contemplate all those clean, white, crisp pages on the new calendar! I'm getting some horizontal spaces cleaned off at home and that is also a good feeling.

One new year's greeting that we received was from Zack's owner (Zack is Bid's littermate). Here is the recent photo of Zack looking just as handsome at age eleven as he ever did:

Thanks, Bob, for sharing!

Dog work has slowed down to a crawl due to a combination of recent mud, rain, many baby lambs, and most of all lack of daylight. The park is even almost too muddy to contemplate a game of fetch unless one really wants to wash dogs afterwards. All of that I hope will get rectified little by little, soon. Our two dorper-cross ewes had their babies (one ewe, one ram lamb) sired by a St. Croix ram. We only exposed three ewes to the ram this year because we are just looking for replacements; the third ewe, a little Barb, either did not get bred or maybe she has a "bun in the oven" for a later date. At the other field that we share, our friend's ewes have dropped five white lambs from the same ram in a couple of days. It is a "lambing storm" of miniature proportions!

Since there is not much to blog about I think I will go back and post some photos of Chiefie working. Whenever we go to a sheepdog trial I invariably get asked whether I ever worked Chiefie on the sheep (right after I answer the question about whether he is a border collie or an aussie mix!). The answer is yes he worked sheep, loved it, and there are photos to prove it. He also enjoyed agility and tracking. Unfortunately his recurring injuries and layoffs among other things just precluded us from making progress, so now he is enjoying retirement (and running the household). But, it might be fun to go back and re-visit his training days.