March 12th, 2007: Today, it was about +12° and things are drying up nicely.

We’re on the road again! Last Monday evening we took off for Saskatoon, then on to visit Sandy and Blaine at their new digs north-west of Carstairs, Alberta, about eleven kilometers from either Carstairs or Didsbury.

Monday morning the temperature at home got down to -25°; here on Wednesday it got up to +16°! I guess that is what they refer to as a Chinook. There wasn’t as much snow here as farther east, and it disappeared dramatically with the warm weather. The wind helped, too.

Sandy and Blaine moved from their house in Carstairs to a small acreage so they could expand their puppy business. They have five house dogs now. They started out with Tia and Ginger, both Shih Tzu/Bichon crosses, and Mojo, a Yorkie/Havanese cross male. Then along the way, they introduced Sweetie Pie, a pure Yorkie, not much bigger than a rat, cute as a button, but thinks she’s a Rottweiler. She pushed the other dogs around for awhile, then they turned on her and in seconds reduced her to a quivering mass of dog flesh. Several hundred dollars later, she came home from the vet minus one back leg. Sandy still calls her Sweetie, but to everyone else she is Tripod. Still pretty aggressive in her play, but they all seem to get along now.

Then Blaine bought Sandy a miniature Dachshund, cross between long hair and smooth hair, and a real sweetie. Its name is Cricket. They plan to mate her to Mojo, and the result will be Dorkie puppies.

Then there are five others, but they are outside dogs and I don’t even know their names. One male and four female Havanese, most of them purebreds. They live in a shed and have nothing to do with the house dogs, except when the house dogs escape and try to attack the outside dogs through a chain-link fence. Quite a racket!

We are learning to watch where we put our feet, inside or out – inside for fear of stepping on a tiny dog, and outside for fear of stepping where a dog has been.