I’m trying to taper off Nova’s extra feed since the pastures are so green and she’s not looking so boney anymore. It’s hard to judge when my Soays are at a healthy weight since, on the exact same pasture and feed, some have always looked like modern supermodels and some have always been more, hm, Rubenesque.
“Where’s the rest of it??”
(She chases me to the gate, yelling and insisting on checking and rechecking the bottom of the tray every morning no matter how much I gave her, it’s not because I’m cutting back her serving size.)
Blue is definitely still on the skinny side, but the vet says he’s perfectly healthy aside from needing to put on some weight and muscle, so that’s good. He’s definitely not short on energy!
“Play time! Chase me!”
Sadly, no one here is fast enough to play a satisfactory game of chase, except maybe Mira. But she does not really enjoy playing “chase” so much as she just gets the zoomies and runs in big circles on her own.
“I’M the baby around here, got it NewBarkyDog? It doesn’t matter who else is younger than me! I. Am. The. Baby.”
Blue has settled in just enough he’s starting to experience boredom, which he insists is the most awful, unbearable, terrible thing that has ever happened to a collie. I will say I appreciate he expresses this by crying rather than by finding destructive ways to entertain himself, which is always a possibility with very intelligent dogs.
Echo is somewhat confused by all this fussing, I don’t think he was ever bored even when he was young.
“You good, bro?”
“Nooo, I’m dyyying of boooredom!”
But once he’s run around outside and played tug enough to burn off some of his energy, he’s content to lay down in the living room with us and chew a bone.
“Shame we just have to lay on this blanket, too bad there aren’t two perfectly good dog beds behind us.”
And when he gets tired of that he might even flop over mid-chew for a (brief) nap.
“Zzzz…”
I am taking advantage of any moment when he doesn’t need attention, because today is the first day of the Tour de France and, more importantly, the Tour de Fleece! I had picked out some fairly ambitious goals for the spinning challenge before I knew we would have Blue, so I had to drastically scale back. If I finish the more moderate goal early and do manage to complete as much as I’d originally planned after all, well that will just be a bonus!
But that may have to wait, because naptime is apparently over for now and I’m being stared at pointedly in a way that makes me think he’s ready to go back outside and do some more racing himself…
“Play time?”