putting up pickles

After reading about just how easy it was to make homemade dill pickles (somehow I expected more steps than canning peaches) at Eating Locally in the Pacific Northwest, Eric, Finn and I went off to the Ballard Farmer's Market on Sunday for an armload of pickling cucumbers, to supplement the four we grew in the garden. That was the easy part. Finding alum was a bit harder. No luck at two grocery stores and one local hardware store with an extensive kitchen/canning section. Our last hope was the massive grocery/department/always-too-busy-to-be-sane store where I bought the canner last summer. We crossed our fingers, the angels sang, and we found the alum. Once home, we followed all the directions very carefully, and now we have seven quarts of these beauts to look forward to.... in about two months.

To celebrate, we had a dinner of brats, grilled peppers, grilled portabellas with pesto, garlic and feta, and grilled peaches, our new favorite food. If you have not tried this, and you're within driving distance to fresh peaches and a charcoal grill (I have a sneaking suspicion that they just wouldn't be the same over propane), try these. Simply cut the peach(es) in half, remove the stone, sprinkle the flesh with a pinch of sugar and grill, somewhere between the hottest and coolest parts of the grill, flesh-side down, for about two minutes, turn once, two minutes more, and serve warm. Oh. so. good.

Beginner Agility Graduation

Tonight was graduation night for Romeo's beginner agility class. They set up a little course, just 13 obstacles or so ... jumps, tires, weaves, tunnels, chute, pause table, low A-frame and dog walk. Each dog in the class took turns running the course a couple of times. Romeo had a blast! I had been working on some sequencing with him on my own, but normally just 4-5 obstacles at a time as we are still polishing each obstacle. So when he got in front of all those obstacles and realized he got to do ALL of them, he couldn't be stopped! LOVES the dog walk and soared over the A-frame. He was so easy to handle, just seemed to "know" where to go before I told him. Of course, the course was pretty easy, no hard corners just a sort of serpentine back-and-forth curving line, but I still think he did amazingly well!

Gio was born to play flyball, he just seemed to "get it" immediately. I think agility is Romeo's "thing", he's just clicked with it and has an absolute blast every time.

The instructors that we are learning from are taking a bit of a break from classes to host a couple of agility trials in the coming weeks. So our next set of classes, Advanced Beginner I, won't start up until mid-October. I guess that means we will have to get the weave poles out in the back yard again and do some practicing on our own. I always like to be ahead of the game when we get to classes!

Ribbons and smoothies.

I don't think I've ever posted a picture of my wonderful dog here (though he might have sneaked in on some), so I thought that maybe I should do it now, as I bought him a green ribbon to make him look prettier. I think he looks just adorable with it.


Recently I've also become addicted to making myself smoothies every night consisting of these ingredients;


Banana, soya milk, frozen blueberries and dried cranberries.




And, voila!



I always go through periods where I keep making, and wanting to have a specific thing over and over again, and this time around I suppose it's smoothies. Does anyone else also go through times where you crave a certain thing?

A Good Romp After Class

Hub City Kennel Club started up their fall set of classes today. They are offering 3 public classes at the moment: Puppy Kindergarten, Beginner Obedience, and Novice Rally-O. I'm helping to teach the puppy class and novice rally-o. There is a club member time offered as well, so I took Romeo out to work on a couple of obedience drills.

One of the club members lives a short distance out of town and has a beautiful large yard, 9 acres I think was the number. She has kindly offered her yard for classes while the weather is still decent. The back portion is all fenced in and used just as a dog play area. She breeds Cairn Terriers and owns a couple of Golden Retrievers, so a great big open field like that gets a lot of action! After the classes, a couple of the club members took their dogs out back for some off leash play time.

There was a Jolly Ball abandoned in the field, and Romeo, being the ball-hound that he is, decided that it was high time for a good game of fetch.

Classy move there, Romer. The ball was hard plastic and quite large, so it took some practice for him to get the hang of carrying it.

"Throw it! Throw it! Throw it!"
From left to right, Sasha the Doberman Pinscher, Romeo, and Julie the German Pinscher.

A little game of Follow the Leader ... err ... Follow the Jolly Ball.
Romeo, Julie, then Sasha.

Julie, Romeo, then Sasha.
But wait! There is a fourth dog in that picture!

Yes, that is Tetley, the English Cocker Spaniel. He is absent from most of the pictures because he was off doing what English Cocker Spaniels are best at ... stalking gopher holes.

But we got him running a couple of times.
Sasha, Julie, Tetley, and Romeo.

And again.

It was eventually time to head back to the cars and go home.

Gio stayed at home today as he is still somewhat dopey and uncoordinated from his recent seizures. No more seizures since Saturday morning, so hopefully he will have at least a couple of days to recover *knock on wood* and we can get some blood work done to plot our course of action.

WIP saturday

a quilty card and progress on the red quilt for Lisa....

worth a thousand words

Here are some pictures to wrap up the last few weeks....

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We took a little hike around Mt Rainier at end of July...


the mountain was being coy for the camera...



waterfalls...


a little snow on the trail still

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The garden is winding down....


we got loads of sugar snap peas -- an instant favorite


the garlic is still curing -- a good haul

we've got enough hops for a batch or two of beer...

carrots are still coming in strong

And just last weekend, Eric and I built our cold frames for winter gardening

The tomatoes are still a work in progress, as we had a bout of cool and cloudy weather, stalling the ripening process. there are dozens of tomatoes on nine plants, but they're all still green. We've got our fingers crossed that the upcoming few days of warm weather will ripen them up. If not, do you have any good recipes for green tomatoes?

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Our trip to California in August was great -- we went to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University....



detail from the front of Stanford's campus chapel

and Elizabeth & Marla's wedding was lovely and we were honored to be among their guests...

Congratulations, you two! We're so very happy for you and we wish you the very, very best!

Gio's a Cluster Pup Now

It appears as if our luck has run out. Prior to now, Gio has had some pretty nasty seizures, but they always stopped after one and then we would go for a stretch of time before running into another. But as of this morning, Gio is officially a "Cluster Pup". He was diagnosed with "Idiopathic Epilepsy", which is a silly term in and of itself, in February of 2007. It is idiopathic because we just don't know what is causing the seizures. All of his bloodwork, x-rays, thyroid tests, and ultrasounds have come back clear and we have no conclusive trigger for his seizures. So idiopathic basically means "he has seizures, but we don't know why".

A cluster is when there are multiple seizures within 24 hours. So in addition to the grand mal of yesterday morning, Gio had a focal seizure at midnight last night and another grand mal this morning at about 3:55am.

There are methods to dealing with cluster seizures. Many pups have found success with the Valium protocol. I had some success with the Ice Pack Treatment this morning, as it was able to significantly reduce the recovery post-ictal stage to one hour rather than Gio's normal 3-4 hours. Others have reported that the Ice Pack Treatment can prevent successive seizures in Cluster Pups, or at least lessen the severity of the subsequent seizures.

I will be speaking to my vet this morning about possibly adding Phenobarbital to our medication regime as we are obviously not getting good control with just Potassium Bromide (KBr) anymore. And in the past, increasing Gio's KBr has lead to digestive issues that wreaked havoc on his poor belly for months.