The Power of the Ball

When I was growing up we had a black lab next door, Rowdy, who would play ball with you any time. I used to love it when he would come over. He would settle for a rock if he couldn't find a ball. I didn't understand the obsession. Our own dog had a soccer ball that he would chase around but he did not share or play well with others.
So when Z showed an affinity for playing ball I was pretty happy. From day one he had a great time chasing after the ball and he was pretty good at bringing it back.
Of course, being new to the puppy/ball game it took me a minute to learn that I had to teach him to drop the ball and wait for me to pick it up. For a while it was a game of keep away which he was much better at than I was.
He would play ball inside or out. His green nubbly ball was his favorite for his first couple of months. It was a soft ball so he could play inside or out with it. This was a good fetch ball but hard to catch.
I would be remiss if I didn't say that not everyone in the house was quite so happy about all the ball playing... Blizz is skeptical about the dog (even today) but she has been more accepting than Calista.
Zdeno is the luckiest pup on earth. My parents are avid tennis players. What could a ball lover love more than a non-stop stream of tennis balls to play catch with? This, and most mornings, his first task is to empty his toybox out onto the floor. We now separate 'inside' and 'outside' balls so that he can't mix them up.
His new soft soccer ball became a hit when he learned that he could catch it when we threw it up in the air for him. Who knew you could have so much fun with balls!
We were a little worried when the snow started to fly. We were able to play for a bit while the snow was still shallow. Art also plowed a path with the Bobcat for playing. Toward the end of winter we ended up playing ball with snowballs. This way he would get his exercise running through the snow but we wouldn't have to worry about tracking down lost balls.
Of course, if there were no ball to be found Zdeno could usually find a stick (or branch) to fill in.In the spring he started swimming in the local ponds again. Chasing a ball or stick into the water and rescuing it was a new way to enjoy his favorite activity.
He isn't proud. He will let anyone play ball with him. There is a little girl who helps pet sit while we are gone. She will do her homework down where Z stays at their house. She will throw the ball, get a little work done, throw the ball...for hours. Doggie heaven!
At this point Z has countless balls. Outside we stick to tennis balls as we have a launcher that can throw them the length of the field. Our skinny mini pup probably runs 5-10 miles a day! Maybe a little less when it is really hot as he splits his time between sitting in the pond to cool down and running after the ball.
The ball is the training tool we have used with Zdeno. He is not a foodie so we bribe him with ball. If you want him to come you better have the ball. If you wanted him to sit, lay down, stay you better have a ball! There is something for everyone and for Zdeno there is a ball for every occasion!

Family

Last summer our nephew Kevin married Jamie. They are a sweet couple and the wedding was so much fun. The sunset was absolutely amazing and since they got married on July 4 we were able to see fireworks from different towns up and down the water. My Mom-in-law even got up for a dance with Dad-in-law.
Abbie came with her boyfriend Zeb. He is from Colorado and we had fun getting to know him!
The day after the wedding we went to Halibut point with Art's folks. It is one of the first places I visited in New England. They looked so sweet overlooking the water I just had to get a shot :-)
Our Thanksgiving ritual of going to Plum Island was a success as usual. The weather was pretty darn nice and we, of course, listened to Alice's Restaurant all the way there.
Keeping warm by the fire. Zeb even fashioned a pot holder over the fire so we could keep the soup warm. So ingenious and fun!
Introducing Maggie! Sue, Sam, and Charlie adopted Maggie just about a month before we got Z. She is exactly one month younger and the two of them adore each other and have such fun playing together!
They played together so well and they slept for a whole day afterward! No one wanted to nap lest they miss something!
The goal- global domination. The result- lots of fun!
Lindsay's pup Bailey also joined in the fun. She is a bit older so she is in charge. They had a great time together. They played in this room all night!
Our annual Christmas picture. We had Sue take it when everyone came over for a pre-x-mas dinner. Usually it is just me wrangling everyone into one shot.
Went to Colorado for Christmas. We got to spend time with the kids and also got to know Julie better. We went to the Bronco game one afternoon and Julie introduced us to a fabulous Mexican eatery in Denver called La Loma. Delish!
Julie has a son Harry who is half way between my brother's two boys. Now they have five kids between the two of them. Wow! It can be loud and is usually chaotic but they are all a lot of fun and seem to get along well.
Mom turned 80 this past June. She had a fun party at Stratham Park and lots of family and friends came. It was a rainy day so we all cozied under the pavilion and caught up. I met a few new family members and some old friends of theirs. Great day and Mom seemed to have a wonderful time!
We moved the party back to Mom and Dad's house after the extended family cleared and the day wore on and got cooler. Such a great family! I love how often we were able to see each other this year!
For Father's Day we caught up for the traditional lobster dinner. Sam and I had hamburgers ;-) I try them every year but still don't like them. I do like the occasional mussel though, if there is enough wine, butter, and garlic on top!
We rented a house on the beach with Art's oldest sister this summer. It was a fabulous time! We were only fifteen minutes away from Art's folks house so they were able to visit often. It had a little back yard so Zdeno was able to come and enjoy the ocean. He had Maggie and Bailey come to visit a couple times which was great. We also got to meet Kevin and Jamie's new (older pup) Lester. He is a retriever pyrenees mix. He is a love with people but sadly did not really get on well with the other dogs.
The dogs, and us people, really enjoyed walks on the beach. It was early in the year so the water was still cold but we had some pretty hot days that made it feel refreshing. I even had a girlfriend that was able to come and spend the day on the beach with her three kids. Great time!
I definitely would like to do this type of vacation again. Super relaxing. We were close enough to home that we could go back if needed (Art, Karyn, and Ralph all had to work at least one day), we were close so family and friends could visit. The best was that we got to bring Zdeno and he even had visitors!

The Big Move

Welcome to Brookline, NH

We bought the business property in the summer of 2009. We quickly did needed repairs to wiring and walls so that we could move our warehouse over by summer's end. By fall we had paved the new parking lot and put a fence up for the fuel and put in a turn around for the tractor trailers. It was working out beautifully as a warehouse. Our storefront was still at the location it had been at for the last nearly ten years. We had one more year on our lease so we had to make a decision. Should we stay or should we go to the new property? Cost-wise it made sense to be located in one building, but there were a lot of unknowns. The traffic count was lower for one big thing. We would also be on a lesser commuting path instead of a main road, a road which doubled as one of the busiest shopping roads to add to the conundrum.
The cost of renovating the property was also a consideration. We had already gone over budget with the initial repairs as we did not know that the infrastructure was so messed up prior to moving in. The site planning, site work, and paving were also more than we anticipated. We really thought we did our homework but boy were we wrong! Our sales were also on the decline. Partly a symptom of the new economy and the general mood of the country, but also our industry had a few black eyes from 2008 and 2009. Moving was a big risk!
We did a survey and got enough of a positive or neutral responses that by December of 2009 we decided to move. We had our contractor start work in the spring, after the pipes froze and we had the future showroom side of the building flood, of course. :-( We saved when we could and did it ourselves and borrowed the rest of the necessary funds from our line of credit and a personal loan so we could move in during the month of June. We built displays and walls to get started but planned to finish the center display, the insert display, and the wood stove section as we could.
We had our main fears about moving alleviated pretty quickly when we had a fall that was much better (percentage-wise) than the first half of the year had been in our old location. We were also finally starting to see the savings of having one building instead of two: one insurance bill, one rent payment, one utility bill, lower gas and propane costs...
We vented some displays to heat the building and installed a furnace for the warehouse.
One big bonus for the new building is that we designed and had a break-room/office built at the back of the shop. This way the guys could eat their lunch in peace and we could have our meetings uninterrupted. They also had a place to put their things and a place to get away.
One thing I think they were even more excited about (I know I was and I don't even work on stoves!) is that we finally had a workshop area where the tools could live and stoves being cleaned or repaired could reside.
We have a pretty happy group now who work well together and are doing a great job :-) We had just a couple changes on the employee front. We had fired a liar/thief late in 2009. The other guys were instrumental in helping to catch him. We also let our first employee go in early 2011. He was a difficult person who never cared for me much and I also think he was burned out. The guys were tired of his complaining and unwillingness to work with the group, and his assets were being overshadowed by his liabilities. The good news is that we were able to hire back an employee that worked with us for a couple of years about five years ago. He is a good fit.
Improvements continue. We are currently painting the building. It really needs to be re-sided but the finances just aren't there yet. So we will paint and hope it will buy us five or so years until we can do it correctly. We still have the main display to do and wood stoves to vent, but we did get the insert display in. Like my fake brick?
Other than that it seems like a good move and we don't regret it for a moment!

First Photos

Turns out Zdeno is quite the ham. He loves to have his picture taken. He does squint if he thinks the flash will go off though. Here are his first photos. They were taken in October 2010. I was very late and lazy with leaf pickup but it worked out as a nice backdrop for our photo shoot!

In the Coop

On our fourth year of having chickens I finally feel like I am getting the hang of it. We have our routines down and everyone is getting on well. I have a few people that buy eggs from me. Not for much but it does help to offset my chicken feed bill. We were up to 22 girls and two roos this year. Lou Lou La Roo has been the most amazing rooster ever. He is so patient, sweet and protective of both me and the chickens. His eye mostly healed from Frank's attack but he will never fully regain his sight. Flower was our first hatch here and he was the cutest snuggliest little rooster. More on him later...Our resident brooder "Momma" Cuddles hatched two babies last fall. I named the first one Pumpkin because she was soooo tiny! Art named the other Baby Spice. Pumpkin just wasn't strong enough and didn't make it but Baby Spice is one of our most adorable bantams. Her Daddy is Flower and her Momma is Cuddles. They were a nice fall treat. This year I had her sitting on some leghorn eggs but when we went camping our pet sitters unknowingly took the eggs away just shy of their hatch date. Cuddles is mad and won't sit again so I am not sure if we will have any new fall beaks hatched here.
Baby Spice at five months. Super sweet and snuggly.
We got a turkey for Thanksgiving from a our local farmers. It was a 36 1/2 pound beast! I brought poor Flower in to pose with it. He was a little nervous- can't blame him!
This spring I placed my order from My Pet Chicken early. We got the babies in late March. It was still really cold so I set them up in our shower stall. Everyone got a big laugh out of that but I loved having the adorable little beaks right there! I was also able to introduce Zdeno to them and teach him to lay down and be calm around them.We spent hours playing with the chicks and he would always help feed and clean their space :-)
I spent a great deal of time taking him into the coop on a leash and teaching him to be calm around the chickens. He is pretty good now. I won't take him in without a leash yet but he is good at letting them be. He does have a special relationship with one of our Andalusians- Ashleigh. She will go right up to him and peck around his toes and let him sniff her. It is pretty cute.
It has been a really sunny and hot summer so I thought I would try letting the chicks out to munch on grass in the shade of our yard. It worked great for a couple of months but then someone moved into the brambles behind the greenhouse. We live in a pretty rural area so we frequently have predators. We thought it was a fox at first so we loaded the gun and went on the lookout. He had taken our primary girl, a RI Red named Rhonda and also one of our new babies. Next he took sweet Flower. Also both of our baby Leghorns. The next day Art saw a Bobcat run across the road. We can't do anything about that. They are protected and someone in town told me that chickens are considered fair game for them.
So everyone is in lock-down in the greenhouse. I pick weeds to bring in to them. We are re-doing the front of the greenhouse to make a parking space for the (machine) Bobcat and the tractor. After that is done I will be able to put up their fence again so they can go outside. Turns out the fence wasn't to keep them in it was to keep the predators out.
I am hopeful that Cuddles will get broody again so I can hatch more leghorns but if not I will probably go to a chicken swap in September to try to get our group back up to at least 20 and try to get another rooster. We have too many predators and poor old La Roo just can't see as well as he used to...

New Beginnings

Recently hubby and I were talking about blogging and he was saying how nice it was when I blogged because it was a great journal to look back upon our trips and adventures. Over the weekend I received a lovely note from Exseno saying that after a long absence of her own she was going to start blogging again. So I have been inspired. I miss it too. I got sucked into the void that is Facebook but find that it is not fulfilling what blogging did. Blogging is really a sort of diary of our short little journey and as I get older and I find that my memory is not what it used to be I think that is quite nice. I have also met some great people who share their lives in return.
Probably the biggest change in our lives since last year was the addition of our new family member- Zdeno. (pronounced Zah-Day-No).
After we lost Polaris last summer I thought I would need a long break from having another pup in our family. But I missed having a buddy to take walks with, someone to keep me company as I work alone in my home office most days, and someone to snuggle with and keep me and the chickens safe. So, in early October I filled out applications with a couple of dog rescues. I wasn't sure what type of breed I wanted, but I knew I didn't want to 'replace' Polar so another Malamute was not what I wanted. I was really hoping to get a white dog though. Then he and Blizzardora could shed the same color. I was thinking a little guy like a Shiba Inu mix where Art, of course, wanted a BIG dog like a Newfie mix.
We visited a lot of shelters but never got the feel that any pup was right. We were not in a hurry by any means. The only reason I started in October was that I heard it could take up to two years to get a puppy. I definitely wanted a puppy so that I could train the dog to be around the chickens. That was a stressful part with Polar as he would attack them. One of the groups I applied to was a White German Shepherd Rescue called Echo Dogs. They are a group here in NH, but they rescue shepherd's from all over. We filled out an application, they checked our references, and they even came to our house to do a home assessment.
To my shock and delight they called us just a few weeks after we applied to say that they may have a puppy available in Connecticut.
It was a strange process. The lady that had the pup was not computer oriented and didn't have a camera. She was also not sure if she wanted to give the pup up. She had adopted the puppy from a breeder in Minnesota. Turns out they were terrible breeders. When she got the puppy he was sickly and had giardia. He was also fed a solely raw diet. So the lady spent a great deal of time taking him to the vet and trying to get him to gain weight. He had constant diarrhea and the only thing he would eat with any regularity was his poo. On top of that she had a three year old dog that did not like the new puppy and would attack it any time they were in the same room. So this poor sick puppy spent most of his life trapped in a laundry room listening to another dog growl and knowing that if he asked to go out to do his business he would likely be attacked. Yet the lady wasn't sure she wanted to give him up.
I spent weeks talking with her on the phone assuring her that we would be a good home and agreeing that her situation was not good for the pup. After she backed out of the deal twice and didn't show up when she said she was going to drop him off she finally arrived. Up until the second I saw her car I didn't really believe that he was going to come! Keep in mind that I had no idea what this dog looked like. I only knew that he was born on the second of July and he was a sickly pup.
We did get a few things to prepare though, just in case she actually showed up. We got a kennel this time. I wanted to kennel train as it was such a nightmare with Polar and we already knew that he still wasn't potty trained. I made a little mattress in their with a fleece pillow case and we got a few toys.
She arrived in an SUV and had him in a little dog carrier. When she opened it up and let him out I just choked up. There was this adorable white fluffy bundle of joy that bounced out of the car and ran right over to me. I couldn't even believe how cute and happy he was! Art came out and had an instant huge smile on his face! The pup ran right into his arms.We had done a little prep on what we would like for names. We knew his name was Zoltan but didn't want to keep that. Art had a cousin with that name and it just seemed so severe. But we did like Z names and thought the puppy would have an easier time if we kept the sound similar. We settled on Zdeno. If you have not heard that name you are probably not a hockey fan. Zdeno Charra is the team captain for the Boston Bruins. He is also the largest hockey player currently playing and he is a big 6'9" teddy bear. Back to Art wanting a big dog I thought that we had potential for Zdeno to be big as his breed can often get up to 120 pounds or more.We took the lady around the house and yard and introduced her to the chickens. She lives in a suburb of NYC for all intents and purposes so I am sure our yard was not what she expected. I gave her some fresh eggs, some syrup that was made from the maple in our yard, and some jam made from our raspberries as well as a hat that I had knitted over the last winter. After she was on her way we just cuddled and snuggled and played with Zdeno all night. His favorite toy was a nubbly green ball. He was very good at running after it and bringing it back. He seemed instantly at home. He went right into his kennel exhausted at the end of the evening.
Welcome home Zdeno!