Petsitting for Sit & Stay

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay1 Comment

In our area there’s a petsitting company called Sit & Stay. They are a locally owned small business with a small number of petsitters scattered around the county. I just joined with them to cover my neck of the woods! I think this will be fun, as I love animals, and I love seeing what other people’s farms look like. I’ve been doing some petsitting on the side for friends for a while anyway.

Dave took a nice picture of me to put on their website. I think it turned out pretty good, and I usually don’t like pictures of myself. I wanted to get more than one dog in the picture, but Barclay was the only one who would hold still, and just barely!

Canine Nose Work Trial, Clackamas, Oregon

On By stefrobrtsIn pets1 Comment

I drove down to Clackamas today to photograph a Canine Nose Work Competition. I volunteered to do the Exterior Element, because it was my first time doing something like this and I hoped it would be technically easier than photographing inside or the vehicle search. However, because it was a cloudy day, and we were in a very shady place under the trees, it turned out to be more challenging than I had hoped for! Fast dogs and slow shutter speeds don’t go together very well! But I got a lot of good shots, everyone there was friendly, the competitors were having fun with their dogs, and overall it was a really well organized competition. I would love to train one of my dogs to do this and go back as a competitor next time!

This is the trial area. The judge is standing about in the middle, and I am near the starting line. The dog and handler are behind a tree at the far end of the field.

To start the day a dog and handler team came to try out the element. They headed out into the field…

The dog sniffed around a few seconds and made a distinct U-Turn and headed right to the hide, and gave his owner the signal that he had found it…

 

And she fussed over him and gave him his reward – happy dog! This was how it went all day, happy working dogs, and clearly devoted owners. One thing I really enjoyed about the competition was the teamwork, and how each owner’s love for their dog came through loud and clear. Unlike competitions where the owner is ordering the dog around, in this competition the owner has to let the dog do his work, and guide them and watch their signals. It was beautiful to watch!

We saw dogs of every size and shape…

 I expected to see lots of beagles, but this beagle mix was the only hounddog I saw!

All excitedly exploring with their noses to the ground…

But even if they didn’t find the hide, the judge guided them to the right place and they let the dog find it and get his reward, so the dogs had fun whether they were successful in the competition or not.

This gentleman and his dog were one of my favorites! The dog was raring to go as soon as he saw the field.

He made short work of it and took his owner to the hide,

They were a fun team to watch!

That’s just a few of my favorites. I ended up taking over 250 pictures! A few came out blurry, but sometimes that worked depending on the shot. A lot of competitors requested no photos because their dogs were distracted by the clicking and people standing around. They did their best to give the dogs the opportunity to be successful by being flexible to their needs. Since they encourage reactive dogs to participate, they go to great lengths to make sure each dog is kept separate an never sees another dog, with visual barriers set up, and volunteers guiding dogs in by one route and out by another, and then if necessary they moved people around at the element so as to be the least distracting to the dogs that were ‘people reactive’. So the dogs stay relaxed and just have a good time doing their work. This was really a special event, and I hope someday I can go and participate, but I’ll definitely go photograph again!

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Bathroom fish

On By stefrobrtsIn Uncategorized4 Comments

We are going to be selling our ‘3 Happy Acres’ and moving to something smaller and closer to town. It’s just too expensive to live out in the country, spending so much money on gas to run into town all the time, and then having to take care of 3 acres between the two of us. We’re looking forward to a smaller house payment, and less to mow.

So I’m working on cleaning and de-cluttering the house. I started with the bathroom, because the walls were covered with my vintage ‘bathroom fish’ collection.

My favorite, with rhinestone eyes!

The bottom one is actually a glass tray with a neat printed fish scene on it. I love all this stuff, but I won’t have room for so much of it where we’re going, so I put them up on eBay.

Rainy Day

On By stefrobrtsIn flowers2 Comments

Today was the first day of fall. Rain and cloudy grey skies returned after a too short summer. I hope there is a little more summer yet to come! But I took advantage of the weather change to take pictures of the remaining flowers around the yard covered with raindrops.

I played with Picasa’s center tint function to highlight this dark red rose.

Following directions – green tomato salsa

On By stefrobrtsIn food, garden, jack, navi2 Comments

Last year my favorite thing of all the food I canned was the green tomato salsa. It was seriously YUM – and I just finished my last jar of it, so it was the perfect time to make more. There’s no shortage of green tomatoes right now either.

Lots of green tomatoes! Don’t worry, there’s still plenty left to ripen (if they ever do).

I spent a couple hours chopping all the onion, peppers, garlic, and tomatoes, in fact I spread the job over two days! Finally, I had it all in the pan, with the liquid – a mix of lemon and lime juice, and spices.

I boiled it, meanwhile I boiled the jars, and soon it was all ready to put together. I was following a canning recipe exactly. I had a little assembly line set up. I thought I had it all but I forgot one really important step! After you fill the jars you’re supposed to use something to gently get rid of the bubbles down inside the jar before processing. I realized just as I put the last filled jar into the water bath that I hadn’t done this! I pulled the jar back out and looked at it, and sure enough there were big air bubbles throughout the jar. I was really disappointed in myself – I’m supposed to be a master food preserver, and getting out the bubbles is basic stuff! I went ahead and processed them.

The trick is that if you realize you screwed up within 24 hours, you can reprocess the food safely. I had Dave pick up some more jar lids, and once it was cool enough to handle, I opened all the jars. I noticed the salsa was pretty chunky, and I remembered my teacher saying it should be kind of thin, so I dumped the jars, two at a time, into the blender and gave them a quick spin before dumping them into a pot.

While that heated to a simmer I washed the jars and got them heated up in the water bath again. Then I refilled them with the blended salsa. This time the salsa was so thin there weren’t any air bubbles to worry about. I lidded them up and processed them like before.

There are very few small bubbles visible in the jars after processing, but that’s ok. It was worth the time to reprocess these. All I lost was a few lids, and that’s better than having to throw out spoiled salsa a few months from now. I think I will be enjoying these until it’s time to make more next year!

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