Thanks to all who have suggested various solutions to my one-legged predicament. I sincerely appreciate the thoughts and suggestions. I now see that many of you have experienced some of the same dilemmas as I am now. I have a few new transportation "options" and will start to use them as soon as the Doctor "okays" them. Right now I am supposed to ice and elevate for a while longer. To those of you who just laughed… I appreciate that too. Heck, if I can't laugh as well, then it's gonna be a long 6 weeks. Right?!?
But… my 'dog entertainment' has continued.
As well as the Alaskan Husky population here at SP Kennel, we also have one "odd dog", Tig. She is a Lab. We got her almost 8 years ago when we were "in between" retired sled dogs. I thought it would be fun to get involved with retriever training. For the first few years Tig and I did quite a bit of training and even competed in some Hunt Test and Field Trials. She is a pretty talented dog and I am a reasonable dog trainer. Tig absolutely loved the events and we actually traveled to quite a few competitions in and around Alaska. But, I started to get rather competitive… can you imagine that?!?! And it was apparent that I was going to spend a significant bit of time, money and effort on training, hunt tests and trials. I was getting up at 5AM to train Tig in our field before driving and hour for a Hunt Test that started early in the morning and lasted all day long.
It occurred to me that I already had one waaaaayyyyyy over the top dog related addiction that consumed every minute of my life from September through early May… did I really need a second one to take up the remainder of the year? Yeah… probably not, right?
So, Tig and I backed away from the competitive aspect of retriever life. We still have fun with training and retrieving. She carries stuff around the kennel and brings notes to Allen in the garage or me in the office upstairs. She'll carry harnesses to the harness rack, leashes to the truck or lug around basically anything she can fit in her mouth. She doesn't tear things up and even carries my phone upstairs at night. Having a retriever around is actually extremely useful!
When I was teaching Tig to fetch, Sam decided he wanted to learn; Tig and Rambler.
Tig still gets to be a "real retriever" every Fall. She's gone on some kind of hunting adventure since she was a yearling. The first few years we went to Nome when Bridgett and Scotty still lived there. The last few years, Scotty and Tig have flown to Saskatchewan, Canada with to hunt one of the most productive waterfowl flyways in the world. Setting up before dawn (Excited Tig eyes!); Scotty and Tig after the day's hunt.
When I was teaching Tig to fetch, Sam decided he wanted to learn; Tig and Rambler.
Setting up before dawn (Excited Tig eyes!); Scotty and Tig after the day's hunt.