poops, cranes, and pedalcars

well duk duk, i think we are finally packed for our summer adventure! now all we have to do is find someone to take care of our poopie snake collection, build the traveltowquarium for our walrus, rent a crane so we can put him in there, and wait for our pedal car to come back from the shop! :) :)

dancing with me: box step (teeny tiny video)

hee hee, hello my friends - shall we dance the box step today? u can lead. :) :)

genetic cutation

I'm not exactly sure how tiny chumley ended up poking his little snooty snoot through the only hole in the towel we use as a mat when he nibbles on his rawhide, but I would guess this morning's serendipitous moment came about with a little help from his cuteness gene. :)

dapper doxie duds: lucy & nikki :)

Happy little doxie duds to share today, a second set made for the lovely little Nikki and her big sister Lucy.  I babbled on forever in yesterday's blog post, and the little kielbasa seems fixated on his  multi-social network campaign to name the new royal baby boy  Georgopotamus Poopsarexall Jaminicakes Jones Mountbatten-Windsor, nickname him Twinkie, so these pictures, I hope, are worth the thousand words we will spare you today. :)


Nikki,  Snoopy cotton tee overlay with water repellant treatment, french bound in purple plaid. For skippy summer days hiking on dusty rocky paths in the mountains.

Lucy, blue/green/black pieced dud with jacquard ribbon trim, water repellant treatment, and sterling silver and pearl embellishment.  Hand dyed corduroy, batik, and cotton print.  Because being an outdoorsy girl doesn't mean you have to be a frou frou girl. :)

heyyyy - mom, wait!  i know you are too young to read this Twinkie my friend, but if you happen to get named some boring ol thing today like the royals seem to always do by taking the same five names and just jumbling them up a bit, know that i tried my best, lil tiny buddy. 

long live his tiny highness prince georgopotamus poopsarexall jaminicakes jones mountbatten-windsor of cambridge!

hook line and sinker

 Alright, ask me like two years ago and I would have haughtily and heartily denied any likelihood of my association with Apple stuff.  Iphones and Ipads were for techbabies.  And hipsters. And very  forgiving minions, the kind who would have stood by the streets of fairytales, impressed by the clothes that their emperor most certainly was not wearing.

But that was two years ago.  My door to IWonderland opened a couple of Christmases ago, when lo and behold an Ipad entered our lives.  Okay, maybe it's not so great for typing intensive projects, but it's nicer to surf the web with, nicer to read in bed with. And, being smaller and less power needy, it was the device I brought to the hospital when my dad fell ill.  The Ipad was a user friendly simple thing, with which I could search on medical terms and procedures, take notes so I could digest what the doctors and staff were telling us, and readily draw pictures to explain what was going on.  All in one handy little compact thing that hardly took up any space at all or heat up my lap.  Typing difficulties aside, a lazy person could get used all this, I realized.  And then I sighed.  Oh how far I have fallen.

It's actually freeing to step off my moral PC high horse.  The laptop PC is still very much a winner for me in some areas and it's still the best device for the kind of work intensive things I sometimes want do, but just like everything in a world full of options, there is a place for my PC as much as there is for an Apple I-whatever in our lives, including what Baxter lovingly and unwittingly sardonically refers to as his new iphoney.    Which you might have noticed has created a bit of an increase in the things he has been posting on instagram and facebook.

For him, a new world as opened up, as it has for me.  Baxter is well on his way to improving his Klout score through posts of heavily hashtagged selfies and smellfies and other such social baxfoolery on Instagram, Facebook, and elsewhere, while I too have spent an inordinate amount of time in iphoney case related activities, researching case after case, and concluding with apple-glazed eyes that we need three, no six, no, ten, no, like, five HUNDRED different cool and awesome iphone cases for the various scenarios our little new fragile baby might encounter.  Planning a vacation in the desert? Or maybe just looking to drop your phone onto the sidewalk then watch it bounce into the ocean?  Why, let's buy an Otterbox. Or maybe the recently released, Lifeproof nuud.  Want to stick it in your pocket? Make mine a Noreve Tradition flip case please.  In pebble leather papaye. Going to the Renegade Craft Fair? Wait, let me get the Grovemade case in that pattern I want so badly.  It's made by hipsters in Oregon, so I can fit right in.   Yeah you get the idea.  It's a dangerous Iphoney case world out there for an OCD shopaholic.

And yet, I still didn't find any dachshundy options that were perfect enough for me to bite.   A couple were close, but not close enough at the price or case design I wanted.  I realized if I was gonna spend the bucks anyway, I should really take matters into my own crafty hands. So say hello above to case number two. Designed by u know who, and made by the folks at Uncommon.   Nah, it's not going to suvive the Apocalypse.  But that's what Iphoney case number 19's gonna do. :)


 

hee hee, thanks for the new iphoney cover, mom! it's so much cooler than the green one and now my darth vader screen lock will be surrounded by sinister black just like he should be! :) :)

rhymey timey with baxter: pat a paw

pat a paw, pat a paw, barker's right,

i'll bark u a greeting in broad daylight;

waiting for someone to walk on by,

just for the chance to bark them hi! 

- baxter, 6.6 years old, on today's activity of the day.  :)

my doxie treasures: hot dogs 5 cents

oooOOooOOoooooOOOOooo! thanks mom for thinking of us at the flea market today. this little fella will make a very nice addition to our doxie collection!!

ps - you did not happen to see if they had any super cool iphoney cases, too, didjoo mom? u know, the pleathery foldy kind with a tardis or u know, maybe ferocious dragon on it?  :) :)

baxter & duk duk's tiny videos: iphoney baloney

dear diary, hee hee, something tells me i have a lot of work ahead of me before siri and i can see eye to eye. and i guess, i really should keep a soft wipe cloth handy. i hope u r having a wonderful saturday because u know i will! toodleydoo! b. :)

baxter and duk duk's fractured fractional fairy tales: fee fi fo fum

 ...and with a mighty inhale did the giant declare, 

 "fee fi fo fum! i smell the stink of a doxie bum!!"

to which the little dog responded in glee,

"thank you, kind sir, thank you for noticing my lovely air!"

chiaroscuro

Lately something's changed, as Rick Springfield so aptly put it. Something hard to define.  The kind of thing your brain sort of notices but doesn't pay full attention to, like having an awareness of the position of the cars surrounding you while driving on the highway while not being able to fully describe any of them if you were asked to do so.  

It's been that way for me when I'm taking pictures of tiny chumley lately.  He's been easier to photograph in lower light situations.  He shows up better against dark backgrounds.  His face, his paws even, seem more contoured.   More...detailed. 

I was aware at some level that something was different, but hadn't taken the time to face the facts of why til now.  Look hard enough, not even really that hard at all nowadays, and there they all are.  Tiny little hairs in varying shades of lightness and white, mingling in with what was once dark red fur.  Adding definition to his face and paws as only a contrast of darkness and bright would do,  highlighting the curves of his eyes, cheeks, and even little toe creases.  Signs that my little boy is no longer a spring chicken, but a sweet little middle aged wolf.  Welcome to the club, my happy friend.  :)

summer reading :)

 






 

...hee hee, me too.  i bet he makes some admirably massive poopie snakes! 

 



okay,  where did i leave off? lessee... "Strictly speaking, the dog doesn't smell the bomb. It deconstructs the odor into its components, picking out just the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect....'When you walk into a kitchen where someone is cooking spaghetti sauce, your nose says aha, spaghetti sauce. A dog's nose doesn't say that.  Instinctively, it says tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.' It's the handler who says tomato sauce, or, as it happens, bomb.' "   hey, quit shoving.  this is very interesting!   alrightchoo can have two pieces of my lunchy kibble but that makes like ten gummy worms you owe me now. 

blah blah blah...oh, here "When the air enters a dog's nose, it splits into two separate paths - one for breathing and one for smelling.  And when a dog exhales, the air going out exits through a series of slits on the sides of a dog's nose.  This means the exhaled air doesn't perturb the dog's ability to analyze incoming odors; in fact, the outgoing air is even thought to help new odors enter.  Even better, it allows dogs to smell continuously over many breathing cycles - one Norwegian study found a hunting dog that could smell in an unbroken airstream for 40 seconds over 30 respiratory cycles."  hee hee, yeah i know!  okay okay, next time we play guess whose foofie, to make things more fair, i promise i will plug one of my nostrils and only smell for half the time u do. but don't tell chocobot because he's always using his magical powers anyway so fair's fair.

okay...blah blah blaahhh...ooo, types of dogs best for finding bombs.. "The best breeds for finding bombs may be German Shepherds, Belgian Malinoises and Labrador retrievers, more for their tireless work ethic than any special olfactory prowess. Shepherds are so-called 'play-reward' dogs....There's a shepherd named June [who]...will work all day for her tennis ball.  Labs, perpetually hungry, are 'food reward' dogs.  Shepherds will accept criticism; Labs won't - the stress of not measuring up takes the starch right out of them.  What about bloodhounds, you say? True, a bloodhound will follow a straight-line scent - an escaping convict, say - as if it's being pulled by a string. 'But they're way down on the intelligence scale,' says Wynn, who worked with bloodhounds as a patrol dog handler...'Also, they stink like livestock.' "  heeey, he said that like it is not a bonus - sheesh!

 "Golden retrievers can outsmell everybody, but it's tough to get them to buy into the system. 'They're so intelligent that if they don't want to do something, they just don't do it,' says Wynn."   hee hee, yeah they just don't do it.  and they always take the best seat on the school bus no matter if u are sitting in it already or not. boy i am so glad the golden twins are moving this summer so we do not have to put up with all that next year, arentchoo duk duk? 

ps after the stink we made about having to read this article, we probably should not tell mom how much we are enjoying it. 

 




promise you will not tell, either, will you? :) :)



















ps - if you would like to read the same super cool article we are reading, visit the smithsonian article here :)

good morning morning world!

good morning morning world! what are we going to do today? :)                                 

hulkzilla smash

rawwwrrrrrrr! rawwwwrrrrrrrrrrr! rawwwwwwwwrrr!

rawwwwr! rawwwrrr! rawwwrrrr!

raawwwWWWwwwwwwr!

hee hee hee. anybuddy else got a tiny village to smash?? :) :)

baxter and duk duk's teeny tiny videos: lunchdance

dear diary,
as you know me and duk duk hope to be starting our summer adventures soon and one very big teeny tiny part of it will be the videos we hope to post with my new iphoney while we are on our journeys.  so this is a test.  not with my iphoney because i have not gotten it yet, but still a test to see how our videos from instagram will look here on my blog.  and a test to see if my lunchy dance will work the same way a rain dance does.  which i do not need to do on account of how much rain we have been getting.  but i do need lunch.  :)

anyhoo diary, i hope you are doing well.  things are otherwise progressing very slowly because of said rain, but lucky for us, me and duk duk have been able to bide my time, and maybe one day i will hear from my friends @badrobot about becoming an honorary bad robot, or at least supplying them with our custom home made 3D glasses.  because they are that cool.. 

toodley-doo!
b. :)

nice job :)

Some things are best left mostly unexplained, I think.  But when fingerless little boy doxies are involved,  no matter how hard he doesn't try, the results always seem to manage ending up on the sunny side of cute :).

hold my calls please

street work right outside my house?   hold my calls please - today is going to be a barky day! :) :)

b&dd's tiny video: #summerfunwithcardboardscissorsandtape

I remember summer vacation. That golden time that we all looked forward to while we were in school, toiling away at word problems and writing book reports, thinking to ourselves how wonderful things were going to be once we free of the burdens of education. Excited at the prospect of adventures old and new, no matter how blurry they were at the time we imagined them, barely listening to our teachers as we counted down the days, the hours, and then the minutes, til finally the school bus delivered us home and to what was sure to be our summer's Greatest Destiny.

The problem with reaching Destiny, the problem as a kid, I now remember, is that we were always waiting. Waiting for mom or dad, waiting for a ride somewhere, waiting for our allowance, waiting for a certain day or time. Waiting, always for something, for what always seemed like an eternity. And with road trips to California and Disney World and the like, my brother and I have had our share of what might seem to be summer's Greatest Childhood Destiny Moments, but I would argue now that the greatness of our summers didn't lie with such monumental wonders, but in the waiting itself. When all the world was ours to imagine and behold, with  just a little assistance from some cardboard, scissors, and tape.

hungry games 2013: the blue plate special

There are a few things I thought I knew about tiny chumley as a result of our playing the hungry games.  First, when given a choice between two equivalent snackies set before him side by side, he almost always chooses to eat the one on his right first.  Second, that he would always choose the stinkiest snackie first when given the choice between two different ones.  And third, that because I knew about One and Two, it would be fairly easy predict the ending to any hungry games with some simple two out of three eliminiation trials just to be sure things were kept fair and unbiased.

At least, that is what I thought I knew.   Til time and time again during yesterday's games, I watched tiny chumley pick first from his left, and pick that snackie regardless of how stinky it was.  Test after test after test.  Left before right?  Chicken before Stinky fish bites?  And we haven't even gotten to the star of the show yet.  Okay, I started to wonder as tiny chumley's tummy grew rounder and rounder with each passing trial, was yesterday Bizarro Tuesday and I didn't even know it? 

Tiny chumley looked at me with a glint in his eye as I contemplated my next move.  well, are we playing this or aren't we, mom? my tummy is waaaa-itinnnng!

He had me going for a while more, filling his tummy while the hungry games stalled without a clear leader. His tummy, in cahoots with his brain, telling him to pick from his left regardless of what snackie was in it.    Til I wondered what would happen if I also switched the plates.

ding ding! today i've been picking the blue plate special -  it's a tasty winner every time!!

Guess next time I need to break out the matching fine china. :)

 
 

u say ikea, i say i pee-a

Even though tiny chumley and his dad had to wait outside in the shade while I did a little storage shopping at IKEA, there was still plenty inside to remind me that a certain little somebuddy needed a few little goodies of his own.











ooh, thanks for the super cool puppy pup containers, mom! they will come in so handy for packing kibble for our trip! didjoo buy like a zillion of these i hope?? :) :)

just another summer monday

sigh, i really wish we could set off sparklers every day, dontchoo duk duk??