Foraging

Conker eats just about anything food-related.  He will eat dirt and mud, rotting stuff, leaves, fruit, select veggies, poop (the worse the brand the better), basically anything he can get his stupid mouth on.  The worst part?  He runs when I ask him what's up.  I don't even attempt to go after him most of the time, I just say his name or something and off he goes.  When he does that I know it's something he's not allowed to have, and he gulps it down as quickly as possible (even if I've got a tasty trade item) and it really pisses me off.
I don't think he realizes that I only get mad when he runs.  Stupid dog.

 Anyways, if I ate this kind of stuff every day:

 Beef meat, liver and kidney, lamb, turkey neck and heart.

I wouldn't touch anything else.  I'd be a snooty brat who didn't approve of anything but my regular food.  And that "regular" food is switched up every day so it's always different.  But no, Conker has to be a moron and eat stuff that's not good for him.

Oh, he also got egg soup today and is still foraging!

June 25th

Today Conker got: 

Bone-in chicken breast and a heart, beef liver and kidney, lamb scraps. 

For a bit there Conker was doing good with the chicken.  He was chewing off smaller bits but then he decided to be an idiot again and attempted to swallow it whole.  It was still a good size.  That's it for him, no more big chunks.  As soon as I can I'm buying a frickin meat grinder.

WHY

Why am I still awake?  This sucks real bad.  I was uber tired at 11pm but guess what?  After I did the bedtime routine and suddenly wasn't tired anymore.  That ALWAYS happens and it really sucks.
For some reason no matter when I get up or fall asleep, I don't actually get real sleep until the middle of the morning and early afternoon.  No matter what I do to try to "correct" this, it always fails and I'm back to being awake during the afternoon, evening, night and late night/early morning and sleeping the rest of the time.  WTF gives man.

And this guy doesn't help my problem one bit.

Look at him sleeping.  He sleeps all the time.  He's fallen asleep at the dog park.  He even sleeps through freakin thunderstorms!  Back in St. Louis when the tornado warning sirens were going off he woke up and trotted around the apartment going "Bruh bruh BRUH!"  For about ten minutes then guess what?  He fell asleep.  Lazy sleeping dog who's able to fall asleep wherever and whenever he wants. 

I'm starting to be convinced that I'm supposed to be nocturnal.  I am a desert creature after all.

Mid-afternoon walk

I decided to go for a walk in the middle of the afternoon today.  It was in the mid 70's, not too hot compared to recently, so I took Conker with me.  We stuck to the shade and went slow and he did fine.  We stopped in at the local petstore and picked up something for Juneau and Sasha.  It must have looked kinda funny to people as we walked by with this on my shoulder:

A fifteen pound bag of kibble is heavier than I initially thought.  That or I'm still horribly out of shape.  It wasn't hard, just awkward since the kibble moves around in the bag.  Conker kept looking back at me, probably wondering when the kibble was gonna fall and land on him.


When we got home I gave Conker a quick slicker brushing to get some loose fur off then looked at him as he lay on my bed.  I've slowly been noticing something but now it's really apparent.

Where did that gray ring of fur around Conker's neck come from?

When Conker was a little pupish he has a somewhat darker ring of gray fur around his neck. Wherever this gray undercoat was, black and black-tipped guard-hairs grew in.  When he blew his puppy coat it vanished beneath a thick carpet of white.  Now that the undercoat has lessened quite a bit, the darker ring is now very noticeable.  There are several other spots like this on Conker and I will try to get some photos of them next time I brush him (tomorrow).


Today Conker got:

Pork! With part of a chicken back and heart, beef liver and kidney, a piece of lamb and some crumbled sardine mush.

Random Picture

I told Conker he was dirty.  He did not agree.

June 23rd

 Today I cleaned a rug.  With a power washer.  The rug is now really fuzzy.


Today Conker got:

Chicken meat, back piece and heart, pork meat, beef liver and kidney and a turkey gizzard.

A long post about a pool day

Today the youngest siblings and a friend went swimming.  I took some pictures of them jumping in while Conker ran around the pool barking in an obnoxious high-pitched sound very similar to the uncanny scream his breed is capable of producing.
After a short while I got him to come over to me and sit in the shade for a few seconds so he could cool off.  It got to around 85 degrees today.  Nothing compared to yesterday's delightful 92 (seriously, it was awesome) but enough that Conker got hot rather quickly while he ran around barking at everybody.

Conker didn't like being restrained in the shade but it was for his own good.  It was either that or he would join the three monsters in the pool.  He didn't like that option so he stuck by me when I told him to.

(If you enlarge the picture and look just below my thumb joint you can see a scar I got from welding)

Conker decided just standing around getting scratched wasn't good enough so he began to play hand-wrestling.  A game where he tries to bite my hand and I try to hold his mouth shut.

(In this shot you can see my obnoxiously long thumbnail)

Around this time I noticed that Lindsey's friend didn't know how to jump off the diving board very well so I got up there and showed her.

Stand at the end, bend your knees and...

 Get the top of your head cut off by the photographer. 

Sorry, no shots of me jumping into the pool wearing sunglasses, a hat and SWAT boots.  I had work to do, and those boots take two days to dry.  (I know that from previous pool-jumpings while wearing them)  I'll see if I can get any next time I decide to not wear my boots for two days.

Fun fact!  I wear this "style" of clothing all the time.  I'm always seen with a hat, shades, guy clothes and boots or flip flops if I'm going barefoot.  (Flip flops are for inside buildings and the dog-park)

Conker decided chilling with me was boring so he ran into the bushes and began to dig a hole.

I don't know about your Shiba or other dog, but when Conker digs he gets super excited about it and gets this insane look on his face (that is extremely hard to take a picture of) and will digdigdig frantically then run around like a madman then digdigdig some more and so on.  It's really funny to watch.

Conker did get to have some actual fun while people were in the pool. The girlies were screwing around and trying to throw each other, Teddy and Conker were having a tug-of-war game over a kickboard.

Unfortunately Teddy was unable to pull Conker into the pool.

When I was growing up we were part of a pool club called the RONS Club.  Not "Ron" as in a dude's name, Retired Officers of the Naval Services RONS. It was founded by a bunch of retired Navy officers and that's where we spent out summers. Sometimes it would get to be about 120 out when we'd walk, barefoot, to the RONS and swim.  Then we moved to Peoria and built a hugass pool that is about four times the size of our current one.

While it all looked like fun, I'm generally glad I didn't join them.

Or they all might have tried to ride me instead of Lindsey.

Today Conker got: Pork meat with part of a turkey back and the usuals.

Craigslist can be pretty funny

Just go read this.  I hope it stays up for a while.

Today Conker got:

Turkey neck piece, chicken meat, heart and gizzard, beef liver, kidney and scraps and a small piece of lamb.  First time having lamb.

What is that?

It's a Schnauzer!  Not my Schnauzer though, the neighbor behind us's Schnauzer.  His name is Pepper and he is going to be staying at our house for a couple days while his owner is in Portland.

So far he's gotten along with the Girls and Conker alright.  Sasha has been ignoring him since he got here.  Juneau doesn't quite know what to think and will follow him around then run off when he tries to sniff her. Conker though, the second he saw Pepper he tried to get him to play.

I'm hoping Pepper won't bark at all while he's here, since when he does bark he sounds like he's being killed.  And that's just how he is.  The only barks he's done have been low not-getting-killed barks and only one or two at a time.  I hope he keeps that up and doesn't switch to the obnoxious kind.

It's been a while since I've seen a Miniature Schnauzer and he's a couple inches shorter than Conker.  I didn't realize that Pepper was so small until he was standing next to Conker who now looks like he's a medium-sized instead of small dog.

Pepper, unlike Conker, gets along with the people great.  He had no problems going with Mom and I from his house to ours.  I know Conker would have objected the entire way and turned into a mess when he got into the strange house.  Not Pepper.
Unfortunately he is just like Juneau and Sasha.  When he wants to be pet he'll lean on or touch you.  As you may or may not know, I HATE that, but Pepper isn't going to be sticking around for long enough that it's going to seriously bother me.  I hope.

So now instead of one annoying little dog following me around I have two.  Or three or even four, depending on what Juneau and Sasha are doing.


Today Conker got:  Beef meat, liver and kidney, turkey back chunk, chicken gizzard and heart and an egg.  He also got an additional chicken breast bone (with a bit of meat) and some skin.

Shiba Shedding

Shibas Shed, it's a part of life.  Today on the Nihon Ken forum someone askeds to see pictures of a Shikoku shedding but I figured a Shiba was close enough.  So I got out the bag of Conker's fur that I've been hoarding for some ungodly reason, spread it out on the bed and took a couple photos.

Shiba, fur and Furminator knock-off.  The fur is kinda wadded up so if it were "fresh" it would cover more than half of my bed.

The small pile at the very bottom of this shot is freshly brushed fur. See how it's looser than the other stuff?  And that was only from a small portion of Conker's neck.

The fur was about three inches deep on the bed, so there is a lot more than appears in the other pictures.


And today was somewhat exciting (frightening) for Conker.  While I didn't get any pictures of it, today was his first official swimming lesson!  He was NOT happy do be in the pool however, but I'm going to keep taking him in and letting him swim around until every time he heads to the stairs instead of the side.  He can't get out of the pool if he tries from the side, so I take him in about halfway then let him go and walk backwards ahead of him towards the stairs so he knows to go that way.
And thankfully since he's lost almost all of his winter fluff, he dries off really quickly.

Today Conker got: Pork meat, turkey back piece and gizzard, beef kidney, chicken liver and heart.