the yard is very crunchy. we haven’t had rain in a few weeks (2-3?), but it looks like it could rain this weekend. i did water my few potted plants that live on the porch since they were looking especially thirsty.

If yours was better than that, care to drop a name for me to go look into?

i ended up getting the sahara shade hoodie from REI because it was on sale. i don’t have much to compare it to, but i thought it was really breezy! i even wore it on my ~10 mile bike ride and didn’t feel too bad as long as there was a bit of wind.

got some teva sandals for children that i’m digging and a shade hoodie for those really hot days when i don’t wanna wear sunscreen.

went to the beach over the weekend, which echo loved! jean (little dog) hates the water, and i didn’t want to have to clean all the sand out of loki’s coat, hah.

new to us (15-year-old) mazda5 was awesome for hauling all three dog crates and our gear, but the AC stopped working 1/3 of the way back home, so it was a hot ride. 🥵

a little over three weeks until RAGBRAI starts. i’m so sick of training and ready to do the ride already!

howdy! 🤠 🐝

immediately the “drip drip drop” song from bambi rolled into my head!

i know how ya feel, but sometimes you gotta look out for you!

all about the beeple! 🤠

i’ve poured hours upon hours into this game. it’s just a chill game (if you want it to be), and it’s fun to keep track of stuff to collect, talk to the NPCs, and go fight some baddies occasionally.

echo (border collie) passed her community canine test last thursday. 🎓 pics in a separate post when we get our certificate later this week. also got to meet one of the other foster dogs (buck, pictured below) in our program, and he is a beautiful dog. very driven and toy-motivated. gonna make a nice sport dog for someone.

rode to the other town over on greenways on saturday (~50 miles) with a couple of folks, then met up with some friends for dinner/drinks. took the train back home; it was all pretty chill.

finally hung a bunch of the artwork in the house over the weekend. feeling much more homey now.

heading to the beach this weekend, which i’m looking forward to. it’ll be echo’s first time there! 🏖️

fellow invisible bi person checking in! 🫡

hah, yeah. doesn’t help that somebody sent these, i downloaded them, then uploaded to youtube. at this point they might as well be taped with VHS technology. 😂

i set mine up last weekend, too!

weekend before last was a two-day agility/rally training event for the dogs. they all did wonderfully! didn’t manage to get a good video of loki, but i got a few of the others.

• jean: agility
• echo: agility — her first full course!
• echo: rally obedience — her first go at this sport!

we also took the dogs trailer camping this past weekend, which they (and we) enjoyed.

my partner ordered them online. guessing from amazon.

if you can plop the tablets in there, i think that would help!

my partner ate some of the fruit, but they don’t seem quite ripe enough to eat.

and yeah on the fungus! it was heavily infected last year, though we pruned heavily and it seems mostly gone this year. i’ll have to take a pic sometime, poor tree was shooting off ten billion branches trying to survive the neglect so it’s really bushy and awkward looking.

figured out that our big fruiting tree is… an apricot tree! sadly, it seems to be struggling. it didn’t fruit at all last year, and some of the bark is sloughing off the trunk, so i’m not sure how much longer it will last. i think it’s nearly done fruiting, which is good because the fruit flies are going NUTS out there.

spent the weekend at a wedding a couple of hours away. sent the two herding dogs to my agility coach and the chi mix to a friend’s house for boarding. chi mix and aussie did great! the border collie had a rough time. apparently barked more or less the whole weekend and couldn’t settle. i think she was just bored and overwhelmed/overstimulated, sigh.

we’ve had a few thunderstorms, and the xanax the vet gave me doesn’t seem to be helping the border collie’s severe reaction (barking, leaping, basically inconsolable making both humans lose sleep for a couple of nights). i’m wondering if i could up her dose. also picked up a thundershirt, but haven’t had a chance to test it out during a real thunderstorm yet.

we’ve got a two-day mock agility trial this weekend, and i’m hoping to get all three dogs in the ring at some point or another.

RAGBRAI is steadily approaching, but due to lack of sleep and being out of town, i didn’t get a chance to ride at all last week or this past weekend. fingers crossed i can get a decent ride in after work tonight.

assuming “PC” doesn’t count… i’ll be a basic bitch and say nintendo switch. it’s the one i’ve played the most games on.

yeah… it’s really hard to watch. the most i do is a very upbeat “oops!” or “nope!” with my dogs when we’re training. i do occasionally get frustrated with my barky aussie, but i try to keep it positive as much as possible.