Weekend...

It seemed to be a long week for me...I don't begrudge getting up to walk Penny, but it does cut into the number of high-quality ZZZs I manage to accumulate during the course of the work-week...we watched "The Adirondacks", on PBS on Wednesday night (until 11pm!, which is late for us...it was worth it!)...I had lots of meetings at work this week ( a necessary but unfortunate part of my job, I would prefer to be in the classroom working with my students), which resulted in some student discipline issues...long weeks happen, even in nearly perfect jobs in paradise...

On to the Penny Pictures...


Penny and Cedar are working out their relationship day by day...there are still some growls and tense moments during mealtimes, but they continue to explore their shared love for sleeping on couches, an area in which they are in complete agreement...


After Penny's first morning walk (around 4:30am) I often bring her in to snuggle and sleep with Ben for a bit...I took this picture in the dark, and the flash filled it in quite nicely, although the focus is a bit soft...


She woke up for a second when the flash went off...Ben did not...although she has creepy eyes in this picture, the focus and cuteness is a little better...


Couch-napping training session #47b...Penny snores so beautifully that you might think that generations of chocolate labs were selectively bred just to yield the cute buzzing and gurgling sounds that we are treated to every time she dozes off...


The above isn't a great picture because of the extreme distance and the limitations of our cameras, but I wanted to include it because of the fun that Ben and Penny were having together, playing on the field in back of our house...they chased back and forth in the long grass until the bugs of dusk drove us inside...poor Penny has a lot of bites on her perfect puppy tummy, bugs seem to find it yummy...

Cedar and Penny...napping

After a full day of running around, Penny and Cedar snuggled up together on our couch while we watched the movie, "Zoom!" downstairs...


They love hanging out together, although Penny does sometimes hang off of Cedar's neck by her teeth...

Secret Fort, part 2

We got to talking about Ben's fort, and how we could keep stuff for him down there, and Ben suggested geocaches, camouflaged so that nobody would be able to see it...we ran by the dollar store and picked up some paint to color some ammo-cans I just happened to have lying around (yup, I'm that guy...geocaching, camping, Zombie Squad, etc.)...


Camouflage went out the window once Ben saw the colors...he especially liked the gold, which, to be fair, was really cool (if not terribly subtle in the deep woods)...


It even got the top of the salt bucket pretty and shiny...


After gold-ing up a couple of ammo-cans, Ben shifted gears and added some other colors, including black and red and white...


He got a really cool pattern going by making a series of black and red dots in wavy lines alone the sides of one of the ammo-cans...


We brought three ammo-cans down to the fort: from left to right they hold food and toys and books...


We tested out the food/drink can, and the toys can...playing with Penny on the soft mat of 50,000 years worth of accumulated pine needles...at the end of our playtime we covered the cans with a couple of balsam branches...

Mother's Day Weekend

Yesterday we had some fun at a geocaching event in Saranac Lake...it was organized as a worldwide "flash mob" that consisted of thousands of geocachers in almost 200 events and 16 countries...


Attendees were instructed to show up at exactly 1pm, and at the tolling of the bell, were told to...


...put on clown noses that they had retrieved at a cache outside of town...


Penny had a great time at the event, loved meeting all of the new people and Harley (pictured below), but needed some "mom-time" to chill out...


Harley, a perfectly behaved boxer, was a great playmate for Penny during the event...


Here's a group photo of everyone who attended the Saranac Lake event...we were there for 15 minutes, then everyone took off the noses, and faded away...it was lots of fun, and we got some great looks from people walking/driving by...


This morning, Gail read to Ben for a while, and then we made pancakes for Gail...


After breakfast, Gail and Penny took a little nap while Ben and I went out to romp in the woods for a bit...


We woke Gail up a little later, and took her out to Ben's secret clubhouse/fort in the woods in front of our house, where he had a little surprise hidden for her...


He had hidden a geocache in the woods, among the baby balsam trees...


We retrieved it and went to open it in a fort that Ben and I built out of dead trees and tarps...yes, the ammo-can is fluorescent pink...


Inside the ammo-can was a bag that Ben decorated at school, and within that was a beautiful box that Ben had painted and jazzed up with stickers...the floor of the fort is covered with a tarp and a cushy layer of balsam boughs...it's closed to the elements from the North and West, and open to them to the South and East...Ben was excited about watching cars go by without their being able to see us, and about maybe sleeping out in it sometime...we're setting up an ammo-can for him to bring out their with essential supplies, like snacks and books and coloring stuff...


Penny kept getting hung up on her leash in the woods, so she bit it...


Ben and Gail liked hanging out in the fort...


Ben told Gail about how we built the fort, and about the next round of improvements that we were going to make...


Penny fell asleep in Gail's arms while we were out at Ben's fort...


She's a gifted sleeper...


When we got back inside, Penny fell asleep on the sofa, and I loved the colors and textures of her napping spot...

Pictures of an albino moose..

Nope...not really...they're just more pics of Penny...



...sleeping...


...pretty hard...