Signs??

I've been beavering away at my vast number of recent image files, trying to sort, delete, organize and generally wrangle them into some sort of order. Since the amount of shooting I'm doing of late has grown exponentially, staying on top of it all is pretty important.

I spent the morning and much of yesterday (and part of the day before) doing edits on the multi-hundred shots I took on our Edmonton area outing of a couple of weeks ago. I did some horse shots for a friend who plans to sell her young warmblood, some farm and under saddle shots for the owner of the dressage facility where she boards, and a whole bunch of shots of general interest and for future art use.

Going through the Edmonton visuals brought back some of the visits to friends and the strange new form of entertainment I picked up while we were there. On our first evening we went to visit with an old (as in long-standing, ahem) friend and fellow artist Noreen Crone-Findlay http://www.crone-findlay.com/ and her expanding family. The expansion is in the form of a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law, both of relatively recent vintage in that capacity, and both being met by us for the first time. These are all dog people so talk centered to a fair extent on our doggy friends, both current and from days gone by.

Ali, now married to Noreen's son Angus, also has a Boxer past, so of course we had to have some Boxer discussion. One of the things that struck me as very entertaining in the midst of this was Noreen relating the story of a visit to a dog show where she encountered a number of frantic people rushing about the grounds crying out "Seven Boxers running loose!". Ali finished the knitting stitch she was working on, then remarked with a totally straight face "Isn't that a sign of the Apocalypse?" Of course this set us all off, and now one of my current new activities is looking for "signs".

As these things work out, we discovered another one that same evening, when we were chatting before bedtime with our friend Brenda, at whose place we were staying. We told her the Boxer Apocalypse story, and talk moved off in an equine direction, Brenda being a horse person. We were talking about farriers and she had a story about her farrier who also did team roping with various of his cowboy friends. Apparently a couple of them had purchased an electric cow (no, I'm *not* making this up) to spare wear and tear on the real thing while they practised their roping skills on horseback with a moving target. My understanding is that it would lurch off when started up and carry on fleeing until a rope landed on its neck to trigger the "off" mechanism.

The farrier happened by one evening to find his friends working on the cow who had some mechanical problems. They were toiling away trying to find out what the problem was, when the "on" switch was accidentally triggered, the cow was miraculously cured, and took off into the distance, leaving them staring and cursing with no ropes or horses with which to pursue and subdue it. Of course we all instantly recognized this as yet another "sign" by which we would be able to foretell bad things in the offing. If it was being pursued by seven loose Boxers at the same time, heading for cover would be a prudent thing.

There's nothing for it but to post Boxer and cattle pictures here. I couldn't choose from the Boxer shots, so am putting up a few more than usual. Both these dogs belong to a local breeder and friend of Boxers in particular and dogs in general. She has a huge amount of heart and kindness and fosters many Boxers and Boxer mixes that find themselves in bad circumstances until they can locate new homes. I have a huge amount of respect for her.

I got these shots at Ebon Stables last week. There are a couple of dog agility rings north of the barn, and I was lucky to catch a lesson with the Boxers in it. Marco is the more standard looking one. He is one of their stud dogs and an absolutely loveable goof. I was thrilled to see him in action since he makes my boys look relatively sane by comparison. Anyone who knows Boxers will understand the one where he is sitting. He's under orders here and is waiting to be allowed to zoom off on his mission, but it's really tough for him to stay still. The second shot of him shows him in action over a jump, ears and jowls flying.

Spryte is the little white female who is flying over her jump. She's a small little package, but powerful and strongly muscled. If she was a horse, she'd be a feisty little Quarter horse mare for sure.

The cattle shot is one I got in Alberta a few years ago. My daughter and I (and grandson Mark) spent pretty well all of Mother's Day that year driving over four hours each way to take a bearded dragon lizard to its' new home at a reptile sanctuary. This is a whole other story, but I did get some nice shots of these cows as a reward.

Noreen's daughter, by the way, is an up and coming artist in her own right, and also relatively newly-wed to her military husband (who Mark was thrilled to meet) Clancy. I was going to post a link to Chloe's website, but darned if I can find it!!