Behold the fuzzball known as Potter. Pictured here with my friend Leslie, Potter is a 7-week-old mix comprised approximately of lab, husky, shepherd, and border collie. Her fur is enviably soft, and she loves to give kisses.
(In the background is Leslie's dog, George, being jealous.)
I made this shelf for my studio out of culled wall shelf units that a former neighbor threw out, a couple of cheapo L brackets, and some paint.
It had to fit well below the windowsill and be high enough that the heater running along the floor wouldn't catch anything on fire. It also had to use almost exclusively things that I already had on hand.
One of the wood pieces had a dark veneer on it. I used this piece for the top shelf. To make the silhouettes, I layered some extra-wide masking tape onto a cutting board, sketched the images onto the tape, then X-acto'd the little buggers out. (I used various images on the web for reference... didn't save the links, though.) The masking-tape dogs got stuck onto the wood, then I painted over the whole thing with glossy, sunshine yellow Rustoleum paint.
The paint has a rubbery texture when dry, and the edges left behind when I peeled up the stencils were fragile. I coated the whole top shelf with matte Mod Podge, which so far has held the dogs' shapes nicely.
The only thing I had to buy for the project were some small metal L brackets that I picked up from the Big Box for about $2. The structure isn't quite as stable as I'd like, but I can always add on later. It's strong enough for my current purposes, anyway.
There's something about fences that are absolutely ineffective when it comes to keeping people on one side or the other that just make me feel good about life. This one is too tall to jump over, but it's easy enough to walk around it and come face-to-face with Gitchi Gumee (aka Lake Superior).
I have no idea what that metal thing is, but isn't it awesome?
Evan using our new awesome mysterious metal friend to break up a bag of ice for our drinks. Note the last remnants of winter ice still hanging out on Lake Superior. We spent that afternoon drinking cold beer, looking at the water, and waxing poetic. It was pretty windy.
Meet Huckabee, my beloved pedal-powered steed. He's a 26" men's Giant Sedona DX — a hybrid model, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Hybrid bikes are less rugged than standard mountain bikes, and not as fleet or lightweight as road bikes, but they're plenty fast and stable enough to ride on just about any surface. Perfect.
He's named after the quirky, hilarious movie "I ♥ Huckabee's," which you should see if you haven't.
My upstairs neighbors (who have since been evicted) stole my bike pump last summer. Poor Huckabee has gone almost a year without a good old-fashioned tire pumping. A couple of days ago I finally rode him to a gas station and used the air hose to fill him up. It took about a second and a half per tire, and he was like a whole new bike afterwards... smooth as silk, and speedy, too.
Since then I've been biking pretty much everywhere. The only real point of consternation is that I can't bring Rufus along when I ride. Being a corgi, Rufus wouldn't be able to keep up for long with his stubby legs (not to mention he would probably try to herd the bike, which could only end in disaster).
I found a pretty sweet how-to on building your own trailer over on How to Fix Bikes (link) and I'm itching to give it a shot once I gather the resources. I'll want to be very, very careful to make it super-stable before trying to put Rufus in it, of course. I can just imagine biking him to the big park on the other side of town, then letting him run around and catch frisbees off-leash all afternoon...
Springtime always seems to come late in the northwoods, and summer is practically a joke. For the first week or two of June, the heat in our house was running daily. And it rained. Cold, ice-colored rain that's really just snow in disguise. Winter never really takes a break around here.
There is, however, a very brief window of opportunity between mid-to-late June and the second or third week of August. This is what we mockingly call "summer" around here.
This is the time when everyone who enjoys such activities as gardening, hiking, camping, kayaking, rock climbing, biking, swimming, and venturing outside without fear of death from exposure gets really frantic. Like squirrels in the fall, or pundits during the last month before a presidential election, we all rush to cram a year's worth of beloved activities into a timeframe too small to hold them.
True to this tradition, I've been dragging poor Rufus around on long walks just about every day. He doesn't complain, of course, but his ears are, shall we say, very expressive.
On our way back from the coffee shop yesterday, I left him tied out front of the dollar store while I ran in real quick. I was looking for two things: a zipper for a project I'm working on, and a package of zip-ties, because zip-ties are as ubiquitous as duct tape — you've just got to have them around.
I found neither, though I did pick up a few things I wasn't expecting to find... and a package of rawhide strips. His fur was hot to the touch after five minutes of standing in the sun, peering in the automatic sliding glass doors and waiting for me. I promised never to leave him tied up in the hot sun again, and gave him a rawhide to seal the deal. So much more meaningful than shaking hands, which he only does on command.
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