Busy Days!

Hi All,

I'm really sorry its taken me so long to update the blog, it's been a really busy time around here. Jethro got to spend a lot of time with sitters over the last month for a variety of reasons, the first was i have a new granddaughter!!

Here name is Kaydence and I flew out to California to be there when she was born, so Jethro went to jail. He really likes the guys at the Dominguez prison, and they adore him. He gets lots of attention (24/7 -- it is prison after all) and he gets LOTS of obedience work which he can always use since he is now 10 months old and 90+ pounds (i stop counting at 90).

After I got back from California, I got him back from jail and we went about our normal puppy raising work, and it was time for his Penn-Hip xrays. For those of you who follow any of the other blogs, you know this isn't entirely normal procedures, which means there was something questionable in his regular xrays when he was neutered! We all had paws crossed as he went over to South Texas Veterinary Specialists in the VREC building to have his xrays done.

Thankfully after a week of fretting, the all clear came back and he is good to go. Assuming he and i survive adolescents. He's a big fat teenager!

Then i got really busy at work, and Michelle at guide dogs was helping me sit him and get some extra work into him. She's much harder on him than i am. :) But SHE just got finished training a client for three weeks at the training center, Dakota the labradoodle (http://www.dakotastail.blogger.com/) was trained as a diabetes alert dog! He was matched with Ben a 12 year old middle schooler here in San Antonio with Type I Diabetes. While Michelle was busy with class and I was busy at work, we didn't want Jethro's work to suffer, so he spent some more time at prison. He was such a happy boy and they work so hard with him.

Michelle graduated Ben and Dakota (http://dakotastails-thenextchapter.blogspot.com/) and Jethro came home and we started off like there was no break at all. That's the joy of having other puppy raisers puppy sit for you, there is no regression of work, it's like he never missed at beat, and he even came back better than he went.

We had lots going on around here, he went to Lowe's with me to pick out some hardware for an art project I'm working on. He went Christmas shopping with me at Target, and he spent some time with us at the 3 day retreat at Scrapbook 911. All busy and fun times. his work is coming along nicely, even if he is a really big dork.

We still have to deal with all the puppy things 10 month olds do, like chewing open the seem of the ottoman trying to get the lab to play with him, getting an ear infection, and finding some weird fungus on his head. That had him in quarantine for 10 days while the vet decided what on earth it was and whether or not it was contagious to other dogs, cats or humans. Its some weird name i can't pronounce and apparently you can only get it if you come in contact with the live spore. Go figure. All the other critters and humans are fungus free. Leave it to the German Shepherd to find some funky fungus while playing. :)

i promise not to let this go so long next time. I'm off to an artist retreat this week in Arizona, so Jethro is going to Greenwood school for a week. (http://www.greenwoodschool.net/) Tracy is a brave puppy raiser who runs a great school. I don't know who i should be more worried for, the kids or Jethro... I'm leaning toward Jethro. But i CAN count on Tracy to take some awesome pictures and video for me!!! :)