….”they are huge!” Seems Gus is projected to now top out at over 100 pounds and Daisy will be 80 to 90. That is 40 to 50 pounds of dog MORE than we anticipated at the outside, wildest, full-grown ‘advertised’ weight! Worst case was supposed to be 160 for both. At 7 months plus a week, Gus is 75 pounds, Daisy 65.

And our routine is still full-on puppy chaos starting around 6:00 in the am. Sal usually gets up with them and sits on the outside wicker chesterfield as they lick and jump on her for at least five minutes every morning. “It’s a puppy attack!” she shrieks every time. That was mildly amusing but Sal weighs under 130 and they now weigh a combined tonnage of just over 140.

They are progressing nicely despite their recessive Wooly Mammoth gene starting to show. Gus is actually swimming. And he has such thick and curly hair, he seems to float a few inches above the water like a dry log or maybe a basking Orca. He can really move. Daisy? Not so much. She’s been in. She gets wet. But water is not her thing. Not yet, anyway. She’s just not keen. The irony is that, despite being more athletic than Gus, she has fallen in about five times and, of course, she swam until she was hauled out. Gus has not fallen in at all but he still does a face plant every day in some activity – just on dry land instead of the dock or from a slippery rock. He is kind of a Goofy Gus, still-a-puppy-clumsy but his athleticism is improving.

Both dogs are slowly changing colour (that was predicted) with Gus getting a dull-brown effect on his mid-to-back end and around his muzzle. Daisy has a sexy silver thread thing going on with sprinkles of silver-white all over her back – kinda like a canine version of wearing diamonds. Very pretty.
They are eating a ton! And neither has an extra pound to spare. NOT fat at all. They are just growing! Having said that, Gus has loose skin……I do not know any other way to put it. If I grab some loose skin on his left side (say, mid-torso) and swivel it to the right, I get no real resistance until that handful has rotated over to the other side. His skin swivels over half his body girth! We really hope he doesn’t grow into it. If he does, he will weigh 150.
They are very gentle and Sal calls them ‘chill’. They do not bark much. They never get angry. They socialize fabulously with everyone and with all the local and visiting dogs save a couple they encountered on a walk a few weeks ago. Those two ‘bad’ dogs were just protecting their property and Gus and Daisy were chased right back all the way to the boat. One of the ‘baddies’ even jumped on the boat to drive the point home but that was an error in judgment. My daughter was on the boat and she is not afraid of dogs – even charging, barking ones. She moved to intercept and, in that move on a rocking boat, her head and the ‘bad dog’s’ head collided. In effect, my daughter head-butted the bad dog off the boat. Problem solved.

On another note, the propane fridge is flagging. Not as cold as it should be. So, we took it out and cleaned it all up and flipped it upside down a few times to ‘burp’ it and, when we put it back, it was worse! Consequently, our kitchen ceiling sooted up and cleaning it just made a mess. We needed to paint the downstairs, anyway. Sheesh.
So, Sal wanted a new fridge before this ’cause propane fridges are NOT self-defrosting. We ordered an LG 12 cu. ft unit (2 cu.ft larger than the propane one) and it is now ‘on order’. ‘On order’ means we may get it sometime in September. Maybe. An all-too-common fridge is almost 3 months away down the supply chain debacle (SCD)! I mention this only because everything, it seems, is screwed up due to the Covid/SCD. Get this: I ordered two galvanized plumbing pipes six feet long. No one had ’em in Campbell River. “We can order them in for ya but most things are taking a few weeks and that is if they are in the province!”
The SCD is manifest even when there is NO SUPPLY involved….a friend has a friend who wants to come to Canada. That effort has been stymied for closing on THREE YEARS!!! Bureaucrats in Canada are in short supply, I guess, or else they are on stress leave….whatever….. We have gone from a working economy that was annoying enough in good times to a weird, delayed, insufficient, very expensive economy in the space of those three years and there does not seem to be an end in sight.
So, my blog is primarily about dogs today. So much more pleasant than most other topics on the go (like Trump, January 6th, etc.). And I also mention the fragility of the system in matters economical. So much of the news is unpleasant. I could include the BC Ferry system, the Health system, and, of course, the airline industry…..a whole new level of schmozzle, but I’ll leave it at that. Not so interesting a blog, I suppose, but it does kinda tell you where our heads are at…..