Willie July 3, 2006 - April 15, 2019That'll do, Willie. That'll do. I can not write more right now. Not now. I can't even find the perfect photo to include. Not now. But I will have lots to say, when the miasma of this pain has cleared. So, so much to say about life and death and dogs and the biological miracle that is our relationship with them.  And about Willie.  Our Silly Billy Willie Boy.We are bereft, that's all I can say now.Here is what I sent friends yesterday morning, on Monday the 15th of April, 2019. I'm including it here, because so many of you feel like friends, even though we've never met.We wanted to let you know that we are putting Willie down tonight. His cancer has defied all expectations, and in spite of chemotherapy and a gazillion other efforts, has Read More

Recently Lisa Lemberger (Business Mgr, Numbers Wizard, HR guru) and I traveled to Wenatchee, WA to visit the good people at Dogwise. Several years ago we partnered with Dogwise such that they send out all orders that come in through our website. It's been a great arrangement--as the "Amazon of Dog Books" [I mean that in the best of all possible ways, not in a take over the earth kind of way]  they are set up to mail packages all over the world to individual buyers, to big book distributors, like Ingram and Baker & Taylor, and to Amazon itself.  But unlike Amazon, they are a small, family-run business that has staff that's been there for decades, and considers Dogwise part of their family too.Here's the pack in front of their dog friendly office:That's Nate (VP & son of Read More

I am sorry to have to tell you that Willie, my Silly Billie Willie Boy, has metatastic pulmonary adenocarcinoma. Lung cancer. Chemo might slow its progression, but can’t cure it. Surgery isn’t an option.I thought you would want to know. So many of us here have become a close village of dog lovers, and have followed each other’s dogs for years. Many of you have read about Willie’s challenges in The Education of Will. I didn’t want to blindside you with the end of his life, which is predicted to come in two to six months. In my experience, people don’t want to be protected, they want to be informed.This chapter began with a quiet cough, a little mouse of a thing, a single solitary huff after he got up from resting. By the end of January it became 3-4 coughs in a row, as if he were Read More

 I am out of town this week, meeting with the good people at Dogwise in Wenatchee, WA. So I'm reprinting a post from 2010, which has me grinning like a fool because 1) It's fun for me to read about Willie's early driving lessons nine years ago, and 2) I'm using similar techniques with Maggie after watching videos on the Macrae's online training program. You'll see in my post that Willie needed to learn to drive the sheep in a straight line. Maggie, on the other hand, would drive sheep for miles in a line so straight it would bring tears of joy to an engineer. But she needs to learn to push on heavy sheep, rather than let them set the pace, so we're again using Alisdair's magic cones for another purpose. So here's a post from September 2010,  with lessons from Read More

Recently I called Maggie, and she didn't show up. I was outside at the farm, working on clearing the muck-infused ice from a gate. The Border collies were out with me, behind the barn. No matter what I'm doing, I never let them out of sight; we live close to a road and even though the dogs are trained to stay off of it, they are dogs, not machines. I'm well aware that it just takes one second for trouble to turn into tragedy. In addition, let's face it, I tend to be on the neurotic cautious end of the continuum."Maggie! Maggie Maggie!" I called again. Nothing.And there it was. That feeling. That moment when your stomach drops like a plane hitting an air pocket. Fear, in all its physical glory.And then I turned around, to find that Maggie was standing two feet behind me Read More