Happy Easter from our family to yours!

And hooray for Tripods, Digital Cameras and their self timer continuous shooting mode, which made this family pic possible. 🙂

Cueball would like to show his blogger friends his bendy nose.

Not only can he do neat things with his ultra cool ears, he also likes to bend his nose.  I was able to capture this one above during one of his daily stretches.

The weather turned cold and rainy again this week but before it did, the Crabapple Tree that we received as a gift in Maggie’s honor bloomed last week. Such delicate little pink blooms.  A fitting way to honor our Mags.

It was beautiful to see.  I miss her so and can’t believe it has almost been a year since I had to say goodbye to my special girl.  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you, my sweet Maggie Mae.

In happier news, the hounds, Mitch and I are getting ready for our trip to GIG next weekend.  GIG was the first big Greyhound event we had ever attended shortly after we adopted Maggie and Booyah in 2006.  That was seven years ago and we only went up for one day.  We are looking forward to going back.  It will be a special trip, as it will be a first for Cueball, Pippi and Ziva!  I hear a lot has changed in seven years.  We are also excited that we will get to hear Dr. Couto speak on Saturday and of course all the shopping and visiting with fellow Greyhounds and their people. Oh and a planned trip to a winery too.  We have lots of fun planned for next weekend!  I hope to get some great pics of our trip too.

Until then, Pippi says we should just take it easy and get some beauty rest so we look our best for all the photos mom plans to take.

Happy Easter to all our blogger friends!

After an early (up at 4 a.m. to meet the hauler at 5 a.m.) and busy morning helping four newly retired Greyhounds go to their forever homes yesterday, we packed up the van and headed out with the pups to Cooper Vineyards.  Cooper Vineyards is a very dog friendly winery about an hour from our home.  The Winery has a beautiful tasting room and large covered deck.  They have live music on the weekends.  When we arrived, we did a tasting and then got a bottle of their Pinot Grigio and made ourselves at home outside on their large covered deck.  The pups were happy to be out and about with us.  They also enjoyed the cheese and turkey slices from our small picnic.  🙂  We were hound sitting Apollo this weekend, so we brought him along for his first Winery visit.  He did great.

Below are just a few pics of the hounds enjoying their afternoon yesterday.

Pippi kept me company and laid next to my feet most of the afternoon.

Apollo and Cueball listening to the Musician, Curtis Prince, play his guitar and sing.  He came over to our table and met the hounds during his break.  He dedicated his album to his dog, Sam, who was his best friend and who traveled up and down the East Coast and to Texas on all of his gigs.  Dog people are the best!

Ziva just looking pretty like the princess she is.

Apollo thinks Wineries are relaxing.  We couldn’t agree more!

My handsome hubby, Mitch, enjoying the music.  He liked the musician so much, he bought his CD and gave him a tip. 

And of course, I must include the four lucky hounds with their new forever families who were adopted on Saturday.

Above is KB’s Money Power, now known affectionately as Davey and his mom Renee.

Below is Devils Elbow, now known affectionately as Ivan and his mom Annie.

Below is Bon Vivant, now known affectionately as Tess and her mom and dad Ellen and Lou.

And last, but certainly not least is High Praise, now known affectionately as Lady Grey and her new mom Karin.

Adoption days are always the best!  We had an early, and busy, but successful morning and ended our day enjoying great music, our wonderful hounds, each other and some great wine!  I hope we have a long Spring this year so we can have more weekends spent just like we spent this one. 🙂

Our long and cold winter is finally over.  We are so happy to welcome Spring and so are the pups! We will have pics of them playing in the yard in the upcoming weeks.  We have some fun activities already planned for Spring. 

As you may remember, Apollo came to stay with us for a few days.  He is one of the calmest Greyhounds we have ever met.  He is a beautiful and sweet boy.  He is certainly welcome to stay with us again, any time.  Mitch did not want Apollo to leave.  Unlike me, he doesn’t feel that way about every hound we doggie sit.  🙂  He has told me that he is going to ask for a hound like Apollo when we are ready to adopt again.  That won’t be for a long while.  We are at our max with three.  Below are a few more pics I took of this sweet, velcro boy. His velcro personality made him hard to photograph while he was standing.  He loves to lean against you and bear all his weight. 

One of the many great things about Spring aside from the beautiful weather is all the pops of color you get from the blooming trees and flowers. This is one of our Forsythia bushes.  I love the bright yellow this bush produces this time of year.  We have 5 of these along the driveway.  So pretty. I just wish they bloomed for a longer period of time.

We are in the process of totally re-vamping our flower beds in front of the house.  After two years of trying multiple plants with little success, we sought professional help from a landscaping company (Natural Progression Landscaping).  I had a coupon for 60% off of the consultation, which included the landscape design.  The landscape designer met with us, took measurements and pictures of our current flower beds, chatted with us to find out what our needs/desires were and then designed a plan.  She sent us the design in a PDF file and also gave us tips for planting.  One tip we got was how to rid your property of voles. We have had a terrible time with getting rid of voles and our plants have suffered because of these pesky creatures.  She advised us to use Permatil with all our plantings.  We both had never heard of this product, but are willing to try it and will hopefully be saying bye, bye to the pesky voles! 

We accomplished 90% of one of the two flower beds this weekend.  We planted 23 of the 28 plants on Saturday.  We are waiting for the nursery to get in the 5 remaining Perennials that we will plant in this bed.  We plan to work on the other flower bed in early May.  We have 25 plants to plant in that bed.  We wanted to have color all year long and with the variety of plants she choose for us, it should be beautiful during all four seasons.  🙂

Some of the bulbs I planted two years ago are blooming also. I am hoping more come up soon.  I planted 50 along the driveway last year. 

I love the fragrance and color of these! I have no idea what they are (lost the tag), but they are pretty and very fragrant.

We also have lots and lots of birds.  One of the many things we love about this subdivision.  It is very park like.  We have a feeder in the front yard that will fill twice a week.  We have seen Cardinals, Blue Jays, Wren’s, Oriels, and Woodpeckers feed at our feeder.  They are really neat to watch.  This is what Cueball had his eye on in our latest Wordless Wednesday – Expressionism post. He loves to watch the world out of the big bay window. The birds have become use to us now and continued to feed while we were doing our yard work.  The feeder is just feet from the flower bed we were working in. 

I did not have my zoom lens outside with me.  I wish I had, probably could have got a pretty decent pic, darn, but this one gives you an idea. The feeder is in front of the Greyhound statue.

We have bird’s nest in our carport.  I just noticed this on Saturday.  They were pretty creative constructing the nest around our chemical bottles.  Have not seen any babies yet, but hope we do.  Birds are so neat, aside from the daily defecating on my car.

We have a wine tasting trip planned with the pups for next weekend, should be fun! It is that time of year for festivals and outdoor fun.  Pippi is ready for an adventure as are Cueball and Ziva.

We hope everyone is well and is having as good of weather as we have had of late!