Dog Stuff
All kinds of information about dogs, especially our Bernese Mountain Dogs.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Lazy Daisy
Daisy has a favorite place to nap—a love seat in the office. Here are few pictures taken over the Christmas Holidays.
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Sunday, October 22, 2006
Millenia is Gone
Today we put Millenia to sleep. She was almost 7 years old. She had wobblers disease and had been on prednisone for a year. But, she got around great. However, starting a few days ago she began to fail. She become weak, could not get around well, stopped eating and drinking, and was incontinent. We took her to the vet today and blood tests and X-rays pointed to a very high probability of a tumor on her spleen, causing bleeding into her abdomen. She could not have lived more than a few hours without surgery. And, the probability of a successful surgery was low due to her overall health, being on the pred for so long, and high likelihood that even if the tumor was successfully removed, she would not live more than a few months.
Click here to see Millenia as we remember her.
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Sunday, September 24, 2006
Ticks
We recently found some ticks on dogs. Bode has had two and Sailor has had one. I also found a small one crawling on Daisy’s head last night. This is so strange because we have not had any ticks on dogs throughout the entire summer.
In Colorado, we would watch for ticks in the Spring. But, as soon as Summer came and it got hot and dry, we did not worry anymore. Here, we went the entire Spring and Summer without ticks, but now that Fall is here, we have seen several.
They come off pretty easy. I just grab them between my thumb and finger, apply gentle pressure and pull gently but firmly until they decide to release. I check to make sure I got their head out, then I squeeze the beejezus out of them and throw them away.
We put Frontline on all the dogs a few days ago, I hope that kicks in soon. Meantime, the dogs enjoy the extra “petting” they get when we go over them looking for ticks.
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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Dogs Drinking Slowly
If you read my previous post, you know that I brought a high-speed camera home with me this weekend. This morning, I took some movies of the dogs drinking from their water bowl. It is pretty fascinating to see how they roll their tongue back to create a large surface area on the water, dip it into the water, pull it up slowly, then gulp the water they’ve pulled up from the bowl. Here are three movies of three of the dogs.
All movies were shot with a Vision Research Phantom V7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I was using a Sigma 24-70mm F-mount lens. All movies were shot at f/4. I used two 250W Northstar lights. The movie of Sailor is in super slow-motion, at least compared to the other two. It was shot at 1000 frames-per-second with a 100 microsecond exposure time. You’ll notice that it is a little washed-out. That is because it was dark, so I tried to lighten it up some by adjusting the brightness and contrast after the fact. I’m not very good at this stuff yet, so the pictures aren’t as good as a pro could get them, but you can sure see the act of drinking!
Update: I uploaded a new movie of Sailor that is exactly 1000 frames long. This means that everything you see in this movie occured in 1 second in “real life”. I count three full slurps of water in 1 second!
For the movies of Daisy and Bode, I changed the frame rate to 500 frames-per-second (so they move along a little faster). And, the exposure to 200 microseconds, giving me a little more light to work with. Now, you can see that I have some parts of the scene (the white on the dog, for example) that are overexposed. I could have fixed this in the camera if I had been paying more attention. (A feature called Extreme Dynamic Range). But, they are what they are from a quality perspective. I’m learning and will get better!
The movies are in Quicktime format using the h.264 codec. If you can’t view the movies, download and install the latest version of Quicktime from http://www.apple.com/quicktime. And, they are about 32MB in size, so give them some time to load.
Hope you enjoy!
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Friday, June 09, 2006
Bart Being Bart
In case you missed it, check out this article on Lynne’s blog:
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