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Tag Archives: yaris

In which Yaris has a small accident

I had some unplanned time off from work last week, so I took the time to finally, FINALLY get my annual parking pass to the regional and wilderness parks in Orange County.  I have long coveted one of these passes.  It’s been hard for me to obtain one because of the hours I’ve been working.  The offices at the regional parks close at 15:30 M-F and they aren’t opened on the weekends (not that it would have mattered of late).

Anyway, I like the regional parks.  The little community parks that are around my area are nice, but they aren’t very explorable.  A lot of them are just an expanse of grass with a playground that sprouts up in the middle.  They’re nice, but you’re constantly tripping over small children or you’re trying to convince the parents of small children that your dog won’t eat their small children.  Not like my dogs particularly enjoy eating small children.

It’s true that the wilderness parks would be even more explorable than the regional parks and community parks, but I can’t bring a dog into those areas.  So…I’m not sure how often I’ll go to the wilderness parks since Yaris likes to accompany me to go exploring.  Choco…doesn’t like to get out much these days.

Anyway, I was enjoying my new found unfettered access to the regional parks along with Yaris last week when she decided she really wanted to go see the ducks in the lake.  Yaris really likes birds, you see.  She likes birds in that…she likes to eat them.  She’s caught a few from our backyard and eaten them and then left feathers all over the house for me before.  The first few times we were at the park, she saw the ducks but decided it was ok to look at them from afar.  This time, she decided she’d really like a closer look.  So I let her.

We walked up to one of the lakes where all the ducks were out in the middle of the lake.  I wasn’t about to get us kicked out because Yaris was terrorizing ducks.  I figured the ducks in the middle of the lake were safe enough from Yaris’ taste for birds.  Anyway, we slowed down a bit as we got closer to the shore since it gets a bit steep because the lake levels are low for pump maintenance.  So, as we were slowly approaching the water, Yaris bent down a bit to sniff it out and then…promptly fell in.  I think she was a bit surprised.  I’m not sure what she was expecting.  The water wasn’t very deep where she fell in, so she really only got her legs wet, but I still had to drag her out.  There was a very prominent “no swimming” sign where Yaris fell in.  Granted, it depicted a humanoid figure swimming and not a canine, but again, I wasn’t about to get my park privileges thrown out because Yaris decided to take a dip.

I decided that Yaris wasn’t going to get to see the ducks after that.

Swap: Dog treat edition

I recently participated in a swap in which you traded recipes for dog treats with three other people.  But, the recipe had to be presented on a decorated card.  Here’s what I sent out.

I punched little bones into the side of the card (you can see the postcards I had the in background peeking through) and then doodled over the rest of the card.  The dog saying hi is from Cricut (Paper Pups).

To continue with the theme, I wrote little notes on dog shaped cards that I cut from miscellaneous pieces of scrapbooking paper.  This…ended up being a bit of a problem.  I had to use my larger scraps and one of them was from this project.  You see, with the sickly green background and skulls and crossbones, you might think that I was sending a recipe for poison.  That’s…totally not true.  My dogs are very fond of these biscuits.  They always know when I’m going to make them and you can’t push them out of the kitchen.  Yaris will even go and wait next to the oven while they’re baking.  You can make them for people too.  Just add more honey.

Anyway, I carried my dog theme out all the way to the envelope with dog stickers and Up themed stamps with Dug and Mr. Frederickson featured front and center.

I am thorough.

I’ll update the post with the recipe later as I’m currently gallivanting about in Indiana and I don’t have access to the file. Or you can try making out those decorated cards. I actually sent along non-decorated cards to my swap partners too since the decorated cards were so…decorated.