Kell Shelties Blog

I needed to take a few quick snapshots of Eliza, the little tri Will x Giada daughter I need to find a companion home for. Again, the plan is I lie down in the grass and wait for the right shot and hope I’m quick enough to catch it. I can’t really walk around or do much, so it was all on Eliza to strike a few favorable poses and leave off being 100% goofy long enough to allow an in-focus shot.

I captured a couple that I feel show her character, example below.

After my video experiment the other day with Luke, I thought I would give it a shot for Eliza. I couldn’t figure out how to make it focus at all – she was a blurry ball of fuzz. Good idea, but I couldn’t make it work.

The kids were inside with Daddy, and I was only going to be out for a couple minutes. While I was trying to get the still camera to focus on the bouncing Eliza, there was an eruption of protest barking from the dogs in the yard - but about what? A few minutes later Soriya comes barreling towards me calling “momma!”.

Our daughter figured out how to open the front door to the house – oh no!

It wasn’t until later when I was looking at the video of Eliza that I saw, during the protest coming from the adult dogs in the yard, that her great escape had been captured, albeit somewhat blurry, for posterity.  You have to watch closely - you’ll see an impossibly tiny human being running in the far off background towards the large show van parked in front of the house. And you can clearly hear all the protest coming from the dogs standing in the yard – they know Soriya isn’t supposed to be running out of the house unattended!

Taking puppy pictures will never be the same.

I cut it just to that moment, and then cut it to the moment she came hurtling towards me -

Soriya’s Great Escape

It has been overcast and raining off and on all day today. It is amazing how quickly all the grass is greening up – and this means Mr. Massey is going to have to break out the lawnmower, do an oil change and get mowing here in the next week or so.

The dogs have been enjoying getting to stretch their legs across the 2 acres of fenced area behind the house and kennel during some of the sunnier days. But there is such a balance this time of year between allowing the herd to gallop across the flowing green grass and preventing the backyard from becoming nothing but rolling hills of mud.

We’ve decided our Ch. “Will” x Odyssey Kell Giada puppies are part bouncy ball. With the on again, off again rain they have spent a little more time here in the front room in the puppy pen then they are used to and they get soooo excited whenever it looks like play might be about to happen that they pogo-stick bounce up and down in their puppy pen.

The smallest tri girl in that litter is absolutely adorable, and she knows she is adorable. And she LOVES the kids. Too bad she is going to be a little girl as she really does have that loving, sunshine -to-all outlook on life we so treasure in our dogs. The little biblack boy, Rowdy, goes to his new home in Oklahoma this weekend, and we’re  keeping our little tri girl Lolo for show. Hopefully we’ll be able to do some pictures of her in the coming weeks. She is everything we hoped for from this breeding – and she is non-white factored! Hooray for small favors!

We’re watching a non-white factored biblue  boy and non-white factored biblue girl in our Tsuki x Cecily daughter litter that look quite nice for show, but we won’t end up keeping either one because we are keeping Lolo. With the very tight pedigree and the consistency in type, they will be useful and hopefully valuable for somebody else’s show program…if their early promise continues to hold!

Another visit with the perinatologist tomorrow and I forgot to arrange rides to the appointment. Better get on that…

We had an inquiry on one of the available puppies that requested a video of the puppy.  I promised I would try to get a video and send it today.

This was interesting to manuever from the bed-rest prone position, but I did manage a search for my husband’s video camera. Easily found. After another little while to rest, I searched for the cord to connect the video camera to the computer. No dice. I don’t know where he keeps these things.

My new digital camera has a video feature, and I know I can just pop the card out of it and put it in the computer which means no cord to search and destroy.  I picked up the camera, thinking this would be a quick-kill from my to-do list, and headed to the front yard.

I laid in the grass in front of my house while mom watched the toddlers and Abby walked around with Luke, the puppy.  The focus feature for the video function was odd and the puppy kept popping in and out of focus. I still had on one of my telephoto lenses, which meant Luke needed to be about five feet away or more in order to be far enough away to be in focus. Then there was Soriya’s insistence on bringing Luke back to Abby – repeatedly. (My child herds!)

After I took about 6 minutes of video I headed back into the house to hopefully upload the video and send it by email to the interested party. While reluctant to leave the sunny and 80 degree plus yard for the confines of bed and computer, I had promised video today and wanted to cross it off my list.

The file was 500 mbs plus! Oh, no, this I cannot send by email.  I spent the next three or four hours looking for editing software, some way to convert the .mov file to some smaller file format, trying to figure out how to cut out wild shots of the sky and the side of the house, etc . In the end I found a freeware program (albeit one that splashes some kind of disclaimer across the center of the screen) that allowed me to do some very basic cutting, compressing, and converting. I created a YouTube account, uploaded the video and sent the link.

Six plus hours later, mission accomplished.

The result? 30 seconds of video, somewhat blurry, of a blue fluffball bouncing around the front yard. I do so hope I get better at this.

Luke

Today, a short note. Years and years we’ve been breeding. We’ve finished lots of dogs for ourselves, for others. But in this breed our National is the summit on the mountain. Big wins at the National are a big deal.

And we rarely miss a National.  At least my mom is always there. I actually am having a hard time thinking of the last National we missed. 

This year we miss the National and we have the best National yet. There were 5 dogs in Tuscon we either owned or bred. One placed in her class, one did not place in her class (but looked really good!), one won her class and was Winner’s Bitch/Best of Winners, and two got Award of Merits.

Granted, these things would not have happened without the hard work of others.  But still, man oh man.  Now we’ll have to try to BE THERE to see something like this happen. That would be outstanding…

Our little Ch. Kell ILU Infinity daughter had her puppies yesterday – she is a trifactored sable girl and she was bred to Odyssey Kell Fit To Be Tied (after following the link, scroll down to see “Roper”. With this new site I haven’t yet figured out how to do anything fancy like targets, and I haven’t made individual pages yet…). 

Each individual puppy should have had a 50/50 chance of being sable, but we got three tricolors. We just like our black Shelties, I guess! All three are doing well. We’ll put pictures up when they are a little bigger and look more like puppies and less like little mice…

We are repeating the breeding that produced Kell Personality (WB/BW ASSA 2010) and Kell Sugartime (1st in 12-18 AOC at ASSA 2009). This is probably the last breeding for momma Cecily; she isn’t getting any younger. Her Ch. daughter by Ch. Okies Smokin Gun ROM is being bred to Will, too, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that we get some same degree of the quality we got with Personality and Sugartime. Wishful thinking?

Today was the first Easter egg hunt for my first set of twins, Sawyer and Soriya. They are almost 19 months old … it was quite funny to see the different tactics employed. Soriya was very fast and quite keen to get every egg into her basket as quicky as possible where Sawyer would pick up and examine each egg…

Happy Saturday!

We finally bought our domain name – for a long time it was locked and owned by some domain name reseller and we weren’t going to touch it…but it finally shook loose and we dove in.

So welcome to our redesigned site — we are working on a permanent design solution that will be launched in August – meanwhile we’re making this design work as best we can.

We are home this weekend – no shows. But we’re busy anyway – one visiting girl is going back home to Omaha today and another visitor is coming to stay for 10 days or so.

Our trifactored sable Ch. Kell ILU Infinity daughter is currently whelping her litter – keeping our fingers crossed for some spectacular tri-factored sable male…

And me – on bedrest. Hoping for another couple of weeks; we’re at 33 weeks and 4 days with twins, so we’re in pretty good shape, really.