I had the utmost pleasure of grooming Zivah today.  The beautiful retired Samoyed show dog who belongs to the lovely and talented Rachel Barkman, who does dog photography.  She does human photography as well, which I must say I quite like and you can go check out her website here: Rachel Barkman Photography. 

Rachel gave me a mini session with Yukon and Akira before Zivah's grooming this morning, (even threw one of 'Puppy" in there), just a quick 30 minutes, and look what she gave me, priceless treasures.

There are a lot of photographers out there, and I have a very critical eye when it comes to photos.  I have to say, she is really good!  A great photo captures light, personality, composition, balance and I'm sure other and more technical stuff that I don't know about, but put it all together right and you get a magical moment that you just want to keep looking at.  It is art. That is a good photo.  That is what I see in Rachel's photos.  So thank you Rachel, you made me very happy today!

Happy Tails!!

So, Wow!  When I decided to give away a free grooming in a contest, I did not think I would end up doing an 8 hour grooming!  Well, you know you love your job when it doesn't bother you to do it for free :D  Our winner, Sarge, is a Golden Doodle, 10 months old and an outstanding boy.  My Yukon should have been taking notes!

You see all that fur? It was aaaaalll matted.  This is something that happens to a lot of people.  You have a cute fluffy puppy, with that fine puppy hair, and it is so adorable!  Then around 10-12 months old the fine puppy hair starts to be replaced with adult fur, and it seems like over night, your dog is one solid mat.  I recommend having any long haired fur baby at least bathed and brushed once a month, and groomed every 6-8 weeks.  This is also important to keep them familiar with the grooming process as they go through critical emotional developement in their first year.

Sarge had waaaay too much coat for me to try and bath and then dry, so I started by brushing him out.  I got about 65% of the mats out here, then moved on to bathing, and more dematting in the tub with cream rinse.  If Sarge's mom had had to pay for this, it would have been $100 just for the dematting alone.  His regular grooming rate (for a long scissor cut) is $100.  So lucky, she won a $200 grooming!

It's never a sure thing when a dog is really matted that it can be brushed out, but Sarge was such a good boy, tolerating all the brushing and tugging like a true champ, that he made it possible.  If it had stressed him out, I would have recommended clipping him short and just starting over.

Can you believe that that little bit of wet fur could fluff up so much!! Still more mats to brush out. *Sigh

Okay, are you ready??? Here are the afters photos!  His face is trimmed short this time because he has had surgery on his inverted eyelids (you can see the intravenous site shaved on his front leg).  Isn't he handsome?? Such a good looking boy!  Looks and a great personality, he sure has a lucky momma :)

Here's his before and after side by side:

It was a pleasure to spend my day with you Sarge, Happy Tails to you and your family!
~Miriam

Some nice words from my step-mom, who taught me how to groom:

This is her grooming studio in Abbotsford: Danielle's Dog Grooming Studio
and her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/daniellesgrooming

At the drive in!  We haven't been on a movie date together in.....well a long time.  It is great fun, especially for Puppy, who stayed up the whole time until 2 in the morning!

They were playing 'The Heat', a show about two women officers, one an FBI agent and the other a detective, and oh I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.  I loved it.

The second movie was 'Wolverine'.  It's set in Japan, and I always love movies set in Japan.  I have been studying Japanese for the past five years, and even though I still can't speak it, or understand most of it, it has stopped being a 'foriegn' language to me.  My vocabulary is just very small.

You know the classic train fight scene in movies?  You know the one, where the good guy fights the bad guy on the roof of a moving train?  Well this movie steps it up a notch, they are on the roof of a bullet train!  The scene was really well done, quite entertaining.

Yukon is still growing, he is just almost 7 months old, and he doesn't realize he's not still the tiny puppy that he used to be.  He is always climbing up in the front and onto our laps!  So we have a nice roomy mini-van, and here we have two adults, a toddler, one small dog and one fairly larger dog all watching the movie from the front seats :D  Happy Tails!

Browsing through the web on a dog related search, I came across this great magazine, City Dog Magazine -Seattle.  The are planning to expand to more cities soon, I hope they will come to Vancouver.

They have a dog lovers social community where you can make a profile and share, make friends etc.  Like Facebook but just for dog lovers.  I like it!

One of the articles this month is on camping with dogs.  Most of the places are in the States, but they do mention Cultus Lake, and places in Oregon which isn't too far to go.

It can be challenging to find a dog friendly place to camp.  Sure you can have your dog at your campsite, but are they allowed on the beach?  It's good to know places that have more to offer your dog.  Maybe I'll camp at Cultus now, I haven't before.

Really, there are lots of more remote places that are great for camping with dogs, which is the kind of camping I usually prefer.  The more remote the better.  With four kids now though, safety is a factor, so somewhere close by might just be the way to keep us outdoors :)

Really I wish I had four arms sometimes, it would have been 'handy', (okay *groan*) today for picture taking.  Then you could have seen the exemplary groomer's dog having a bath and being blow dried. (eye roll, read sarcasm)

I really can't hold it against him, he is just a baby still, and it's my fault for not giving him a bath in the last... I can't remember when.

The water was scary, the yipping and howling told.  The table was impending doom, said the shaky legs, and the dryer was for sure mother's evil side coming to get him.  My heart went out to him, and lots of reassuring words, hugs, kisses, cuddles, and more kisses had him sitting still by the end of it and he even let me blow dry his ears!  This kind of accomplishment always makes me soo happy.  I really didn't need to dry him, the weather has been so hot, but it was a matter of getting him used to the noise and a bit of an exercise in trust.

When I say dogs are family members and I treat all dogs as if they were my own, this is what I mean.  I would lavish as much patience, love and reassurance to any and every dog on my table. I am just as proud and happy when I see the dog settling down and trusting me, allowing me to do things like blow dry ears, use clippers on their face and scissor in front of their eyes.

These truly are Happy Tails!