A grown-up newf and her favorite toy.

Big Green Monster

Mr. Field Notes indulged me in splurging on a $20 dog toy. It is the size of a basketball and has 8 dangling octopus legs, 2 with squeakers. Its body has another loud, 'farting' noise maker and a rattle. Katy loved it from day one. Now, puppy loves it too and every time Katy wants to play with it so does puppy. Poor Katy has become Yuki's new BFF. But the sentiment is not mutual. Yuki is certainly not Katy's BFF and this is most obvious during big toy play. Katy wants to play rougher than she can with the baby so she approaches her people with the big toys and gets flustered when puppy barges in. Katy does play and do the whole play fight thing with the baby, but Katy really loves to rough house. That's where her nickname the Baroness von Roughenhausen came from. So now Katy can't play with her favorite green monster like she used to. .. just one of the myriad ways Katy's life is changing.

Miniature Newfoundland & The Big, Scary Vacuum Cleaner

From yesterday, a photo of the tiny Newfoundland with her nose buried in the grass. When she's not pulling Max around by the tail, or to trying to start something with big Katy, or faking me out by acting like she's going to kiss my nose and then snatching a chunk of my hair instead — she is rather charming.


She's plagiarized every play out of Katy's book except the chapter on being afraid of loud stuff.

I thought maybe we were going to have a problem with being afraid of loud noises when I got the vacuum out today. She reacted to it exactly like Katy does with all things large and novel. She skirted away, looking back at it with suspicion. To defeat that before it grows into a habit, I took immediate action and did a little 'counter conditioning' using systematic desensitization with her.

The point of systematic desensitization is to introduce gradually more scary things, waiting for signs of relaxation before adding more frightening stimuli. This is a recommended technique for treating phobias.

The systematic desensitization went like so:
I brought her over to the vacuum and sat down with her in my lap, giving her lots of pats and verbal praise. Then I held her paws out to it and made her bat at it, still making all kinds of high pitched googly moogly good puppy sounds. I held the cord out and moved it around to get her attention. I knew she'd think it was a toy, and although I don't want her to chase and chew cords, she has shown an interest in them so I temporarily used that to my advantage.

After she expressed a keen interest in the cord I banged it against the plastic on the vacuum and rubbed it against the corrugated part of the hose. She didn't like that, but I got her to come back using praise and moving the cord around so she could bat it around. The next time, I did the same thing, but quieter.

Then I stood up and moved the vacuum as if I was vacuuming but didn't turn it on. She didn't like that and backed away. So I moved the vacuum backward and away from her and every time she moved forward, I moved the vacuum away from her to make it seem like she was chasing it off. Then I turned it on and continued to do the same thing. She chased it and then got bored and laid down.

Within minutes I was vacuuming right next to her nose.

So, using tried and true principles of behavior modification and learning, in ten minutes I turned a frightened little puppy into a calm one.

I'd love to use this technique with Katy to get her acclimated to strangers, but the number of people who are willing to play guinea pig with a huge, barking dog are vanishingly small. If I could scrounge up some brave volunteers, this plan from the Animal Human Society describes more or less what I'd do. I might have to run some counter conditioning on the volunteers to prep them for their roles, seeing as how they would be frightened of the big black dog!

In any case, given little Yuki's quick learning it will be interesting to see how many trials it takes to get her to learn commands like shake, lie down, back away and give. Katy showed herself to be a star pupil, learning shake in just four trials and the others equally quickly.

Puppy's first swim.

This morning we took Little Miss Intrepid down to the Farmer's Market so she could continue to be exposed to people and loud sounds.

She's already showing signs that she's got a completely different temperament than our other newf. She fearlessly approaches loud and new sounds.

Our older newf cowers behind the fridge if so much as a pin drops. Okay that's an exaggeration, but not much of one!

So that Little Miss Intrepid stays that way, we've decided to drive her to a place with people and sounds everyday so she can get habituated to life in the city.

The Bold One was completely unfazed by the band blaring at the market and everyone who bent down to meet her found themselves walking away trailed by a little Newfoundland.

After about 8 minutes she got cranky - no doubt a combination of being hot, tired and overstimulated - so we drove home but not before stopping at the fountain on campus first — for her first swim.

The pics didn't turn out that well, but I did snap a terrific, melt-your-heart one of her and Mr. Field Notes afterwards.

Puppy's first day home!

Our incredibly tiny 8 week old Newfoundland arrived today at around 1 p.m. She was delivered right to our home, and I carried her in myself. Mr. Field Notes was getting in his usual swim at the lunch hour before heading back to work for a slew of afternoon meetings so he wasn't there for the excitement.

Puppy was perfectly well behaved, curious and followed me around the house everywhere I went. She licked me, gnawed on my pant leg and mewed a lot. She is definitely a squeaker.

Max took the arrival of the puppy remarkably well. Of course, I think it makes all the difference in the world that she is smaller than he is. He sniffed her and laid down by her. It was very sweet. Then, Katy came in. She got excited and very quickly went into bossy intimidation mode. Puppy hid underneath me, under the tables, in any spot she could find. And she was excited too — to play. But Katy didn't like that and put her paw down on the puppy's back who squealed. Eventually I got Katy to calm down, but she still produced copious amounts of drool. I mean - serious drowned in it pools of drool. I take it that was because she was anxious.

After a while I took the puppy outside so she could hopefully pee (which she had already done once inside on an easy to wash cloth). But all puppy wanted to do was wreck through the garden and lie underneath the lily leaves. She crashed through the largest of my snapdragon plants, tearing it in two so I brought the torn off stems with flowers inside and put them in a vase.

Puppy played in the sprinkler and got good and dirty so she got a good toweling off inside, accompanied by tick removal. She had a little tick lodged into her brow.

Then we drove downtown where she went inside a couple of businesses, met up with Mr. Field Notes and had our picture taken for the stores' bulletin boards. She also got her first collar.

All in all it was a pretty smooth introduction. She's asleep in the kitchen now.

We're thinking we are going to call her Yuki.

Name the Newf Contest

Welcome to the Name the Newf Contest!

I'm sponsoring this contest to generate names - and hopefully a winning one - for our new Newfoundland puppy. The person who suggest the name that sticks and becomes her name will win an item from my etsy store. You can choose anything under $20.

The contest ends when we've chosen our puppy's name.


** Participate as many times as you like, but please only once per day. A serious name that befits a large, dignified individual is most likely to stick. She may be small now, but in a few months, she'll be 100lb behemoth! Remember leave a way for me to contact you if you win.

New PUPPY!

Yesterday we got to meet our new baby!

At 12 pounds, she was just a ball of black fluff.

She is one of a litter of 9 Newfies that are almost all the black and white Landseer variety.





The newfie pups are from the same mom and dad our other newf is from. There were only 2 black girls born, so we had our pick of the two.

I chose the more sociable of the two who also happened to be the bigger one. She's got two white toes, just like her big sister!

We don't have a name yet so we're looking for suggestions! I am thinking of having a 'name the newf' contest if we can't come up with anything. It just has to sound good with Katy and be something that can be easily called and have good nicknames.

Really, we could have had the 'pick of the litter' who I think was this Landseer male with an all black head. He was super affectionate and stuck to my side practically the whole time. Whenever I felt someone licking my hand or nibbling at my ankles, it was him. But, we decided black *and* white hair would just be too much. He sure is a cute little man though! His expression reminded me so much of Max. His name would have been Sailor, I think. Or, Bruno.

Our little fluff ball will stay living at the farm she was born at for 3 more weeks, then we get to take her home sometime around the 4th of July. She'll have some vet visits and get vaccinated and de-wormed and all that good stuff.


While visiting Katy's canine family we discovered she is a lot taller than both her parents. She makes her 'old man' 12-year-old Bruin look small! Stilts. That's her new nickname. Or, little horse. The first thing Bruin wanted to do when he met Katy was clean her ears. She didn't want to have anything to do with that though. Her nose wrinkled up and she growled at him. Yep, she wanted to bite her old man for trying to clean her ears — something she does to Max nearly everyday. The biting part - and the ear cleaning. Her ears get a funk about them, so it certainly would be nice if she came around to the idea of letting her little sister lick her ears. Without a doubt she will be licking little sister's ears!

Katy had a grand time running around the farm and finding out what puppies are. She was very good around them, if not a little bored by them.

Meeting Little Sister

Our Baby Newfoundland... who needs a name!

Just Lay Me in My Grave Now!

That must have been Max's thought last night when he climbed into the dirt of the freshly built planter bed to take a nap.

We've been giving him more unsupervised outdoor time now that the backyard is completely fenced off. Usually he wanders around seemingly aimlessly for hours but lately he's been napping outside. He's slept next to the lavender, on the deck, and now — the planter bed.

He looked so cute and peaceful that I really couldn't groan about the seeds that I laid down that were now inevitably in his fur. He just looked so sweet and so unlike the curmudgeonly old man who has given us a headache with his almost complete inability to do his business outside rather than the living room carpet even though he gets to go outside and spend hours out there everyday now.

I'm a little worried about how he'll cope with the addition of another dog. Will it be enough to send him over the edge? Mr. Field Notes and I joke about how he's bound to try to throw himself into traffic, off a bridge or whatever other means to end his misery he musters up. For now, he's just practicing at pushing up daisies.

Weekend Gardening

My dream is to create a Japanese garden in my backyard someday. It would have to contain wisteria. If I started now, with a plan, in several years time it could be awesome.

The thing is, I am not much of a planner anymore. In my 20s I had everything planned. I new exactly what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it and kept lists and deadlines. Now I rarely do that. Flexibility is what works. I still have goals, but I am not so rigid about when and what I'll do. Perhaps I've just grown impatient with age. I want to see immediate results! That's why this Japanese garden dream may end up just being hodge podge of what worked at the time - and more realistically - what I had money for at the time. Add the fact that I really like flowers and they are not the main feature of Japanese gardens - at least not from what I've seen.

My weekend gardening saw me uprooting lunaria to transplant to the front yard - at the front of the house to hide the ugly foundation. I had hollyhocks growing there the last two years but decided I like lunaria more. Hopefully the transplants will survive.

I also uprooted a lavender plant I grew from seed. It was doing really well until the lavender it was near engulfed it, crowding it out of sunlight and room to grow (must have felt like Max in Katy's shadow). So, I moved it to a new location. I think I may have done quite a bit of damage to its roots when I moved it. It's wilted now and just looks awful.

Mr. Field Notes expanded my planter bed to 3 times its original size so I took advantage of the extra space to plant seeds for some veggies and more flowers. I'm really hoping I can get the columbine to take off. They are such a pretty plant and I've seen quite a few of them growing in our neighborhood. That will be the last of the flowers I need to grow to use the seeds from in my shop - all the others I harvest myself from plants I grow. It's just the columbine left, then ALL of my cards will have seeds from my own garden. Lots of people sell plantable cards, but so far as I know, I am the only one who grows the plants and harvests the seeds from them.

Next on the list is getting the wisteria and loofa started!

It's not shaping up to be a very Japanese garden...

Plantable biz cards turned out beautifully!

One of the wonderful aspects of etsy.com is that they've made it possible to request - and fulfill - custom orders. This has been a huge boon to clients who love the idea of making their biz cards, tags and customer appreciation or other promotional gifts out of plantable paper. For many, it's the first they've heard of the concept.

Although I've made custom plantable papers before, the most recent one turned out really, really well. I made the paper base out of completely recycled paper - newspaper page proofs - for a creamy white color. I added wildflower seeds plus flower petals and bits of metallic and mohair yarn scraps from Mr. Field Notes' weaving. Adding the petals and yarn bits increases the time it takes to make each sheet, but I think the effect it achieves is worth it.
The Pretty Peacock can be visited here.

Three week update and Newf News!

Now that things are slowing down a bit I've had time to create some new cards. Rather than pressing flowers or leaves into cards, I decided to print images on the paper I make. Fortunately it soaks up the ink really well. I really like how they've turned out and am busy at work on some completely new images.

In other news, I was asked to review a manuscript for publication. Finally I get to use my PhD for something directly relevant! I am a little curious how it came to be that I was asked to review a paper instead of the hundreds or so other PhDs out there who are far better known. In truth, it feels great to be asked to provide an expert opinion on the quality of a piece of research. My non-academic day job certainly doesn't offer much of what would pass as respect. That is one of the things about academia that I took for granted. Pretty much everyone respects everyone else at some level. Being asked to review a manuscript means someone respects my opinion. Lately that feels like a refreshing drink after walking through a desert.

I've got to get as much done as I can in the next 6 weeks because we are expecting! A puppy. In a few weeks we'll be going to visit the family Katy came from so we can pick out the puppy we like. They have 2 black females. She won't be able to come home with us until she's 8 weeks old. I know it will be a ton of work. It's happening earlier than we'd like. I wanted to have one arrive sometime in October when the weather is cooler, but the female became pregnant earlier than everyone anticipated (thanks to a very eager male) so she'll be coming home sometime around the 4th of July. Katy will have a little sister who really is her sister! She'll be coming with us to meet the puppies too. I think it will be fun to see her doggy family. I wonder what she'll think of so many newfies! She seems to recognize them when she seems them, or just goes bananas over big shaggy black dogs that drool a lot. Either way, it will be a riot I'm sure.

She is the inspiration for one of the new cards I'm creating. And maybe just maybe one of these days I'll have time to draw some more monkeys. But for now, I'm hoping these will be the catch of the day for Father's Day.

For the love of - Lunaria

Last year I planted a bunch of lunaria seeds from plants I found growing by the railroad tracks that run through town. I didn't even know what the plant was called at the time; I just loved the seed pods.

Lunaria is also called the "money plant" because the seed pods look like silver dollars. It's a fragrant plant that produces big bunches of purple flowers and unique seed pods that look like silver dollars. They grow to about 4 feet high and produce big wide leaves that are perfect for hiding an ugly foundation. They grow well in partly sunny locations and are perennials so they produce flowers in the second year.

This year the lunaria I planted last year took off! I will be planting more of them for sure.

I pressed some into the paper I make and embedded seeds from the plants into the pulp. They can be planted just like my other cards.

As usual, I had a newfie helper during the photo shoot. She loves hanging out outside on cool, breezy days.

I scored one of the REAL 'treasuries.'

It was just luck, I suppose. When I need a break from editing stories, I go see what's happening at etsy. Today I noticed someone alerted everyone that an opportunity to make one of these things called a 'treasury' was about to open up.

Members of etsy, the online company I sell my artwork through, can compose collections of other etsy member's artwork. The collections are called "treasuries" and are basically a 3 item x 4 item poster style collection of thumbnail images of listings on etsy.

The etsy website's front page displays a treasury and they are rotated throughout the day so fresh ones are always available for viewing pleasure. The best ones are themselves a work of art.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the one I got to make is a work of art or anything, but it is pretty, and I did it on the fly while trying to do about 6 other things at the same time. All of the pieces are available for purchase - including that scarf in the middle on the bottom row!

Earth Day - Photos

It must have been wishful thinking to plan a blog post for every day this week. As soon as I get home from one job, I've got to turn into business woman - answering emails about custom orders, arranging large orders, wholesale orders, packaging up orders, printing out labels, re-ordering mailing envelopes for mailing out orders and packaging wholesale orders. It's a lot of damn work. And that's not to mention photographing a new product I'm launching - tree free paper.

I spent about an hour of Earth Day actually outside. I planted some seeds, but mostly I was out taking pics and providing entertainment for my furry four-legged helper.

She made 'friends' with a squirrel who must have a nest in our plum tree. They chattered at each other for a while, and when the squirrel ran off after barking excitedly at Katy, she squealed in excited-frustration-disappointment... arrrrroooorahhhhhooooh she yelped.


Then she flopped down at my feet and waited patiently for me to finish, getting up every so often to sniff my face and give kisses. She was so well-behaved, and cute, that I couldn't help but take some snapshots of her newfyness.

I photographed a set of "Herb Garden in a Card" using mint and rosemary plants growing in a pot. It was a very fragrant photo shoot.

It even attracted the attention of the canine authority. I accidentally broke a piece of mint off, so I held it out to her. She sniffed it skeptically then turned her nose up at it. So I ate it. Yum!! Fresh breath. I should have gone inside to give it to Bad Breath Max, but offered a second piece to Katy who promptly gobbled it up. Hopefully she won't decide to help herself to it any time she feels like it now!

It was pretty cute how it all went down. Blech! I'm not eating that. Not not not. Gross. Oh..... so you're eating it? Well.... where's mine?

Stinker.


So, that's what I did for Earth Day - work work work and more work. A little yard time, hanging out with the newf, eating mint.

... pssst ... The herb cards are available in my etsy store now. They can be used to grow basil, oregano, mint, rosemary, lavender and chives.

11 day blog vacation over!

In case you couldn't guess, I disappeared into blog oblivion because of the incredible free advertising my little store received. I have just now begun to come out the other side of it, which means two things:
* sales have tapered back to slightly above normal
* I have enough time to blog again

While I'd love to write something thought-provoking here tonight, I'm just going to give you an 'advance' of posts I have planned for the upcoming week:
* Earth Day
* hamadryas baboons and the FLDS scene
* making a fake entrails dog toy - good, clean, fun evisceration
* shooting at the gun range

That should be a pretty good week!

Boing! Boing!

My plantable handmade lavender cards got featured on an insanely popular blog sometime early this morning. I woke to a nearly cleaned out store. ALL of my plantable cards had sold out. I found out I got featured on the blog when I logged on to the etsy forums to ask whether people had seen them anywhere. It didn't take long at all for someone to provide a link to the website that gave me a TON of absolutely FREE advertising at boingboing.net, a "directory of wonderful things."


Wonderful, indeed.

The exposure got me several wholesale inquiries plus a really, really exciting one from a company based just over the mountains. The want me to create 1,000 cards for them to distribute at a trade show. I even get to keep my biz info on the reverse of the cards. I cannot imagine having 1,000 of these cards out there in the world. You can't buy that kind of advertising! Next thing you know, Al Gore will be knocking on my door.

It wasn't all rosey over at boingboing. Being a blog that allows comments t be posted means people from all over can comment on my cards. Well, some of them thought I am an environmental EVIL-doer. I even got lumped into the same crowd as Big Tobacco at one point because evidently American Spirits cigarettes distributed something like this. And no - their paper didn't have tobacco seeds in it!

This is by far the best negative comment:


But this one had my coworkers (at my other job) wonder what I was laughing about:
"Lighten up FNARF. Sheesh. OK so we have to avoid invasive species, but you combined evil Big Tobacco, ecological catastrophe, cheap gimmickry and empty-headed liberal tree-hugging do-gooderism into the simple act of sending a card and planting a seed. It's not like we're sending cards with atomic zombie boll weevil eggs.

Although now that I think about it, that would make Mother Earth so very happy...."

I particularly enjoyed the empty headed liberalism bit and the atomic zombie boll weevils.

Oh, and someone else chimed in and said "I hate to be a party pooper because I adore this type of stuff, but I have never gotten paper-seeds to germinate. And I'm a farmer, so I kind of know what I'm doing."

.... emphasis on KIND OF.

I suppose the 30 plus seedlings coming out of paper I made are just my imagination.

You can read all of the boingboing comments if you click the photo and scroll down.