BUMMER!

We had hoped we would be doing a happy dance today, instead we're blowing raspberries! Back in July, we did a post on David Tant (breeder of fighting dogs) who was requesting parole.  Sad to say, he received parole yesterday after serving less than 6 years of his 30-year sentence, which had been reduced from an original 40-year sentence.  We're bummed!  Especially after all the signatures on the petition - 7000 signatures collected AGAINST parole and only 24 in favor of parole.  I guess our signatures had no influence on the the people making the decision :(

If you want to read more, here are links to a couple of articles today: 

http://www.southcarolinaradionetwork.com/2010/09/09/attorney-says-tant-already-served-longer-than-any-other-dog-breedersaudio/
http://www.wtoc.com/Global/story.asp?S=13116499
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/08/3014831/dogfighting-kingpin-is-paroled.html


Now -

Okay.  Well.  Since this can't be undone (we guess?), we want to leave you with some happy thoughts and images, so here you go:

Luna's back! and Pip's modeling costumes for us!  Go get your smile on :)

PeeS - Smiley faces courtesy of http://www.bestofweb.com/ - we can't figure out how to make a link to the image.

The Road Dogs

Ghost Town - What Ghost Town???

We never did find that elusive ghost town on that long and winding (and bumpy) road, even after going at it from both ways!  Apparently, the "supposed" ghost town is now a part of private property - meaning roustabouts like us can't go see it.  Whatever.  This isn't where the ghost town was, but we liked this gate.  Bears must live behind it 'cause there's bear totems outside it, right?

Private property + Cool Gate = Keep Out!

Potential rock slide?  These rocks were pretty scary, but they were nothing compared to what we saw on the road in front of us a few minutes later.  We were so nervous, we didn't even get a picture of it!  What was it, you ask?  A guy in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road and aimed a shotgun out his window into the mountains and tried to shoot a deer!  We just didn't think it was very sporting of him to not even get out of his truck!  But since he had a gun and we didn't, we thought it best not to point a camera at him, especially since he wasn't playing by the rules!

More random pics for your viewing pleasure or boredom, whichever works for you. Our version of "almost Wordless Wednesday" - starting now, not another word. 

The Road Dogs

Celebrating Our Strangeness

Oh, wow, we've been honored with a really cool and funky award for our strangeness by Those Elgin Pugs, who, BTW, crack us up every time we read at their blog and look at those pics. Those dudes (um, ladies and dude) will do anything for a laugh - check out their poetry chops on Puddles post here (look in the comments)! Oh, yeah, they're strange! We don't think we could possibly compete with their strangeness, but still - we'll do our best.

Now you must go forth and celebrate the strangeness of friends (and strangers - strangers are always allowed) by nominating blogs run by strange folk. *Beware, some people don't like you to refer to them as strange…Try to avoid them if possible."

Of course, as with any award, there are some rules:

1. Add the logo of the award to your blog post - CHECK

2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you (don't mess with strange people) - CHECK (see above). But, we're gonna do it again here 'cause we don't want to be messin' with strange people (or dogs).

3. Nominate seven other blogs telling us why you think the recipient is strange enough to deserve the award.

We consider being called "strange" a very complimentary thing. We take it to mean "interesting" - in a good way.  So, we hope all our nominees feel the same way and take our "strange" comments in the good-natured way it is intended.


We have to say that we would have put Puddles first on the list, and we think everyone would agree, but she just received this award, so she has been duly recognized for her interesting strangeness!
1 - First up - Frankie Furter - Um, do we need to explain this - the dude married TWO girls! As confirmed bachelors and bachelorettes, we think this is strange indeed! Plus, he just cracks us up!

2 -  The Blablabs - check out their video Get Pet 101 and you'll see what we mean.

3 - I Still Want More Puppies because of the strange fascination with space, like this, for example - whatever "space" is. We only know what OUR space is, and we don't like it to be invaded!

4 - Two Pitties in the City - Ms. M + tutu = need we say more?  We love it!

5 - Hound Girl - Haylie and Fred, a fabulously strange couple - in the best possible way.

6 - Miley - A Curious Cavorting Cavoodle - now that's wonderfully strange, dontcha think?

7 - Pei Days - A beautiful Shar Pei named "Lola" - how exotically strange!  We love how she signs everything "Me, Lola." 

4. Leave a message for those nominated on their blogs.  Okay, we plan to do this immediately, if not sooner.  However, as we've admitted, our sense of time is very fluid.

5. And, if you email catephoenix(at)gmail(dot)com and tell her you've received the award for your strangeness, she'll enter you in the biggest kick-ass Strange Men competition ever. Details over at http://www.strangemeninpinstripesuits.com/ (click on the award link on the home page). We visited this website and, yeah, it's STRANGE all right, and a little scary. We might have to leave a light on tonight.

The Road Dogs (off to celebrate strangeness everywhere)

Oh, Wow - Awards - For US???

We’ve been honored over the last week with awards by a several of our blogging furiends – Prudence at Cow Tails and Chew Toys, Pibble at Scratch My Belly , Pup Fan at I Still Want More Puppies , and Lisa at Heartprints Pets, Jes at How I Lost My Sanity, Miley at Curious Cavorting Cavoodle and Emerald at The Blab Labs.  And we want to thank all of them them for choosing us for this honor! We are a bit overwhelmed by the generosity of our blogging furiends! At first we had some of Pip’s insecurities and spent several days agonizing – Are we worthy? Do we really deserve these awards? What if we do something to disappoint?  Did we get all these links right?


Then we thought – what a great opportunity to tell ALL our blogging furiends THANKS! Not just for reading our blog, but for writing yours, too!

You see, when we first had the idea to write this blog, it was just to chronicle this one particular adventure. We had no idea there were so many animal blogs out there. Guess we’ve been too busy playing and eating and stuff to notice. But thanks to Life With Dogs and the Saturday Blog Hop, we found all of you. We’ve been inspired, entertained, touched and informed by reading ALL of your blogs. And, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets – don’t you just love that movie? Little Verdel is just the cutest thing! What? Oh, yeah, paraphrasing Jack Nicholson – You make us want to be a better blog! We think you are biggest bunch of creative, funny, smart and generous people and animals we’ve ever met!

As we humbly perform our award duties, we just wanna say we are honored to be in your company!

So, here’s a few things you might not know about us.

1 - This isn’t our first road trip! No sir. We’ve been traveling since we came to live with our parents. And that’s because -

2- We didn’t always live together full time. Mom and Dad lived in different parts of the country once upon a time (some of us lived with Mom and some with Dad) and we’ve traveled through many states to see each other, mostly in automobiles, but some of us have done a bit of flying! But we never really wrote about our travels, or even took many pictures of what and who we saw, what we did, the motels we snuck into, the places we pooped, the trees we sniffed and peed.

3 - This was our first trip with the food hauler.

4 – This was our first trip that lasted more than a week.

5– Not too long ago, we also had three German Shepherd brothers - Dusty, Jake and Jett. Over the past few years, they have gone over the Bridge and we miss them terribly.

6 – This is our first trip without them  and we were sad not to have them with us. You might notice there are eight dogs on our logo – we couldn’t bear to think of a trip without the big guys, so we had the logo made, including them of course, and plastered it on the food hauler and the truck and carried their photos with us. Obviously, not the same, but it made us feel better to have their smiling faces with us! They sure loved the road trips. Of course, they are always in our hearts and thoughts, but we miss them so!

7 – We have a very fluid sense of time - in case you hadn't noticed :)

We’re more than thrilled that you stop by and visit and hopefully are entertained on occasion. We’re entertained by all of your blogs, for sure!

Now, we’re gonna take another page from Pip’s blogging manual and offer up this award to ALL our blogging furiends. There are too many to mention individually and we have way too many favorites – all of YOU!

The Road Dogs (tails waggin' cause we found all of you)

Happy Wedding Day to Frankie, Ruby & Penny

It's blog hop Saturday, but we can't think of anything besides the wedding of the century!  Of course, we're talking about Frankie, Ruby & Penny's upcoming nuptials - with bad girl Puddles officiating.  "What Puddles has joined together - let no dog get in the middle of" - or something like that.  Anyway, we're looking forward to the festivities and hope there's lot of cake!  Like this -

Here's to you - Frankie, Ruby & Penny!

Cheers!

The Road Dogs

Molly of Pony Antiques

You may remember from a post last week that while we were searching for a real ghost town in Montana, we kind of ran out of road.  Not ones to give up that easily just because we (meaning Dad) can't read a map correctly, we decided to try to get to the top of that hill and find that ghost town from the other direction.  So off we went . . .

Have we mentioned that we (and Mom and Dad) are easily distracted by shiny objects, food and an assortment of other things?   We had to drive through a little town called "Pony" (isn't that just too adorable?) to get to the other end of that elusive road.  We love little towns, especially the ones that have just one main road running through the middle.  They're usually not that crowded, which suits us just fine, and they usually have a grassy place to stop and play.  And if Mom and Dad want to go in some shop that doesn't allow dogs, they can keep an eye on us from anywhere while we wait patiently in the car and bark "hello" at other dogs we see.  And weird statues!

Mom and Dad like to sniff around antique shops sometimes. They’re not professional antiquers (although they are antiques themselves – BOL!) and they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. But, they’re always hoping to come away with some goofy treasure that might land them on the Antiques Roadshow and make them millionaires. So far, all they’ve gotten are some goofy treasures that probably aren’t worth what they paid for them. But, they have some fun so we let ‘em do it.

Anyway, they found Pony Antiques and figured this was probably the place where their undiscovered million dollar treasure waited.  Ummm, NOT!  They came back with some old silver buttons made from coins and a, um, pickle fork?!

But, they did meet a cutie pie named Molly that was helping her folks run the shop and being the official "greeter."  She graciously posed for several photos, but she was a dog of few words and didn't have time for an interview because of her shop duties and we didn't have time to wait around for her snack/potty break.  Daylight was awastin' and we had ghost towns to find.

Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure are the many faces of Molly -

How's this?  Is this my best side?

No, wait, I had my mouth open.

How's this side?  Do I look dark and mysterious?

Hmmm, wonder what's for dinner tonight?

And that's what I think of squirrels and baths!

Sorry Mom, didn't see you there.

Okay, enough with the picture taking. Now scram!

The Road Dogs (we can take a hint)

Here's the Plan . . .

Here's what we have planned for Mom and Dad today -

What do you have planned today?  Oh, yeah, other than blog hopping!

The Road Dogs