Meet Bonnie Prince Charlie

Dearest Reader,

Thank you for stopping by. It's been many months since I last posted. A special thanks to all those who left comments or emailed me in my absence. I greatly appreciated the encouragement to return to blogging. After ten years (soon eleven) I was feeling a little burned out. I needed a break from social media, so I took some time for myself.

To be honest, I haven't entirely missed sitting at my computer writing and editing photos. In the late summer and fall, the garden kept me pretty busy. As the days got colder my focus shifted inside. Our quirky, old house is a fixer-upper that still needs work. This fall I tackled several projects– the biggest of which was our front and upstairs hallways.

There are a number of good reasons that I don't write a home decor blog. For one thing, I don't have the proper camera equipment for decent interior shots. More importantly, I am not at all convinced that my offbeat sense of interior decor is something anyone else might aspire to.

The first thing any good interior designer would have recommended is to paint out the dark woodwork in the front hallway. Certainly, it would help give our one-hundred-plus-year-old house a fresh, modern look–but even though I knew it was the tasteful thing to do, I just couldn't bring myself to paint the vintage woodwork (with one exception). Years ago, some mischevious children carved their initials and other crude drawings into the beadboard at the foot of the staircase, so I had to paint it out of necessity. Still, I stopped short of slapping white paint on everything.

By far the biggest part of the hallway renovation were the walls. Rather than remove old wallpaper, some previous owner stuccoed plaster over the paper. Then they painted the walls with a color I'd describe as "mochaccino". Underneath all that beige paint, the stucco was really crude with bumps, lumps and valleys.

To get rid of the entire mess, we would have had to strip the walls back to the studs. The construction is lath and plaster, so it would have been a huge job. Instead I elected to sand the bumps and fill the divots in the plasterwork. Even so, it was a really big job! Imagine, if you will, the clouds of plaster dust that have been a big part of our lives all through the fall!

You may note that I need to do a bit of touchup on the edge of the white paint. The dratted painter's tape ripped away some paint when I tried to remove it.

I painted the walls creamy-white. A darker color might have sat next to the dark woodwork better, but a soft white suited my contemporary artwork nicely.

The work is still ongoing. There is one large wall that needs to be completed. The pine floor and staircase need to be refinished (as evidenced in the photo above) and a runner needs to be installed on the staircase (I'd love to leave the stairs bare, but the dog's claws are really hard on the soft pine). Hopefully, this work can all be completed before the gardening season commences.

In other news, we have a new pup! Meet Charlie (named after the legendary Scottish figure "Bonnie Prince Charlie".

Scrap with Piper when he was just a pup.

About a year ago now, our senior dog Scrap passed away. The loss was hardest on Piper, who was then three years old. Scrap was a mentor and Piper's best friend in the world. Over time we all made adjustments, but daily life never felt quite the same.

Despite the unease, I resolved to stick with just one dog. My husband retires in a year and one pet would make our plans to to travel across Canada so much easier. I'd tell my husband to remind me of this resolve in one breath, and in the other, I'd scroll through online listings for Shetland Sheepdog puppies.

We finally went to see a puppy in the late summer, but something didn't feel right. I didn't like to number of dogs in the house or the size of the kennels. The puppy, in question, was scruffy looking and seemed disinterested in us. So we came home disappointed, but feeling like we had made the right choice.

A month or more passed before then I saw another listing for CKC registered pups in the city where we live. There was just one male pup left in the litter.

Charlie not long after we brought him home.

It was love at first sight when the breeder handed me little prince Charlie. He snuggled his warm little body right into the crock of my neck and fell asleep while we chatted about Shetland Sheepdogs with the breeder. 

A few weeks later we brought Charlie home. 

Every dog has a distinct personality.

Charlie is a quick learner. I don't think we've ever had such an easy time housetraining a puppy. After just two weeks, he had only a couple of accidents. At 18 weeks, Charlie obeys hand/voice commands to sit, lay, jump and rollover. We are still working on "stay".

Charlie taste-testing hostas in November (which thankfully are not poisonous).

As with most puppies, Charlie chews everything! Most worrisome is his fondness for eating vegetation. There are lots of poisonous plants in my garden. Hopefully, it's a phase he grows out of.

If not, I may have to rethink perennials like foxgloves. 

And how is Piper handling the little interloper? 

His excitement for having a new buddy made me glad I had reversed my decision to get a second dog. Piper loves Charlie and Charlie dotes on him. It's cute to see how much Charlie takes all his queues from the older dog.

That's not to say that Charlie doesn't give his elder some attitude. Piper's magnificent tail is looking a bit worse for wear after all the games of tug-of-war.

"Hey, let go of my tail!"

Like a Sumo wrestler, roly-poly Charlie hip-checks Piper and knocks him to the ground. In a wide-open show of teeth, big dog and little pup "gurr" playfully at one another and tumble around. Poor Piper puts up with a lot of love! 

So now you're all caught up on all my news. Thanks again for returning to my blog. I hope to resume regular posts going forward.