Merrylog

If yer Irish (or just Irish for a day, like the pug), we wish you a happy St. Patrick’s Day. The pug will even get a taste of the Irish treats gracing our table tonight – colcannon and pork chops. However, the chocolate Guiness cupcakes with Baileys cream cheese frosting will be strictly off limits. ;)

She is so cute when she howls in the middle of playtime – even cuter when her ears fly up like that. Merry, silly pug, you’re such fun to play with. :)

Nine and a half years later, the pug head tilt still slays me.  I’m going to have to make it a category in this blog so that you can find all of the other pug head tilt photos. :)

The princess looks terrified, doesn’t she? Scared, perhaps of all the spooooky (and yet sparkly) spiders crawling over her skin?

Not to worry, folks – she’s by no means scared. I just woke her up out of a dead sleep to get this shot. Okay, so she was probably a little startled. But I gave her lots of tummy rubbins afterwards. And yes, there is no “g” in rubbins. True.

Actually, I find it amazing that I was able to sneak up on her at all with  the camera – the first few shots I got, she was still sleeping. See what happens when you retire from modelling? Suddenly the camera shutter no longer rules your life! (I’m hoping this means amazing sleepy girl shots over the winter, which I’ve rarely had the chance to practice!)

The princess and I are heading out to a Pug-o-ween later today, so expect many more Halloween-y themed photos for the next week or so.

And Happy Halloween to all of you! :)

This is a very rare photo for two reasons. One, it captures me in a pose that became my natural state during 8 years of running Pampered Puppy – holding up something for the dog to focus on while I get the photo, covered in dog hair. Two, it was taken by a wonderful lady (and incredibly talented photographer) who sadly is no longer with us today. She was a fantastically gifted, wonderfully warm and giving lady who didn’t deserve the long and brutal battle with cancer that she drew as her lot, and finally lost yesterday. She was a mentor to me who helped me find my artistic eye, who gave me the first photography lesson I ever received that really took, she taught me about fine cooking and how to eat asparagus and figs and inspired me with my first Donna Hay cookbook – which eventually led to me becoming the world-beater cook I am today. She had a wonderful laugh. She will be missed.

She gets soooo excited when I play fetch with her, especially when I hunker down on the floor and really give her a good run for it. It’s been in short supply this week, though – between a cold that doesn’t seem to want to quit, a wedding anniversary (can you believe it’s been a year since The Hubby and I got hitched?) and a business trip to Montreal, there hasn’t been a whole lot of time for me to get on the floor and play with my best girl. It’s something I intend to remedy tonight!

It never ceases to amaze me how long the silly pug’s tongue is (and how, with such a long tongue, her face isn’t cleaner instead of needing to be cleaned out twice daily). ;)

She’s been a very good girl this week, taking care of me while I slept and sneezed and coughed my way through a wicked cold. She’s the best pillow and couch cuddle bunny you could ask for!

Important: if you’ve been trying to follow along in a feed reader (rss or atom) please update your links to our now fully functional feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Merrylog. And thank you for following.

Many of you wrote in last week to ask us: what’s up? Why did we get this email telling us that Pampered Puppy had new owners, and that Merry was retiring?

Well, folks, it’s true. Pampered Puppy did finally find a buyer – as I’d mentioned I was seeking back in May. And honestly, after months of trying to juggle both my new fabulous full time gig as Product Director of these fine sites, with my gig as owner of Pampered Puppy and the Merrylog, it was a huge relief to be able to pass on the reins to someone with more time to invest in my baby.

Modeling has also been harder on the spudling lo, these last two years. With her eyesight completely gone, it’s tough to get her to look a certain direction in order to pose – she orients herself constantly by facing me and gets panicky when posing but hearing my voice off to the side. And after 8 years of modeling (that’s 56 human modeling years, after all) I decided it was time to let her take a break from the ‘biz and simply be a dog. Don’t get me wrong – she’ll still be posing lots for the Merrylog but under much more relaxed circumstances. :)

Thank you to all of you for your patience, kind words and support during this time. It’s always tough to let your baby go – that’s never more true than with a site like Pampered Puppy. But I am happier and more challenged every day thanks to my new gig, and I hope you’ll all continue to follow this crazy pug and I along through life through this (still needing to be cleaned and prettied up) new home for the Merrylog. In case you didn’t notice the changed URL – it’s www.merrylog.com. And as Liz commented in our last post, we also have a new feed URL: feeds.feedburner.com/Merrylog (which also needs cleaning up since it currently doesn’t display much of anything – bear with me folks) so if you subscribe via a reader like Google Reader, Bloglines or similar, you’ll want to update things there.

Onward and upward folks – and thank you all for sticking with us!

Merry was stretched out, dead to the world on her Daddy’s legs the other night and I had to run and get the camera to capture it. As I suspected, she peeped open her eyes at me once she heard the camera (I had hoped to capture her in full-on adorable sleep mode) but it still shows how unbelievably cute she looked. Seriously.

Folks, I still own Merrylog.com and plan to keep this blog going in that location, but it may take me a week or two to get it set up in the new location. Do me a favor, and add www.merrylog.com to your bookmarks now so you can find the new version of this blog once I get things all settled. Or email angie@merrylog.com to be notified when the new blog is ready to go in August!

One more wobble shot, because I had so many I couldn’t choose. Isn’t this awesome? My favorite part is the eyes closed in deep concentration, and the lovely neck ruff so many of you pointed out in her last photo.

This shot, to me, is pure Merry. It is how she has been since she was a wee pup and first learned to play fetch. Her “dad” and I have marvelled over the years at how she doesn’t manage to completely shake her brains loose/bash her poor little brains in with the violence of her shaking the ball!