The Senakams | Corgi + 3

Where's everybody???

Hello Mommy!!!  (This is Bryson's daddy writing on behalf of Bryson.)  As you can see from my report card mommy, that even though I really missed you and daddy, I was a good boy on my first night in boarding at Hotel Happy Hound.

  See!  Can I get more treats now?

Anyway, it really isn't the same without you mommy, (daddy a bit boring, u know).  Just want to let you know that I missed you, (I think daddy is too).  Here are some pictures from this morning pick-up.  I know that you don't have a computer on this trip, but I hope that you can borrow one of your friend laptop so you can see me.  Luv You!!!!!!  Plsssssss come back soon... okie?!!?

Whhaa??  Can I go home now???

Hi Daddy!!!  It IS you!!!

{mommy!!} zzzZZZ...

Agility Star!

Herding dogs need a job. Those without one will invent one for themselves (Bryson could be the Chief Leftover Patrol/Garbage Recycling Manager). But if you don't want your canine friend to be too creative around the house, you should challenge them with activities that make them feel like they're fulfilling their God-given mission on this earth.

Agility seems to be one of these great canine sports that fits the bill for these busy bodies. We're encouraged by the few corgi owners we've met who all swear agility is the best thing they've done with their dogs. We thought perhaps it's something Bryson could dabble in since in our opinion he's shown real potential already; he'll jump over anything- bike racks, fences, tree branches, skyscrapers (if needed, we're pretty sure)- as long as he knows there's a treat awaiting him on the other side.

Bryson: I wish some day I could learn to fly like that and still carry a smile and strike a pose

So today, we packed our snacks/treats, slathered on the sunscreen, and made the trip to Sunnyvale to watch the CPE (Canine Performance Events) agility trial. It was quite a scene to take in once we set foot on the soccer-field-turned-agility-trial-course. Rows and rows of tents sheltering the canine competitors and their handlers sprawled out around 3 competition rings with non-stop canine action.

We don't have a tent so we'll just sit on a towel and get roasted

There were over 200 dogs competing in 5 levels in matches with titles like "snooker", "fullhouse" and "jackpot" (which was all very confusing even after people repeatedly trying to explain to us what they are). But if one thing is clear it's how much people and dogs all thoroughly enjoyed the event. There's just this electricity in the air as dogs at their highest level of excitement jump and weave and dash around the course under their handler's perky but surehanded guidance. It's like a 100-m dash and a cheerleading event all rolled into one.

The agility star in the video is Star (appropriately named), and handler Lissa is also an agility trainer

Everyone there was so helpful in clueing us in on what's going on in each ring. We even ran into another corgi competitor, whom Bryson wish some day will be his mentor.

Bryson: Master Mei Mei, would you be my See Fu some day?
Mei Mei: let me sniff out your potentials

Competitors and handlers heading off to competition

I'm having a good time!

After today, I can see agility classes in Bryson's future...

Bryson's first day of school

We've known it's going to be inevitable. We know it's going to be anxiety-provoking. And we also know it's for his good that we do it soon.

So we bit our lips and did it today. Bryson is officially enrolled with Happy Hound Doggie Day care as a day and overnight boarder! I know, I know, what's the big deal, right?

Well, we don't have kids but I think we can imagine now what sending your kids off to kindergarten on the first day is like. You're so used to having them around and be utterly dependent on you for every little thing, it's difficult to imagine they could be just as happy and viable without you. I know it's silly but it makes us proud but also a little sad at the same time.

But with summer approaching and vacations and more business trips coming up, we just need to know that there's a safe place where he can hang out with his buddies and chill while we're gone. Plus he can use some regular exposure to doggie social interactions since he's our "only child". Happy Hound is literally 3 minutes from our home, comes highly recommended and they "interview" all their potential clients. So off to Happy Hound we go!

Bryson on the other hand wasn't quite fond of the idea of daycare or boarding ("what do you mean no treats all day and hanging out with strangers who all smell funny??") So here he is this morning in a last ditch effort to persuade us it's not a good idea to leave him there.

Mommy, quick! Look the OTHER WAY!

Do we HAVE to go in? Don't be deceived by the colorful front, I swear I smell bullies...

I guess I've crossed the point of no return. Goodbye...

So far Happy Hound lives up to what we had hoped for.  The handlers greeted Bryson warmly by name this morning when we arrived (even though today's his first day). The building used to be some sort of a warehouse/factory that is now divided into 3 play areas for big, medium and small-sized dogs (with some fenced-in outdoor area) and the overnight "hotel" area. Each area is supervised by at least one handler at all times, and they even have a live webcam that allow you to watch your doggie in daycare action! (For Bryson the "action" right now is limited to running away from other dogs). One unfortunate thing is that it's close to a sewage treatment plan, and no matter how well this place is ventilated, it still smells funky.

And when we came to pick him up, the supervisor came out without us asking and gave us almost a play-by-play of his experience today, and reassured us that even though he was reserved and mostly kept to himself (when he's not running away), that's normal and he should do fine in a few more days. It's quite wonderful to have someone address your concerns and questions before you even raise them.

Supervisor Don handing us Bryson back with some parting words of wisdom ("don't run and they'll stop chasing") Bryson: Mmm-kay....

We'll be heading back to HH this Sunday for some more "practice" daycare before boarding him on Monday evening when I'll be gone in Vegas and Jacques working the evening shift. We hope he'll pass the real test then.

Suspended Snack Ball

Bryson has a favorite new game, called "Attack the Suspended Snack Ball".

Here is how it works:

Step 1: fill open-weave rubber ball with Bryson's fav treat (like a big hunk of lamb filet)
Step 2: tie it to an elastic band
Step 3: throw it over a ceiling beam and let it suspend mid-air (and balance it with another toy of similar weight)
Step 4: watch Bryson attack it mercilessly for as long as the treat lasts

By the end of the game, Bryson would have expended all the energy he'd consumed and enjoyed a great deal of fun (and hopefully not noticed that one of us has left for work). I know, it's ingenious.

Here's the game in action:

A walk in the woods

We recently discovered Redwood Regional Park. Who would have thunk that smack dab in the middle of the Bay Area, 20 minutes away from our home, is this beautiful, serene redwood forest with a breathtaking vista? It's quickly becoming a favorite for us and Bryson to get accquainted with mother nature.

It occupies almost 2000 acres up in Oakland hills, with quite a few trails and loops open to off-leash dogs. Here's a map to show you how close it is to us (in Emeryville) and to San Francisco (park indicated by green arrow):

Here are some pictures of one of our recent trips on the East Ridge Trail. Some day we need to take a full day and hike the longer East-West Ridge loop which takes you through the redwood forest and down the creek where rainbow trout still spawns. Rest assured that Bryson will be on leash near the creek, as he loves sashimi and we don't want him to go down in history as the dog that single-handedly extincted a species.

 

Hiking is fun but I'm exhausted... ZZZzzzzz........

Spring cleaning

Bryson gives us new meaning to spring cleaning.

He has started shedding his winter coat, BIG TIME. OK, we know corgis shed, but I had no idea how much fur he has until he decides to take his coat off and sprinkle it liberally all around the place. I mean, his hair is like germs- they're ubiquitous and they multiply quickly. We find them on all our black clothes (they somehow seem to prefer dark-colored clothing to shed on), in my bowl of cereal, and every morning I inevitably find some in my eyes/nose/ears. In fact it's a new source of protein in my diet.

So we finally gave in and got the Dyson, for our Bryson (it even rhymes) We got the "Animal" model, which is supposedly better with pet hair. For that kind of money it'd better be.

This is a ball of fur that came from Bryson after one brushing, size of a large orange, and he produces at least 1-2 of these daily (+ the rest that's flying around the house)

Tah-dah! Intoducing, our savior the Dyson! See how it's already half full- that came from only 1/2 of our 1200 sq ft loft

Who are you... declare youself! Funny, you kinda smell like me...

An Early Easter

We were walking Bryson yesterday at the Rockridge neighborhood doing some window shopping, when we suddenly noticed a small animal resembling a bunny hopping along us.

A bunny hopping in a shopping area?

We had to rub our eyes to make sure we're not seeing things. But there the bunny was, tied to a leash around his neck, hopping along his human just like Bryson was walking with us. All 3 of us (including Bryson) stopped and gawked, with me and Jacques thinking "Bunny on a leash?!", and Bryson probably thinking "Bunny for dinner, yummmm..."

Turns out the bunny was super friendly (so is his owner who let us snapped these lovely pix), loves to hang out in the hood with kids, and apparently is an ambassador to this neighborhood. Too bad we couldn't get a video of him in hoppy action, but here are some pix:

Happy Early Easter!

You just can't beat giganto bunny feet in the cuteness department!

My niece-or-nephew-to-be

Please meet my niece/nephew-to-be at 3 months old :)

I think he/she is picking his/her nose

And Yee Ga Tse, thanks for offering to share Brady's stuff! I'm sure Anita would find them helpful as well, and I don't mind using "third-hand" toys/clothing, quite used to that since I was a child being the 3rd girl in the Kam clan (not counting the Wong clan for obvious reasons).

Ah Por: keep the ultrasound pix coming!

A fantabulous spring weekend: Part 2

Sometimes even we wonder why we spend an arm and a leg to live in a concrete box in the Bay Area (especially when it's 1 a.m. and freezing outside and you realize you still have to walk 3 flights of stairs to let Bryson out). Well, a day trip to Carmel with Bryson as part of our fantabulous spring weekend partially refreshed our memory, reminding us how lucky we are to have this place right in our backyard, where the sand is fine, the air smells fresh, and we could feel like newly-weds all over again :)

And now almost 3 years later, we get to share our memories at this wonderful place on a perfect spring day with our Bryson. You just can't beat that.

P.S. I didn't intend for it to look like a Wong Kar-Wai movie, I just haven't fully figured out our camera's video function yet

Brunch at "The Forge": complete with a doggie menu. Bryson greatly enjoyed the Hen House Chicken Strips, which unfortunately only lasted a few seconds

Eagerly awaiting his Chicken Strips

Mommy, come look! This gallery is all about me!!!

Recognize this?

Let's do it again some time soon! And next time get me a bigger bowl of chicken, OK?

A fantabulous spring weekend: Part I

Finally, spring is upon us! Well, at least it feels that way even though it's officially another week away.

Record-breaking heat (80+ in SF), daylight saving time, baseball pre-season games (Go Giants!), there's just no denying it. Bryson has also welcomed the arrival of spring in his own way, shedding his winter coat (i.e. like 5 lbs of fur) which I'm sure if I collected them all I can knit myself a nice sweater for next winter. He also looks like a Jenny Craig success story overnight.

Anyway, shedding aside, timing just couldn't be better with this fair weather coinciding with Bryson's busy social calendar this weekend. He's booked solid this whole weekend (he had to pencil in our cuddle time).

First thing Saturday morning, he had to hang out with Picasso. Oh, did we introduce his new buddy yet? Yeap, his name is Picasso, another super adorable Pembroke Welsh Corgi who could easily be mistaken as Bryson's brother (look at the pictures yourself). It's funny how his owner works in our building and we just met for the first time last week. The 2 corgis hit it right off after meeting for the 1st time, playing and chasing non-stop (something we've never seen Bryson done), with Picasso's specialty being the mega body slam, and Bryson's specialty the speedy bunny-hop.

Can you tell who's who?

Caution: this video contains canine violence that may be disturbing to some audience. And this is just the warm-up round, we'll save the "real" stuff for later

And if you think you're seeing double, wait till you see the pictures below taken at the March SF Corgi Meet, you'll be seeing triple, quadriple, quintuple... there're Bryson-look-alikes coming at your from every direction! I lapsed into moments of panic coz I couldn't pick Bryson out among the clones. But he obviously had a blast, not so much from the playing but the freely-handed-out treats.

Bryson, where are you?

Quick, eveyone! I smell treats!

Hurry, Plan A in motion! Line up and look cute!

Arghhh, she's too slow! Abort Plan A! Repeat, abort Plan A! Going to Plan B: Puppy Chloe, you go sneak behind, I'll get her distracted by climbing onto her, and you sneak into the treat pouch. Copy?

Chloe the puppy, ooohhhhh..... (Lynn, my coworker: uh oh, someone wants a puppy)

And this is only Saturday...

"Guess what, I'm pregnant!"

Warning: Before you over-react, please note that the title is in *quotes*.

Yep, someone is pregnant, and nope, it's not me....

It's my little sistahh!!! My sister's gonna be a mom!!! It's hard to believe, but the miracle premie born 29 years ago at 26 weeks (yep, you heard it right, she was born @ 6.5 months at 2.2 lb) is actually going to have a baby herself. A little mini "ah por" is brewing inside her, quite amazing.

And I, I'm proud to finally be someone's aunt :) "Dai Yee Ma" as you'd say in Cantonese (not an auspicious title, for those of you who speak Cantonese, you know...) I've already been performing my auntly duties, sending my sister pregnancy books (who knows there are 103,579 pregnancy-related titles on Amazon?!), pregnancy yoga DVDs, miscellaneous baby knick-knacks, all of which I plan to borrow some day (recycling is a good for the planet, isn't it?)

As the saying goes, pictures' worth more than a thousand words. So here's the story of our sista-hood:

Getting ready for her big day, May 2006

About 10 years before that, one of those rare days it snowed like 4 inches in one day in Seattle, and in our youthful ignorance we tried to pretend like we were having fun sledding on garbage can lids when all we got were some uncomfortably wet jeans and 2 frozen tushes

Still a few years before that... (p.s. my sister has my permission to post unflattering pictures of me when she has her own blog. But I doubt she'll find a picture of me in pigtails donning a chicken suit wearing "Maxin" shades, ha! *evil sister laugh*)

Quite a few more years back... I wish I could remember what's so funny...

When we were kids I took protecting my sister very seriously (uh hmm), but all she wanted to do here was to elbow me in my stomach and craft her escape coz she thought I was about to tickle-attack her (which never crossed my mind, of course)

Magna cum laude

After 6 weeks of dedication, Bryson graduated magna cum laude from obedience school yesterday! (*Graduation music*) He has learned to sit, down, leave it, heel, and loose-leash walk ("drop it" is still a challenge for him, especially when what's in his mouth is a juicy piece of pig's ear). Otherwise he pretty much left his classmates in the dust. In fact he could only stand there and shake his head when one of his friends got into so much trouble trying to charge the instructor for his diploma (Bryson's advise: curb your enthusiasm, take a deep breath, and when all else fail, look CUTE, with some practice that'll get you off the hook everytime, my friend)

As proud as we are of him, we can't let him get complacent. So we immediately enrolled him in the intermediate class, and decided to teach him some tricks during his "summer break" so he won't forget his manners.

We captured our training sessions in the 2 videos below.

The first one's titled "How to train your corgi to shake hand" (this is after 10 minutes of teaching him what "right paw" and "left paw" means):

This second one's titled "How a corgi train a human to dispense treat by giving paw" (this is probably a couple minutes after the first video above)

A Giant Carcass

We took Bryson on a walk today at the Albany Bulb (see this earlier post for an explanation of its name), all was nice and pleasant until some fellow dog-owners alerted us of this giant semi-rotten carcass laying on the beach mere feet from where we stood:

The picture doesn't do this thing justice, it's HUGE!!! It was the size of a person, at least 5-6 feet in length (not kidding). And it just lay there in plain sight in all its putrid glory. You just couldn't resist that morbid curiosity to get a closer look but also feel repulsed with every step taken towards it. For some reason we just felt the urge to stand there with our dogs and stare and debate with fellow onlookers what this is (or was) in the midst of the thick stench. After some lively debate (a seal? an alien??), we finally came to the conclusion that this must be the carcass of a sturgeon, given that this is sturgeon fishing season in the Bay Area, and it looks like, well, a big fish. Everyone nodded solemnly at the conclusion, and somehow we all felt better having rationalized in our minds what this rotten mess must have been. It seems like not knowing what it was was bothering us more so than the sight and smell of a giant rotten fish. Thanks to our over-developed frontal cortex, that all we could think of. Bryson and his fellow dog-mates were probably just thinking: fish! yum!

If not for the discovery of the giant fish carcass, a visit to the weird "Mad Mark's Castle" would have been the highlight on this trail. I'll remind you that the trail along the Albany Bulb was a landfill full of construction debris, historically home to the homeless (ha ha, get it?) and artist communities, now a popular dog-walking trail with awesome SF bay views. Mad Mark built this castle by hand to commemorate what he calls the Global Resolve Theory (don't ask me...). Here's our first visit w/ Bryson to the castle:

An ominous sky hovering above the Castle

Bryson visiting the "front yard" of the castle

 
View of SF from inside the castle

Here are some more pictures on the interesting trail through cement blocks and random art work amongst tranquil natural beauty: