LIFE'S A BEACH

I could have titled this post Life's A Bitch .. Two of Them .. but that would have been tacky and potentially offensive and when would I ever want to offend anyone *cough cough*

This week has been extremely spring like here in southern Ontario and it also happened to be Collette's spring break. So being us, when we saw the sun shining and the temps going into the double digits we packed up the girls and off to the beach we went

Hayley looked forward to the day so that she could work on her tan
Terra, however, decided the day was more suited to hunting sticks
Hunting sticks is not a simple endeavour. Sticks are crafty quarry. Devious you could say. You never know where they could be hiding. Sometimes they go turtle on you and dig themselves into the sand
Some times the wild stick could be hiding behind hills. Luckily, sticks cannot resist the super secret border collie inducement cry and can be "hollared" out of the hollows. Roughly translated into human speech, the cry means "Hey stick, get your ass over here so I can chew on you"
Hayley doesn't cry for sticks. She would much rather appeal for cookies. And who could resist such an appeal?

Back to the stick hunting. These Toronto Beaches sticks are particularly clever. When being hunted by puppy border collies, their last resort is to flee into Lake Ontario. This was especially effective. When we first took Terra to the beach last summer, she was very eager to swim. An entire winter has passed and now she finds herself having to relearn this skill. At first, she tried doing some kind of funky border collie dance to entice the stick out of the water ..

But the stick was impervious to this dance so Terra knew there was only one thing to do: Go swimming
Wrangling a stick out of the lake is no easy task. They are wily and agile and perhaps this particular stick came from special underwater trees cultivated by a race of sentient dolphins ... No, I haven't been smoking anything, I'm just tired. At any rate, it was no small feat for Terra to grasp her prey but she had help, with Hayley coaching on the side ..
So even though the waves looked pretty daunting to her, Terra is not easily put off her prey. She's never seen a sheep. For all she knows, this is thing she's supposed to herd

Hayley is not overly impressed. Here she is asking "If she eats the stick, does that mean I get her cookie?
So wrangling sticks is a solo activity. But there is one critter that requires two border collies to herd. A critter so baffling and strange it requires all the brain power to two herders to bring successfully home. Yup, it takes two border collies to safely bring home a "dad"
Below is a little video with some of our high lights of our day at the beach



Life's A Beach from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.