Welcome our new family member

After filling out many applications for many different dogs, Kelly and I were finally approved for adoption of a lovely little girl.

Everyone, meet The Baroness Nymeria Frieda von Hopkins-Michael. Her friends call her Nymeria. She is a short-haired dapple red boar mini-dachshund weighing about 8 pounds with startling blue eyes. She came from a rescue called Out of the Woods Rescue.

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Dash and Nymeria enjoy a sunbeam together in our kitchen near the door to the deck.

Like her dearly missed older sister, Thumbelina, she is a puppy mill rescue. Nymeria comes from Pennsylvania, in Amish country. She did not even have a name, just a tag that said “11”.

Nymeria enjoys some time in the big bed.

She was born in September 2016 so she is about 3 1/2 years old. So she is by far the baby of the household now, which is kind of ironic since she has had a litter of puppies every heat since she was able. This poor little girl lived in a rabbit hutch with a wire floor for pretty much her entire life, until she was rescued.

Nymeria working on her tan on the back porch.

Still, she seems to be in pretty good shape considering all she has been through. She has her appointment with our vet scheduled this next weekend, but her foster mom, Chrissy, and the good folks at Out of the Woods did an amazing job with her initial shots, her spay, and her dental in which she lost17 teeth!

They love spending time together. It really was love at first sight.

She is full of energy and has a great sense of curiosity. So far she gets along well with all the other animals. Just this weekend she touched noses with Violet, which was a huge and pleasant surprise. There were cats in her foster hom who she apparently ignored, but Violet was very concerned upon her arrival. But she doesn’t seem interested in chasing them, and so far she has only had a passing interest in them at all.

She and Dash LOVE to play together, and it’s great because now he will be worn out enough to go to bed without much fuss, the way he would after a long day of walking around at Brimfield.

She is named after Nymeria, one of the direwolves from ASOIAF/Game of Thrones, and after Frieda, a character from Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

The good folks at Out of the Woods Rescue sent us home with food, medicine, toys, and so much more. I can’t tell you how thankful we were for their treatment of our still scared but wonderful little girl. If you are so inclined, please celebrate with us by making a donation so they can continue their excellent work.

~Geoff & Kelly

Game of Thrones and the End of Character Arcs

A lot of Game of Thrones Fans were disappointed when the Battle of Winterfell seemed to be somewhat anticlimactic, particularly since most people felt that the fight between the living and the army of the Dead would be THE BIG BATTLE of this final season of the show.

Well, then last night happened.  Season Eight, Episode Five: The Bells.

If there is ANYTHING you can say about last night’s episode with 100% certainty, it is that the episode was decidedly NOT anti-climactic.  And it was one of those things that you just couldn’t stop watching.  Like the Red Wedding, but orders of magnitude worse.

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GoT S8E2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The first two episodes of Season 8 have come and gone, and there are only 4 episodes of the show left.  It took two years of waiting, but it almost seems like it is going by so fast now that it’s here.

Well. I won’t spend too much time recapping the episode, as I would rather spend time talking about what I think it all means and what will happen next.

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Some Predictions for GoT Season 8

Well, here we are – rapidly approaching the final season of my favorite TV show.  HBO has released some teasers and such.

So I thought I might make some predictions for what we might see in the final season of the show, and specifically, who I think will live and who will die.

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Game of Thrones Season 7, so far

I have been meaning to write a post about the first episode of Season 7, and so here it is, along with some other bits of new information from the trailer shown at ComicCon in San Diego.

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My two cents on the GoT Season 7 trailer

So the trailer came out for Season Seven of Game of Thrones, and of course it has already broken records for viewership.

First I checked out my friend Pat’s blog to see what he thought of the trailer and get his input.  If you want the opinion of another person who has read all of the books and is a fairly obsessed ASOIAF/GoT fan (like myself, and in a good way) then go check him out.

So here’s my thoughts.

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Some predictions for Season 7 of Game of Thrones

As I have often done before a new season of Game of Thrones, I thought I would make a few predictions as to what we might see when Season 7 begins this July.

We have already heard a few things, and can guess a few more based on the bits and pieces that we have been shown in the teaser trailers, some clues that have slipped out, and on the logical progression of the story.

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Predictions for GoT’s BOTB

This weekend, Episode Nine of Season Six will finally be out, and I have to say I have been looking forward to this for a long, long time.  Die, Boltons, die.

So here are my predictions, based on the still photos and brief video clips from the episode that we have seen so far.

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Well. I had wondered why they called this episode “The Door”.

I really didn’t know.

I had suspected that it would have something to do with the door to the House of Black and White, or maybe the door to the Great Sept of Baelor, or something along those lines.  The actual meaning and significance of the name, and which door it meant, is something I could never have guessed in a million years.

Continue reading “Well. I had wondered why they called this episode “The Door”.”

Dear Benioff and Weiss… WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?

OK guys, I get it.  George just hasn’t been able to crank out the books fast enough, and now the TV show has caught up to the books, more or less.  So now you no longer have all that juicy source material to work from, you just have whatever tidbits GRRM has given you about where the story is going.  That’s fine.

But guys?  I’m worried.  Frankly, you are starting to scare me a little bit.  Not having Book Six or Book Seven to work from does not mean that you should suddenly become nihilists.  It’s not a race to see who can kill more characters.  Moving the story forward does not mean taking a large metaphorical dump on the hopes and dreams of the fans, ok?

Continue reading “Dear Benioff and Weiss… WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?”