A Different Lasagna And A Homecoming

So this has been a wild few days and I thought I´d wind down tonight by bringing you a new post. It´s been awhile and so here I am and tonight I have some goodies for you. 

First of all I made this recipe HERE for dinner tonight. However, I made it a little more mine by adding salmon. The original recipe is meat free so if you´re looking for a semi vegetarian dish this could work, there is cheese in here, but otherwise meat free. The salmon was really nice and this dish was really good. It wasn´t great, it wasn´t WOW...but it was good. It was different but we all agreed it was good! 

My family has complained that I haven´t been baking like I use too, which is true. I have really taken a huge break and yeah I miss it and I know they miss it but I´m working on this new lifestyle so I´ve been trying to be good. However, this past weekend, life got crazy and I decided we all needed a treat....and I have been wanting to check out this recipe HERE. I would have taken photos of the ones I made but they didn´t last long enough for me to find my camera.....so you´ll have to deal with the photo from the recipe...looks yummy huh? 

This is like taking rice krispie treats to a new level....here you have white chocolate, peanut butter, chocolate chips (or dronning sjokolade is what I used here in Norway) and mini marshmallows.....YUM...and yeah, like I said, these didn´t last long and my children thankfully ate the majority of them. :-)

As I mentioned the last few days have been crazy. We´ve been going round and round with our co-owner of our Leonberger female, Birdy. They live between 8-9 hours away from us (one way) which was mistake number one and a mistake I´ve really regretted pretty much since we sent her. However, my feeling at the time we let her go was that she would have a great life on this couple´s farm, she would be the only dog, get all the attention and everything would be great. The couple promised me loads of photos since we lived so far away and I did get a few in the beginning and less and less as time went on. They claimed they weren´t good at taking photos or putting them on the internet but they assured us she was doing great and the few photos we did get, she looked good. However, early this spring the couple separated and the woman, who we had gotten the impression did the most with Birdy, left the farm and moved into an apartment and couldn´t have Birdy with her. She sent us some mails in the beginning of her separation and assured us Birdy was doing fine and we asked for photos, which we never got. After awhile of trying to get photos from the ex-wife, we were told she could no longer be the middle man for us and if we wanted any information on Birdy we had to contact her ex-husband. So we did....several times. He always had excuses that his ex-wife had taken the camera and computer so he had nothing to take or send photos with. Once he told the Captain that his ex was coming over for dinner and he would have her take photos. We never got anything...so when the Captain came home from sea he called again and the man again acted shocked his ex hadn´t sent photos and said again that he had nothing to take photos with. The Captain asked him if he had a camera on his phone to which he said yes...so the Captain asked him to take photos with his phone. "Yeah, on the next nice weather day" he would....the Captain said no, he wanted photos as soon as possible. He gave this guy my number but I didn´t get anything. I sent a message saying we wanted photos of her head and her body by the next day. I got no response to my text message, so tired of playing this game with him, I contacted the Norwegian animal welfare office near where the man lived. I told them my concerns and they sent someone out to check on Birdy the same day. We were sent the following photos:

I spoke with the man who had gone out to see her and he said that she was VERY thin and her hair was scruffy but in their opinion not a case they were going to do anything more with but I could look at the photos and decide myself what I wanted to do. Birdy has always been an elegant Leonberger, never a powerfully built female but she was incredibly skinny and when we saw her feet you could see she hadn´t been groomed in a long while. Those fluffy hairs between the toes don´t grow overnight and if they looked like that, what were her nails like? 

The Captain contacted the man who had Birdy and he was upset we had contacted the welfare organization. He felt it was for people who abused their animals and he didn´t feel that defined him. He loved Birdy and enjoyed her company. The Captain told him he needed to have her groomed and send us new photos by Monday but before he could continue the man said NO. He wanted to return Birdy, he thought we were too demanding when it came to photos!! This was the only request we had of them the entire time they had Birdy and they knew it when they took her that we wanted regular photos to see how she was since they lived so far away. As the Captain said, he didn´t really want her anymore when he was willing to give her back over photos! So on Friday the Captain and Julia drove to pick Birdy up and when they got her the Captain called me and told me she was the skinniest he had ever seen her and we had done the right thing getting her. 

There has never been any doubt we needed to get her home, but it´s going to be a challenge having her here. The reason she left in the first place was because she and our other female, Isabella, who are only three months apart in age, do not like each other. They are both dominant females and would like to be Queen in the house. Now that they have both been Queen in their respective homes for the last 2 years, we will have quite the work cut out for us getting Birdy back into our gang but our hope is to have it like it was before she left, where they all managed to be together in the same room as long as we were there. We just couldn´t leave them alone together. So we hope to get back there, slowly but surely. No matter what, we will more then likely keep Birdy here. She is 6.5 years old and I´m too afraid to chance her happiness by setting her in another co-owner home and risk that I make a mistake again. People will say and do anything to get a "free" dog and I am too trusting. 

Here are some photos I took this afternoon as we were grooming Birdy...they aren´t that good as she moved a lot..but it gives you an idea. Below those photos I´ll post a photo of how she was before she left us.

Birdy today November 18, 2012

Birdy in 2009 and 2010. 

This is by no means an ideal situation but part of being a responsible dog owner is owning up to your responsibility as long as you own the dog and we have a responsibility to Birdy and plan on trying to make up this time she has been away, the best we can. We were looking forward to having less BIG dogs and concentrating more on the small dogs in our life but this is the curve ball life has dealt us and we will deal with it the best we can and do our best for all the dogs living here.  The most incredible thing was getting an email today from the ex-wife who I had written too for a week or two ago asking where the photos were she had taken? She wrote tonight (obviously not knowing we had Birdy) giving me MORE excuses why she couldn´t get me photos of Birdy but that she had seen her not too long ago and she was doing just fine so I had no reason to worry!!!! I wrote back and gave her a piece of my mind! I was so angry. I probably should have just ignored her, because people like that will never understand what they have done wrong but I couldn´t help myself...here I was being lied too and I was finally aware of the lies!  I had thought it was just the man who was stringing us along all the time but when the ex-wife wrote this too me tonight, I was so angry because obviously she has been stringing us along as well and she was the one I had trusted the most of the two of them! 

Well, that is an update from the woods of Norway. Thanks for stopping by and visiting my little corner of cyberspace! Hope you´ll come back again!

Until next time my friends...