Update: Dog, Cattle, Suburban

Some of you may be aware that our livestock guard dog Justin got his world ROCKED the other day. It all started with a girl...
Our friends have another livestock guard dog (female) and wanted her to be bred by Justin. She is in heat, so they brought her over to our place for a visit. Justin has been very happy with that arrangement, but she has a powerful attractive quality and is bringing in big dogs from all over the county. I didn't even know we had so many dogs around here. Anyway, the other day when we came home from partying with the Allreds I found Justin half dead and freezing out in the mud. I brought him in and set up a pen in the garage with a heater, washed him up, treated him with some 1st aid supplies and gave him warm milk to drink. He was NOT looking good that night and it broke my heart but I was expecting to be burying him the next morning.

These pictures are from the first night. Notice the two teeth marks on the opposite side of his leg from the big gash? I could see his tendons in his leg and he is lucky it is just the skin that was ripped. The next day, we saw a big pit-bull-looking dog that I think was the perpetrator. Those ones on his leg make the cut under his eye look like nothing at all.

Anyway, as of today, he is doing great and is limping around tripod style. We really like this dog. This was his first night spent indoors and he actually held his bodily functions until we let him out of the garage for a potty break - no training and he is housebroke!

I thought this was a fun picture of Winter and Sterling playing in the hay while we fed the cattle and goats.
About our Suburban - the other day while we were hauling Jessica's harp around between performances, the Suburban made some funny sounds and was acting like the E-brake was on and grinding while driving. I thought I could hear noises when I put it in gear too, so I figured the transmission must be full of loose pinball machine parts and ready for the junkyard. We parked it (which, in turn led to the damage to Jessica's harp which you can read about here: Harp Tragedy) and had a auto shop come pick it up. The good news is that they couldn't get the problem to replicate. I asked them to go ahead and drop the pan off the transmission to change the fluid and look for loose/broken parts and it came back with a clean bill of health! At this point, I am thinking a rock or something got stuck in a brake caliper or something and that we are in the clear! Hooray! We were feeling blessed that a $1,500 transmission repair bill wouldn't throw us into bankruptcy, but now we feel even more blessed to be able to apply that $1,500 to something more effective for our family plan.