Holy Cow Batman, you would not believe the fur ONE lone dog can shed. There are tumbleweeds of golden fluffy bits of Irish ALL over. Everyday I sweep, I brush, and in the morning I awake…to find more tumbleweeds of golden downy fluff floating down the hall. It is in every shot of every flower I take here at the Homestead, so I decided to take some snaps, and posted them over on my gallery page.

My niece came downstairs a couple of weeks ago all dressed for her soccer game, and just from walking down the carpeted hall upstairs, she had a thick layer of it all over her soccer socks. Oops. Me bad…forgot to vacuum upstairs. I tell you though, it is pervasive and pernicious and, as lovely as she is … her fur is just non-stop. There has been talk of shaving…can you imagine a shaved part golden retriever? Clipped perhaps…I’ll try clipped.

This was never a problem at the cottage as she spent so much of her time in the summer outside, underneath the deck on the cool gravel. Or, maybe it’s just more humid this year and there’s just more of it. Or, maybe it’s anxiety…because the more she sheds, the more my sister and SirB complain about it. Not to say she knows there disin’ her…but she slumps around, with the hang dawgy eyes whenever they’re about. She can’t help it, they know she can’t help it.

She spends more time inside now, for the most part because she ADORES the girls. She sits at their feet, she worships there every move, and loves them, sleeps by their side when they’re scared, and can’t wait to get back inside so she can be close to them. When they were in school and she’d hear their bus pull up and drop them off, well, lets just say she was just a bundle of puppy pleasure.

It has been exceptionally humid the last couple days…but this started about a month ago. The hair quotient went up 3-fold around the end of June…and has not really let up. I still think some of it was something new in the environment that was causing her skin to become dry, which caused her to shed more fur. We were on well water at the cottage, and here they use chlorine and other substances to  filter out impurities. So I’ve been adding alittle vegetable oil to her food…and I’m not sure if it’s made a difference, but she certainly eats her food with alot more gusto.

I keep looking for patchy baldness, just in case it’s something else….god forbid…but nada. She just sheds it from everywhere. When I brush her outside you’d think we’d been shearing sheep. I have a stash of it outback amongst the ferns, and there is now so much of it that I could manufacturer a whole other wax model of her.

I’ve decided I need to invent an indoor leaf blower/fur blower device. I could then just blow it all down the hall and out the front door. Be simpler then the swifter, sweep, vacuum, bend and scoop technique I’ve been utilizing.