A very Merry Christmas to all the Wiccaweys Family

Paul & I would like to wish all the Wiccaweys Family a very Merry Christmas and a Peaceful New Year.

Thank you to everyone who has sent christmas cards, letters, emails, photos and presents/donations for the dogs here.   We love hearing how our dogs are getting on, and we love seeing photos of them happy in their new homes.   It is just wonderful.

Have fantastic Christmas!!

Sarah & Paul & all the Wiccaweys Dogs

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Christmas Walk & Chinese Lanterns, Saturday 18th December

Our Christmas Walk will take place on Saturday 18th December.

It is for friends and residents, and we hope that if enough folks come along, spare hands will be able to enable a resident to join in the fun.  It will be a jaunt up the bridle path and back, which will take about 1 - 1 1/2 hours, then back to HQ for hot drinks, soup, nibbles, mince pies, cake, mulled wine and lots of good company.

The Badger Clan's goodie stall will be there with to raise a few pennies for Wiccs with for the humans; blueberry muffins, Christmas cupcakes, candle and Christmas tree decorations etc, and for the doggies; some liver crunchies, garlic bones, pilchard cake etc.

The Wiccs shop will be open for last minute pressie buying or treating yourself and your doggie.

Later as the sun goes down we are moving to the big field and letting off Chinese Lanterns to remember and celebrate old friends who have passed over the Rainbow Bridge to the Summerlands.
Folks are very welcome to bring their own lanterns to celebrate their friends too.


Folks to arrive from midday onwards with the walk to start at 1pm.

If you are interested in joining us drop us an email: wiccaweys@aol.com

Better than a box of choccies or a bunch of flowers......

Wiccaweys Collies are good for the heart... and your love life.....
As posted today on the Wiccaweys Forum, by Midge & his Dad Paul:

Yesterday was our 26th Wedding Anniversary. I was home late and we could not organise anything special except a snowy trip to a very early Carol/music concert in the village church. So today I tried to make up for it.

I came home early and we went out for a walk in the snow. We walked across the fields and I stopped at a unsullied hillside of pure snow lit in the pale golden light of late afternoon. I sent Midge to lie some yards away from us and then, with his collie commands, sent him off away and to my left then brought him around to the right and towards me in a long arc, stopped him and sent him out again and around to the right in the same arcing movement, brought him towards me and across to the left to lie down in exactly the place he had taken off from drawing a huge almost perfect heart in the snow. The Missus was slightly dewy eyed by this gesture. Midge got as big a hug as I did.

To the Mystery Card Sender..........

From the bottom of our hearts, Thank You.

You are an amazingly kind and generous person.

All the dogs send you waggy tails and lots of love.

With love & gratitude,

Sarah, Paul & All at Wiccaweys

Phone Problems

Virgin are having major problems at the moment, which means some customers (including Wiccaweys) are unable to access or retrieve voicemail.  So, if you have left a message in the past 24hrs, we haven't got it.

We are trying to answer all the calls as they come in, but obviously calls are coming in while we are already on another call and being diverted to the voicemail.  I suspect by now that our mailbox is full, so please bear with us.

We've spoken to Virgin who have assured us that engineers are on the case they hope to have the service repaired within 24hrs.   We shall wait and see.

Wiccaweys Site & Forum Update

The Forum and Website are back, however it appears that some forum information & memberships have disappeared.    The main Wiccs website seems to have survived unscathed so far. 
If you have been affected forum wise, please re-register and drop us a line to wiccaweys@aol.com to let us know so we can approve you again asap.


From Paul:
Given the problems we've had over the last few weeks regarding webhosting, forum backups and crashes, we're looking into the possibility of moving hosts and servers.  It's quite possible we will have to restart the forum from scratch if the database has been too corrupted to restore on another server (otherwise those glitches could cause more issues elsewhere which would defeat the object of starting again). 
We'll keep you posted.

Just to add, the information we have just received from the host is thus:

"Last nights routine maintenance found a problem which wasn't resolved until this morning, apologies for this.  There may have been data loss in certain parts of the MySQL database due to the recovery process.  All sites are back up and running, please let us know if you have any more issues." 

Wiccaweys Site & Forum

The Wiccs website and forum are down at the moment.
It appears to be a server problem and we are contacting the tech guys to try and get it sorted ASAP.

Wiccaweys Autumn Dog Show and Collie Fun Day 2010

Yes, its back - and we have a new venue!!!    HUGE thanks to Rob for offering us the use of his field again for this year, however we have been lucky enough to find a venue much closer to home which will make organising and running the show so much easier.

THIS YEARS SHOW IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MEGGIE MOO, LAST YEARS BEST IN SHOW WINNER AND AN INSPIRATION TO ALL THAT KNEW HER


Date: Sunday 5th September 2010

Time: 10am - 5pm approx

Venue: Mad Mile Field, Sywell Road, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

SHOW PROGRAMME

Main Ring

10.15:  WELCOME TO THE SHOW
10.30:  MUSICAL MATS
10.45:  TENNIS BALL & SPOON RACE
11.00:  SAUSAGE EATING RACE
12.00:  HEELWORK TO MUSIC DEMONSTRATION - Sharon & Blue
12.15:  ANNUAL PARADE OF REHOMED WICCAWEYS DOGS & PHOTO SHOOT - bring plenty of tissues!


THE MAIN EVENT OF THE DAY

12.30 - 4/5pm: FUN DOG SHOW

Class 1:    CUTEST PUPPY
Class 2:    GOLDEN OLDIES (dogs 8 years and over)
Class 3:    BEST WICCAWEYS DOG
Class 4:    BEST WICCAWEYS BITCH
Class 5:    SPECIAL DOGS (dogs with disabilties)
Class 6:    BEST FAMILY GROUP (2 or more dogs in a family)
Class 7:    BEST CHILD / DOG COMBO
Class 8:    BEST DOG
Class 9:    BEST BITCH
Class 10:  WAGGIEST TAIL
Class 11:  MOST APPEALING EYES
Class 12:  SNOGGIEST DOG
Class 13:  DOG MOST LIKE ITS OWNER
Class 14:  BEST TRICK
Class 15:  FANCY DRESS

BEST IN SHOW



Who is going to claim the trophy this year?


OTHER COMPETITIONS & ATTRACTIONS ON SUNDAY

Obedience Ring
Judge: Lisa Doody
10am onwards
Pay on the Day - £1.00 per go

Class 1: Nursery Stars
For handlers and dogs not having won out of Pre-beginners at an Open show.
Disciplines: Heel on lead, Heel Free, Novice recall (recall to front) without finish.

Class 2: Stars in Bud
For handlers and dogs not having won out of Beginners at an Open show.
Disciplines: Heel on lead, Heel Free, Novice recall (recall to front) with finish. Retrieve any safe article without finish


Agility Ring
Judge: Patch
10am onwards - Fun Agility Competition
Pay on the Day - £1.00 per go
Open to any dogs currently competing, or attending agility classes. For safety reasons, the agility competition is not open to dogs who have never done agility before
Afternoon: Have A Go Agility
Pay on the Day - £1.00 per go


Flyball Area
10am onwards - Flyball Display
Teams: tbc
Afternoon : Have A Go Flyball
Pay on the Day - £1.00 per go


Kennel Club Good Citizen Ring TBC
12.00om onwards: Bronze Test
£3.00 per dog


Working Trials
12.00om onwards: Demo & Have A Go
Pay on the Day - £1.00 per go



STALLS & STANDS

Wiccaweys Stands: Main Wiccs Stall, Raffle, Human Tombola, Doggy Tombola, Bric&Brac, Craft Stall, Cake/Preserves, Refreshments.
Other Stalls: tbc

IT'S GOING TO BE ANOTHER GREAT SHOW!!!   See you all there!!!
For further information, or if you have an enquiries about the show please contact:
Wiccaweys on:  07905 203254
Website: www.wiccaweys.com

Carol's Midsummer Food Appeal

Hi Everyone

I hope you're all enjoying the beautiful sunshine that we have at the minute - it's a great time to be out and about with the dogs

As lovely as the summer is, it means that lots of perspective adoptees are away on holiday and re-homings are down significantly at the minute.

This means that pennies coming into Wiccaweys are very limited.

So, we have decided to try and raise some money to put towards the food bill for the summer.

We realise that times are hard for most of us at the minute so we would be so grateful for any donations received, every little bit will help keep the residents in food for the summer.

If you would like details of the address to send cheques too or our paypal address, please dont hesitate to pm me or email to carolmillerdesigns@googlemail.com

Many many thanks for your support as always.

Carol x

Well done Sara & Ellie!!

A big thanks to Kasey's human sisters, Sara & Ellie who organised a tea party to raise funds for Wiccaweys.   It was a huge success and the girls raised a fantastic £117.56 for Wiccs thanks to their hard work making tea for everyone, baking cakes and running a tombola!!    Very well done girls and thank you very much!

SPAM update

Unfortunately it would appear that AOL experienced an email Hijack, and our email address was used to distribute spam emails without our knowledge or consent (we would never allow such a thing to happen).  We have been told by some of our friends that they have experienced similar spam emails coming from other people they know using AOL mail in the last week or so.

We have thoroughly virus checked the Wiccaweys computers, and found no viruses of any kind.  This is the first time this has happened in the 10 years we have been using this email address.  Given that we do not use an email client such as Outlook, our address book is held by AOL itself (the addresses are automatically stored by AOL whenever people send an email - we do not add anyone to any kind of address book).

This leads us to the conclusion that this is an AOL issue, rather than an issue with our local computers.  We are sorry that this has happened and are very cross our email address has been used and compromised in this way. 

We have taken as many steps as possible to ensure that this will not happen again, however spammers and email hijackers are very clever, and this is an increasing problem on the internet.

We'd just like to apologise for the inconvenience, but unfortunately it appears there was very little we could do to stop it from happening.

If you should ever get an unusual email from Wiccaweys, please let us know so that we can act on it as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Sarah & Paul
www.wiccaweys.co.uk

ANOTHER UPDATE:   Its definately AOL centralised as we are now receiving emails of the same sort from other AOL users.

Suspect email!!! IMPORTANT!!

Some devil has managed to spam the Wiccaweys email address today and is sending out spam mail stuff.  Paul is on the case, and we thank you to people for letting us know.    Please bear with us while we get it sorted, but just to confirm, no we don't recommend any of it!  

Sarah

Thank you for our wonderful Easter surprise...

.... To the Mystery Person who sent the very wonderful Easter Gift - Thank You from the bottom of our hearts.   The doggies send you huge licks and thank you's.    Have a very Happy Easter for yourself.   You are a very kind and special Mystery Person.  :)

Brigheen Dances!

Lovely little Brigheen bought tears of joy to us both yesterday.  When she arrived at Wiccs she was a terrified little thing who pretended she had no legs and would hide and peep out at you.  

On Saturday she took her first steps on a lead.   Very small and very slow steps, but she did a few and managed a short walk round the barn.  She did decided she really liked cuddles and fuss though - and grooming was just heavenly!   

On Sunday Brigheen was extremely brave and after a hesitant start was off and round the field for walks like a true pro!   She enjoyed some more grooming and lovely cuddles.    

Yesterday though, she made us both well up.   It was party time in the barn before everyone settled down for bed, and Paul was dancing around like a mad man to something on Plant Rock.   Most of the the gang were throwing tennis balls around or playing wrestling matches and racey-chasey games.  However Brigheen was sitting watching everything going on.   

Shep decided that dancing looked like a good idea and was up on his back legs, front paws in Paul's hands and they were dancing about.   Brigheen was watching, taking it all in, head cocking from one side to another. 

The next thing we see is Brigheen sidling up next to Paul.  She sits in front of him and lifts up her front paw to his hands.  Paul takes her offered paws and sways them from side to side a bit, and then puts them back down again.   Shep barges in for more dancing, at which point a rather bizarre tango ensues!   Least said the better on that one!!

 

Brigheen sidles up again and this time gets up on her hind legs and gives Paul her paws.   She has a little dance with him.  Then Shep is there again and they are all dancing together.   AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.      

Next time I look its gone one step further, and Paul is walking across the barn with Brigheen behind him on her back legs, paws on his back, and Shep behind her, paws on Brigheen's back - they are all doing a conga!!    Really, you couldn't train it that quickly!   And WHY do I never have the camera when I need it.   

The look on Brigheen's face bought tears to both of us.   She was smiling and happy and really enjoying herself - she was discovering something new and learning something new about herself.  That's what its all about.   That's why we do it.  :)

If you go down to Crufts today - or tomorrow....

...pop along as say hello to a very famous Wiccaweys Boy!!   

Ollie, Star of the Iams adverts will be on the Iams stand with his lovely Mum Sue giving our hugs and paw prints!!

Ollie will be on Stand 3-68, on Saturday 13th and Sunday the 14th from 11am-1pm and 2-4pm.   Look out for the huge picture of him in Hall 3!

Bet you never realised when he popped up on TV, that Ollie was a Wiccaweys lad!!   

He's a full blown Lovie now!   And we are very, very proud of him.

He may be an Iams dog, but Ollie is Wiccaweys through and through!!

Go and say hello and get a cuddle!!   Give him one on our behalf as I can't make Crufts this year.

We are "Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies and Working Sheepdogs"

NOT..."Wiccaweys Rescued Border Collies and Working Sheepdogs depending on where you were born".

If we had someone call from France, Germany, Austria, Outer Mongolia or Mars had a collie who needed help, we'd help their dog, whether that be advice or otherwise.

If someone believes that the geographic location of a dog makes that dog less worthy of saving, then they can't be a dog lover.  By somes peoples rationale, no dogs from Wales or Scotland should be saved either.  A bit of water shouldn't make a difference.   Love is unconditional, and should know no geographic boundaries.

A bit of water will NEVER make a difference to the way we help collies.

That's why we rescue them.

Doggie Updates

Don't forget to check out our new blogspot:  Letters from our Dogs Blog

Fear not..

We are still here,  just manically busy.   :)    I will catch everyone up asap.

Lots of gorgeous doggies need new loving families.  You know you need a collie in your life and home.  :)

Hello 2010!!!

A very Happy New Year to all our friends, adopters, volunteers, blog fans - and especially our darling dogs!  Wishing you all a prosperous and peaceful 2010!

Sarah & Paul

xxx