Thursday 30 July 2009

lovely rain, blue-tongue lizards and doggy dancing

The sun shone warmly all morning and I should have taken Penny for her walk. But I didn't. And in the afternoon it rained. Hooray for the lovely water! Yesterday both major newspapers ran frightening predictions that next summer will bring even more danger from fires than last summer, and today there were articles about the fact that Melbourne is now the driest capital city in Australia.

But, at least it's raining this afternoon. And we're so unused to rain now that I've chickened out on a wet walk, so we had to entertain ourselves with some doggy dancing in the kitchen. Here's our first little routine:



Then we tried a longer routine, and Penny did very well, despite the fact that her silly human mixed up the verbal commands for clockwise and anti-clockwise circling! But... the wonderful thing is that, for the first time, we conquered the sideways step - at the end of the routine.




And then, to make the wet day even more interesting, we had a visit by a blue-tongue lizard at our front door. I don't know what it was doing out in the middle of winter. After we had a look at it and took some footage, I put it in the bushiest part of the front garden (where Penny's not allowed to go, and hopefully no neighborhood cats will find it).

13 comments:

Noah the Airedale said...

Awww the lizard looks like it's trying to drink some water. Glad to hear you're getting some good rain. It must be so dry down there.
Penny, you're doing a good job scaring off the blue tongue.

tailwags
Noah

parlance said...

Noah, its seemed a mystery why the lizard came out on this cold day. Maybe it was just thirsty, as you say. I did think it looked like it was drinking. But I thought bluetongues would hibernate.

Slavenka said...

Parlance,I like your freestyle dancing
with Penny,but I wonder is it a blue-tongue lizard dangerous for humans?

i said...

Penny, you're going to be a dancing queen soon! Keep it up!

I've never seen any blue tongue lizard before. You sure have interesting visitors.

parlance said...

Slavanka, blue-tongues are welcome visitors to every garden, as they eat the snails and don't harm people. There's a story that if you have a blue-tongue in your garden they will keep the snakes away, but I don't think that is true.
Many people keep blue-tongues as pets.

parlance said...

Happy, what I like about blogging is that I see the world without getting out of my chair! I love seeing the visitors to other people's gardens in different parts of the world.

parlance said...

Happy, what I like about blogging is that I see the world without getting out of my chair! I love seeing the visitors to other people's gardens in different parts of the world.

Unknown said...

cool routines, Penny! My living room is too small and I'm too big for us to really dance properly in the house - so we usually have to go to the local park or our trainer's centre to practise...wish we could practise like you in the kitchen!

We've been having lots of wet weather here in Auckland too - so my humans been doing lots of training with me too...we've been doing some free-shaping this week, as part of our Tricky T-Gang assignment from Ludo the Sheltie...do you do any free-shaping? Do you like it? I LOVE it! Check out my latest post for some videos of me free-shaping with different objects! :-)

Slobbers,
Honey the Great Dane

Anonymous said...

I wonder if your lizard was flushed out its den? The ground around here has been pretty hard. I've never seen a blue tongue in winter either.

parlance said...

Honey,we don't do much free-shaping, so I'm going to come over to your blog to get some inspiration as to how we could do some.

It's funny you should say you have to go to your trainer's centre to practise - I was so-o-o jealous when I saw you practising there, because you had so much space.

I guess I'd better just be grateful that I have a big kitchen!

parlance said...

Sally Forth, I did wonder if the lizard came out because of the rain. It was so strange.
I was at a lovely park in Coldstream today and the man who was planting plants as a "friend" of the park said their blue-tongues are all buried under the mulch at this time of the year.

Johann The Dog said...

Oh wow, you guys are getting so good! Loved the routine! Loved it!!!

Have to say that Mum got kinda ewey about that Lizard, she was having trouble thinking about how you picked it up and put it somewhere else. Now this is from a human that made someone stop the car on a busy highway because a snapping turtle (when she lived in TX) was gonna get run over. She got behind it, picked it up and put it heading the other direction in the bushes.

Folks kept yelling at her, don't you know that's a snapping turtle? Mum couldn't help herself, LOL!!!

parlance said...

Johann, Penny doesn't like these lizards, but that's not how her humans feel. these lizards are seen as harmless and a good thing to have around - they eat snails, for one thing.
I loved the snapping turtle story. Recently I came across a giant long-necked turtle that had been run over by a car and took it to a vet, but they said they would just end its suffering. It was very sad, because I think it must have been decades old, or even a century old.