winter and spring in one day

Yesterday we thought spring had come to Melbourne, and I was eager to get a nice walk in the sun today with Penny. But winter came back!

After the icy rain and hail, Penny and I set off for Willsmere Park in Kew. I was all rugged up, but of course Penny jumped  into the Yarra for her usual swim.

She waited in vain for me to make my way down the slippery bank to throw sticks into the water.

We saw lots of other creatures also enjoying the park. (Please excuse the low quality of some of the pictures, but I want to show you the variety of park visitors today.)

The kookaburra kept an eye on us but wasn't too worried.

We walked past clouds of insects - maybe midges? They ignored Penny and she ignored them, because she was too busy cleaning her nether parts.

The grass parrots didn't care about us at all, unless we got very close, in which case they shot up into the nearest tree, waited for us to get a few metres away and landed once more nearby.

The ducks, however, were more wary of us, perhaps because they are slower to take flight. Or maybe dogs tend to chase them more often.

It's surprising to realise all this beauty and peace is right alongside a noisy, busy road. Thank goodness for the big wall that keeps most of the noise away.

worries and a kookaburra and windy weather

Penny's been having a quiet time lately, because she woke up last Thursday with a horrible limp. So off to the vet we went, to discuss it, and he couldn't find out what was causing it, except to locate the problem in the pad of her right front foot and to give her an anti-inflammatory injection and send us home with anti-inflammatory tablets.

Poor Penny. Because I'm a worrier, I kept checking her foot to see if I could figure out what the problem was. I seemed to be the same problem as she had when we came back from our lovely holiday at Yarram last November. At that time the vet couldn't figure out the problem either, but it eventually went away.

Well, with all the poking and prodding, we made her foot really sore, so that she ended up licking it frantically and actually screaming, on the Saturday morning. As you can imagine, that precipitated a rush to the vet again, and once again he couldn't see what the problem might be. We decided to keep the tablets going and see if she was better by Wednesday. If not, we'd try an x-ray to see if anything showed up.

She seems fine now, and we resumed short walks on Wednesday. Today we went to Rosanna, strolling at a pace set by Penny amongst the gum trees, watched by the occasional kookaburra.



It was a windy day, and we decided to head home even sooner than we'd planned when we heard the crack and crash of a eucalypt branch falling nearby, because the creaking and groaning of branches along the path had us on edge. (We'd had a big branch fall on our power lines at home just before we set off, and we're wondering if the recent rain, after weeks of dry weather, has set the gum trees to dropping branches more than usual.)



Penny seems okay, but we're still worrying about whether we made the right decision not to have the foot x-rayed. But we don't want to put her through the stress of a sedative unless really necessary.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how she goes.