It's nearly Christmas here in Australia and Cindy's Walking Group has already celebrated! The sun shone gently (thank goodness for cool weather), the dogs had fun, and...
... Father Christmas arrived, bringing gifts for all the dogs.
Penny loved the treats in Santa's basket, yummy liver brownies from our favorite recipe book, Feed Your Best Friend Better.
The humans had plenty to eat also.
And, best of all, from Penny's point of view: when I wasn't watching, one human scraped onto the ground the left-overs from the plate in the foreground and Penny scoffed them. I wasn't watching her too closely because I knew I was in the company of ultra-responsible dog owners and sure enough, the human treats were fine for dogs - beetroot crisps.
Merry Christmas to all our blogging friends, and, if you celebrate a different holiday from the one we do, we wish you a peaceful, joyful and loving time amongst your loved ones.
Honey is over her surgery to deal with her glaucoma and she's out and about again! Hooray!
And in other news, Hsin-Yi is starting an online store, which you can visit here.
The merchandise looks great so far, but I'm hoping Hsin-Yi will branch out into items that relate to all sorts of dogs and not just Great Danes - though Great Danes are wonderful, lol
I've already suggested the number one on my list for Christmas 2013 would be Christmas tree baubles that are dog-safe. We can't have any baubles in our house because Penny might grab them, thinking they are balls. After all, she pinches the plums from our plum tree each year and stores them up for future games.
So we limit ourselves to a small ornament on a table, up out of reach.
We like it, but it would be great if Hsin-Yi designs something we could use on a full-sized tree next year.
She would drop one near the bank and swim out for the other. But on this occasion she absentmindedly took the WhirlWheel with her as she swam. We watched as she circled around for ages, trying to figure out how to get them both back to the shore.
And then, to our surprise (you'll hear on the video clip that we were a bit over-excited, lol) she swam with both in her mouth.
Today Penny and I walked in a potentially boring place, a sports ground, because high winds were forecast and I didn't want to be under trees that might drop branches on us.
But it wasn't boring. It's never boring walking with Penny, because she explores every nook and cranny and makes me more observant. (Watching out for snakes, if nothing else, keeps me on the alert.)
Today she wandered down to a little sandy patch of water that hardly earns the name of creek. It wasn't much, but as she paddled in it I saw how peaceful and inviting the spot was.
I'm glad I have a dog to open my eyes to the beauty around me.
I'm glad she didn't notice this little echidna walking around each day near our cabin.
The echidna always fossicked around in the mulch outside the huge fenced yards that are such a great feature of the park, so she was quite safe from dogs.
Up in the tree next to our cabin there was a family of owls - I think boobook owls. Mum looked after the baby at the nest for the first few days, with Dad sitting nearby, but later in the week the baby was sitting on a separate branch.
On our last day, we saw a seal sitting on the beach and I learned something new. My companions, more experienced at care of dogs, were worried when we saw the seal in the distance, and called back the one dog who was ahead of us, playing in the waves. Fortunately he didn't notice the seal heading past him into the sea, because I've discovered that seals are very dangerous to dogs. My friends told me a seal could potentially kill a dog.
And I wouldn't want any of our dogs to hurt the seal, of course. I've read that it's illegal to go closer than thirty metres to a seal resting on a beach.
Last year we saw a baby koala at the dog resort. I wonder what we'll see next time.
Penny and I are off to Tarra Valley for a while. Given that one of our main activities there is walking on The Ninety Mile Beach, I was interested to read in The Age newspaper recently that Museum victoria is excavating the skeleton of a whale from under the sand at that part of the beach.
Here's hoping they've dug it up by the time we get there, or they might have Penny helping. She loves digging at the beach.
I'll let you know how she went when we get back...
Dr Jennifer Coates has posted an interesting article about the use of honey in treating wounds. I've heard of this treatment before, but didn't know how honey (or sugar, it seems) hastens healing. To read the whole post, go here.
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Teacher, writer, dog-lover, gardener, miniaturist, - that's part of who I am. I hope through writing I can discover more about myself and more about the interesting world around me.
