Peppa is a very different dog from Penny

 Peppa and I go to play-and-train most Sunday mornings. It's great fun and a chance for Peppa to be around other dogs. 

In going there, I've definitely confirmed that Penny was a very different creature from Peppa. Penny was not afraid of anyone or anything, a calm presence and a confident explorer of new situations and people.

Peppa is timid. I'm not sure whether this is because she is a 'Covid baby' and spent the first months of her life in a quiet household in a basically silent neighbourhood. It has been said that we had 'the longest lockdown in the world.' Perhaps it wasn't the longest, but it did teach Peppa that there should be no sound out on the street after nine pm, and established that she should alert us to anyone out and about at night. We don't mind that, as she is a great watchdog.

However, I think it's probably just her temperament to be nervous in new situations. 

Today we tried out a new short tunnel, in the expectation that she would go through it, seeing she has been through longer and darker tunnels at dog play sessions.

But no. That red thing looked quite strange and threatening...

Eventually a piece of cheese tempted her to put her head into the tunnel. But no way was she going to step in.

So that's where we've left it so far. It's always 'baby steps' when introducing her to anything new.

Just a random post

 

 This is just a random post to keep Penny's blog alive. So many beautiful memories. There will always be only one Penny. 

But Peppa is beautiful and lovable also.

She's great company when we're watching tv. I was never sure Penny registered what was on the screen, but I feel sure Peppa does. 

Finally getting back to training and fun

 Since we've been attending the Play and Train classes at Warringal on Sunday mornings, life has become more settled at home. Peppa has had frequent tummy upsets and visits to vets, and we seem now to have found foods that she can stomach. 

And, best of all, we've found that her appetite is improving and she will take food as training rewards.

Consequently, we're able to play in the kitchen with the toys I bought from K-Mart. 

 

At the moment, I'm rewarding for simply not being scared by the new objects in the house. I was surprised, after fifteen years with phlegmatic Penny, to realise that Peppa is a totally different personality, who needs lots of time to adjust to novelty. (Penny thrived on novelty!)

Re-reading my own old blog posts

 Peppa raced out the door this afternoon when our neighbour called, and we did our usual heart-searching about our awful standard of dog training. 

And then I began to wonder whether we had the same issues, so many years ago, when we had Penny living with us. Our vet agrees with us in referring to her as 'Saint Penny', haha. In comparison to Peppa she was indeed a saint.

I thought I'd look back at my own old posts from 2007, when Penny was around the age Peppa is now. And I'm finding it not only entertaining, but also actually helpful. 

One thing I'm noticing is that Peppa is more of a digger than Saint Penny was. I might have made an error of judgment in letting her 'help' me when I was weeding around the strawberries. She sure did love digging that big hole! It was a bit of a pity that a few of the strawberry plants ended up strewn around the area. But hey, she had fun, and it wasn't all that hard to replant the ones she removed.

I guess we'll find out soon if I've created a 'digging monster'.

I'm going to do a search on my old blog for references to digging and see what comes up. In the meantime, I'm intending to scroll through fifteen years of Penny's blogs to see which links still work and make a note on each post as to which links are no longer viable.

Snooza bed is still giving good service

 It's great to see Peppa using the Snooza raised bed that we bought for Penny so many years ago. 

Penny would only sleep on it if it had a cushion or blanket on it, and even on super hot days or nights wouldn't be happy without that covering. Snooza does say that their pet futon is cool, but I prefer the open bedding at the moment.

I've read that the open mesh is a good way to keep a dog cooler, as the air can circulate around their belly and paw pads. So we feel happy that Peppa doesn't care if there's no covering on the mesh.

Peppa has joined our family

 It was a long trip home in heavy traffic, last Thursday...

and the driver was taking great care, because there was a very special new family member on someone's lap.

Peppa! 

Her name was meant to be 'Pepper', but the breeder spelled it this way, so that's what we will call her.

It feels sad to be writing on Penny's blog without Penny lying asleep in the house, but we've finally made the decision to try to find a new little soul to live with us. It's been more than fifteen months since Penny died, and though we have more grieving to do, Peppa is bringing us joy.

And she's brining us visitors. The cat next door came into our house for the first time in his life on Friday, when his human visited to meet Peppa. He was nervous of Peppa, but he's a cat used to dogs, so we thought we'd try to get off on a friendly footing with him. Peppa was most interested to see him, but he didn't want to be friends. Yet. 

She has turned out to be a calm, confident little girl. Here's hoping we can give her the wonderful life she deserves.

Life goes on without Penny

 I've been feeling low the last few days, and it's taken me until today to realise it's probably because yesterday was  the tenth of what we call the 'Monthiversaries' of her death on 11th March 2020. 

So I'm posting this, mainly for myself, to remember her:

best of dogs

beauty queen

agility dog

doggy dancer

lure courser

beach goer

lounge lizard towards the end of her life

friend

lazy bones at times

ball chaser par excellence until her cruciate ligaments let her down

eater of anything - meat, vegetable, you name it

companion

best of dogs.

 

Her 'tennis ball' tree is in full fruit, but with no Penny to protect the crop from the birds, we've been reduced to covering the fruit with bags. 

 

 But every walk is a reminder of how in her long lifetime she introduced us to the beauties of nature all around us. 

Thank you, Beautiful Girl.

Penny's garden of remembrance

Penny's ashes are buried in her special spot, outside the glass door where she liked to lie and watch the world go by in her last months. 

 At last it's time to plant the packet of seeds that came with those ashes - everlasting daisies. 

Now the  ground is prepared. We won't feed the soil, because they're Australian native plants and don't like a rich soil.

Hopefully, a beautiful garden addition in memory of a beautiful companion.

A timeline of grief for a beloved dog

I has been a long time since I could even think of adding to Penny's blog, but today seems to feel right.

Here's a recap of our grieving for Penny, in the hope that if another bereft dog owner stumbles across this post, it might help in the first sharply sad days and weeks.

Initially, it was a great comfort to hear from our friends and from those who had loved Penny. We left her ashes on the front table.

 We received a beautiful gift of a wood-block print of her, and roses.

As the petals fell, we left them beside her ashes and photo.

 Then came the sad decision to bury her ashes. We came up with the idea of making a new garden in a spot that had been neglected, but which was just outside the unused doorway where she had taken to sleeping most of the time in the last few weeks of her life. She liked that spot because it gave a view of the driveway and the front street, and was just beside the computer where one of her humans worked.

Here's one of my favourite photos of her in that spot:

 So we covered over the hole that held her ashes, and waited...

...because another friend had promised to give us a gift of a plant - a hellebore called 'Penny's Pink.' But it wasn't available in nurseries yet.

 Over the next few months we had to learn to walk in the places where we had always gone with Penny - without her. Sad, but filled with loving memories of a wonderful dog. This spot is Heide Art Gallery kitchen garden, where Penny strolled in her old age and I browsed the interesting plantings.

 And we visited some of the places where she had swum so often.

 We walked to new places, ones that had no memories of Penny, but brought her to our minds - she would definitely have plonked herself into that puddle!

 Finally, Penny's special plant arrived.

Now 'Penny's Pink' hellebore is growing in Penny's memorial garden.

And Penny is remembered with love. No regrets, though, because she had the best care all her life from the team at our vet and from us, and knew she was safe and loved. But her time had come.

A good dog has gone free

Penny's training release command to do as she pleased has always been, 'Go free.'

Tonight, as the vet euthanised her, her two humans stood on either side of her, stroked her and whispered into her ear, 'Good girl.'

I believe, as she faded, the last words she would have heard were her two humans whispering, 'Go free.'

We've been blessed to have such a marvellous dog in our lives. Even in this last week, she was calm through everything, the rush to the emergency vet only to discover a large mass in her abdomen; the visit to our own vet three times in the hope it might be benign and operable; today's last visit when she must have begun to bleed internally and had not even the strength to stand up.

I'm ending her story with two photos from today:

Out into the garden in the morning for a wee, and a lie down in the sunshine...

Gone free in the evening...

Old dogs and new behaviours

Wow! Nearly two months since I posted about Penny and her adventures.

Well, at her age - and mine - just getting out of the house and walking is an adventure.

We're finding that although twenty minutes' stroll is enough for her, it's not sufficient to maintain our own health, so today we humans took a long, brisk walk separately, after taking Penny to Heide Museum of Modern Art in the morning for an amble around the outside artworks.

Here she is posing in the strangely cool evening. How weird that parts of Australia are burning up in bushfires and other areas are so cold that some are even predicting there could be snow on the mountains at Christmas!

As you'll see in this photo, she's quite grey around the muzzle now. I'm not sure when I noticed that - perhaps it was after her latest clipping. 

Life with an old dog

Life is quieter these days, now that Penny is older. She's still enjoying life, though. We headed to one of our favourite places late this afternoon, to enjoy the early evening.

Last weekend was the Grand Final of the football, and, hey presto! it's time for cricket now. You can see the teams playing in the background, but Penny wasn't interested.

We walked under a lovely planting of large trees, mostly oaks. There were plenty of interesting scents for a senior dog to enjoy.

Of course, there are always yummy dog treats if you keep your attention on your human when she asks you to.

Meeting Penny's brother

Once again we met Penny's littermate at Rosanna Parklands yesterday. It was great to see he's well and happy.

Well, we were interested. Penny wasn't.

Oh, alright, I'll say a quick hello.

the big storm

Yesterday Penny went for one of her favourite walks, along the Yarra River at Warburton.

But what was this? A big mess at the entrance!

But no worries. Someone had been very busy clearing up the fallen trees after the big storm last weekend, so we could get through easily.

Many of the fallen trees were enormous. They must have been many decades old.

'Come away from this one,' I said to her, because it looked ready to fall the next time the wind blows.

Every fallen tree we saw was a eucalypt. Here's Penny examining the roots of one of them. This one had fallen across the river.

But here's something interesting... That tree was right beside a stand of Californian redwoods planted early last century. Not a one of them had fallen. (Can you see the fallen eucalypt across the path in the distance?)

I searched for references to this little glade of redwoods in Warburton township, but most sites direct to the bigger forest of redwoods in East Warburton,

Yarra Views Blog is the only site I could find that has information about the trees beside the Yarra River in Warburton itself. The writer says these trees were planted by a group of American Seventh Day Adventists. I recall from a previous blog post of my own that they were planted about 1922, which makes them older than the ones at East Warburton, I think. (I'm not sure about that.)

I think this site, about the forests ofWarburton, is fascinating.

a dog as music connoisseur

Penny's recovering well from her strange limping problem, we hope. It's good to get her up and about as much as possible, with gentle exercise.

But...

Am I hurt about what she does when I play the piano? Get up from her mat and take herself out of the house?

No, not at all...

Worst of all, she comes back in when I stop playing.

Penny's invisibility trick

Penny has a lovely new collar. She received it because her old one mysteriously fell off when we were walking. A kind neighbour read our phone number on it and called us to say he'd found it in the street, so we hurried around - well, in the recent heat it couldn't actually be called 'hurrying' - to collect it. But the clasp was broken off.

So we bought a lovely new one. And Penny christened it this morning in a mud puddle. (We won't be complaining about the puddle, because it's so thrilling to have had some rain at last.)

 And then she rolled in the grass, which is very yellow after the long dry weeks, and did a disappearing act. It's hard to see where Penny finishes and the landscape begins.

walking past a salsify-eating cockatoo

It's just great that Penny has recovered from her gastroenteritis and I can walk along without stressing about whether she's scouting for food. (She always is, but I'm hopeful she won't make herself sick.)

As we stepped onto a path today, I noticed a cockatoo in the distance. Penny didn't, because she was nose-down checking out for edibles. Or good smells.

We approached, and the bird flew up into a nearby tree, holding something in its beak, and then nibbled on the plant it was holding.

I wish my phone could take a better photo, but if you zoom it up a bit, I think you'll see that it wasn't a grass stem. It was something more substantial. Inquisitively, I looked around to see what the plant might be. And there was a clue...

And lots more clues, actually - clumps of stems bent down and snapped off, all along the edge of the path. Also, a clump that hadn't yet been attacked...

Salsify. How interesting. It's considered a weed in Australia, but recently I've discovered it is edible.

Once we moved further away, the cockatoo landed on the path again and, after considering the available plants, decided on a big grass seed head, which it took up onto the old tree to eat.

Penny and I headed home for our own breakfast, and I'm pleased to say that Penny is now eating her normal range of food, instead of being limited to a 'gastro' diet.

Penny is quite laid back about an exciting encounter

Today, as we were walking in a nearby park, we saw a dog approaching - and he looked like Penny.

Now, you have to understand - no dogs look like Penny! People are always asking us what breed she is, and we say, she's a 'bitser'. That's Aussie slang for a dog who's 'a bit of this and a bit of that'.

But this dog looked like her!

Ever-so-casually, I said to the woman with him, 'What breed is your dog?'

She replied, 'He's maltese/shih-tsu/poodle.'

My heartbeat sped up. That's what we think Penny is. I said, 'Did you buy him from your vet?'

'Yes!" she exclaimed.

OMG! This was Penny's brother. When we decided to get our first-ever dog, we didn't know whether we could cope with two dogs, as beginners. We paid for Penny and left her to grow a little older with the one remaining litter mate, but said that if he was unsold when we returned for her, we would take him too. We had mixed feelings when we heard someone had bought him.

It was wonderful to know he has a loving home and is happy.

Penny's named after the copper coin, because of her puppy colouring, but has long since become a blonde. He, on the other hand, is still coppery. When you see them together, the difference is plain.

It was such a happy and exciting meeting that I can't resist posting lots of photos.