Today was sunny, without too much wind.
It was Sunday. Church day. Meet my friends and worship God together day.
I bought a roast chicken for lunch with the kids; it was delicious.
I watched a movie and crotcheted, then Hubby and I walked Kiya together.
I was able to clear up a GoCard issue (very needed) and now I”m heading for an early night, in preparation for a big week ahead.
It’s good to be able to count blessings, isn’t it?
Have a blessed day yourself, dear Reader!
It’s just a few days to Winter Solstice, and I am SOOOOOO glad about that! The idea that the days start getting longer again is completely and utterly BRILLIANT because I find this cold weather so darn paralysing 🙁
I think I mentioned that Hubby and I bought Kiya a coat. A couple of them, actually (we’d never bought animal clothing before and had no clue what we were doing). The wrap-around, velcro-secured ‘jacket’ was a size too small, so that was an immediate donation to Mum’s 10 month old border collie Trav. The woollen-style ‘jumper’ was the correct size, but our clever gurly worked out how to get out of it… without ripping apart the ‘arms’ at the seams! So she was able to wear it for over a week before the seams came apart and it became a rag.
Fast foward to yesterday. Temperature feels like -2C with a wind chill of -957C or something. And poor Kiya with no coat. Necessitating a trip to the store, and now: a new, brown, wrap-around ‘jacket’ to match Trav’s army-green one.
And just in the nick of time. On Wednesday nights Kiya and I have a sleepever at Mum’s / Trav’s place… and check out the two of them in their snazzy coats!
(Sorry for the blurry-ness of the photos, it was dark already and we’d only just arrived and the two pups were so excited I couldn’t get them still enough!)
Still, I reckon they’re cuteness personified. And that patch of white near the bottom of Kiya’s brown coat is *not* a rip, courtesy Trav, where the stuffing is coming out. It’s actually a white, embrodiered, paw print 🙂
Here’s hoping you also get a cuteness overload today, dear Reader!
Back on June 7, I bought Kiya a new toy. Huge, thick. Indestructible, or so I thought.
This morning’s photo shows not only how loved it has been, but also just how wrong I was.
Sigh. Destructo-gurl for the win. Again! You’ve got to admit though, she’s a source of continual amusement 🙂
She loves it. She’s even napping with it, as I write:
(She turned her head to face me, to check out what I was doing, just as I took the photo. lol)
Have an amusing day yourself, dear Reader!
– KRidwyn
I found a waterfall today. I’ve visited this particular park in Nambour nearly every Wednesday during term time for the past year or so. Today was the first time I decided to take my dog Kiya with me while we waited for Mr15 to have his oboe lesson.
Imagjne my surprise when we discovered a waterfall at the end of the path!
Here’s hoping you too had a day of lovely surprises, dear Reader!
– KRidwyn
I’ve decided that I need to slow down; be aware of where I am and what I am doing.
You see, the other week I was told I’d be teaching a Year 7 Art class this semester. To be exact, it was to co-teach with the Art teacher… but my first reaction was to panic.
So I’ve reflected quite a bit since then, coming to grips with ‘why do I feel this way’…and I’ve realised that it’s my ‘busy-busy-busy’ mindset that I’ve developed over 49 years that’s caused it. The way. I figure: if I “cram as much as possible into life” then certain things are more valuable, time-wise, than others. In other words, I’m “too busy” to sit and draw. Or sit and paint. Or sit, even. (Even when watching TV with Hubby, I’m back to crotcheting, seeing as I now no longer have books to cover.)
I’m not sure I particularly like this about myself. If I’m rushing through life, am I even enjoying it? Hubby said once that I made roadrunner look slow. Which was funny… but in hindsight, also an indictment?
So I’ve started trying, intentionally, to be observant of my ‘moments’. Which brings me to my beetle, and my puppy.
You see, I had my beautiful bug serviced the week just gone. And it was discovered that the back pair of tyres was 7 years old. The front pair, however, was 22!
So on Tuesday just gone, I drove it back up to Cooroy to drop it off, and then collected it Thursday evening with 5 brand new tyres. And on the drive home, my 12 month old kelpie, Kiya, sat beside me.
And life was good. Driving my beautiful bug, kelpie by my side, happy and healthy and at the beginning of a long weekend (happy Australia Day, for those of you who celebrate it!) was such a pleasure! And all the more so, realising that I was ‘awake’ in that moment and knowing it for the joy that it was.
Sigh. May I be cognizant of many more… and I wish the same for you too, dear Reader!
Have a wonderful week 🙂
Mum has a new friend. Her first ever dog. ‘Trav’ – the travelling dog 🙂
Isn’t he just adorable!
Have a lovable month yourself, dear Reader!
Check out my boy! I’ve taken to running with him in the mornings, down to my writing spot. Here he’s intently waiting for a bird to fly low enough to be caught… willing him down with that stare, he hopes.
Unsurprisingly, the bird didn’t succumb. Not for lack of trying on my dog’s part though 🙂
Have a ‘focused’ week yourself, dear Reader!
KRidwyn
I’ve always preferred cats to dogs – or so I thought, until falling in love with my first dog when Hubby and I, newlyweds, visited a German Shepherd breeder.
I fell, hard. We bought one, and drove him home, naming him ‘Smudge’ just before he decided to vomit on my lap. (Lucky the towel he was wrapped in caught the majority of it!) At home, we introduced him to our Ragdoll kitten, ‘Rascal’, and there we were – married just a few short months, and a ‘family’ of four already!
The years passed, and pets came and went. After Rascal though, there were just dogs. Even now, we have Aksel (another German Shepherd) and Rocky (Australian Cattle Dog, and the best snake-killer you’ve ever seen…) but no cats.
And I’ve decided I miss them. So once the renovations are completed, we’ll be getting another one. I must admit – I’m looking forward to that day more than I realised!
So let’s hear it for the kitten 🙂
And have a great day, dear Reader!
— KRidwyn
Don’t you hate it when you hear yourself saying something, and as the words leave your mouth you instantly know you’ve said the wrong thing? You mentally kick yourself for saying it, but by the time you realise what’s just happened, the damage is done. Even if you’d like to take it back, it’s impossible. No matter how hard you try! The mistake is irreversible.
That was me, just last week. I guess it *is* a funny story though…
It all started when one of my best friends invited me and my family to her place for dinner. She had thought that my girls will be entranced by the guinea pigs that she had just bought for her three kids, but they were far more taken by her fish tank. You see, we have two tanks (mine and Miss 7’s) but our tanks are nothing like hers. Compared to hers, ours appeared dull and lifeless. Hers looked like an aquatic paradise!
One of the main differences was the sheer amount of weed in her tank, that made it look so interesting, and fun to watch the fish darting around, and (apparently!) playing ‘Tiggy’ and ‘Hide and Seek’. So the following day, the kids and I visited a local pet shop.
Unfortunately, this particular pet shop had its ‘Live weed’ tank separated quite a distance from the fish tanks. In fact, it was adjacent to a large cage full of newborn kittens. And yes, you can probably tell where this story is heading. Yes, the kids came with me to look at what the ‘shop guy’ was doing. Yes, they got bored because it was just a tank of weed, and there weren’t any interesting fish to look at in said tank. Yes, they started whingeing. So yes, I *did* try to distract them by pointing out the kittens. As in, the same kittens which they had, up until that point, been *completely* and *utterly* oblivious to.
Long story short, it would seem that we now have to buy a kitten for our family. Yay…
Oh – and this is my tank, with $25 worth of weed to make it more interesting. Yes – it doesn’t go too far when it’s such a large tank! Hopefully though, it’ll grow… LOL!
When I was growing up, I was a ‘cat’ person. I never really thought about being a ‘dog’ person. To me, they were smelly, loud, rough creatures that I knew of but had little do to with. My family had a cat. We had ducks. We had mice. We had guinea pigs, and fish. But no dogs.
So the first time I bought a puppy, I was 23 years old. Hubby and I had been married for a couple of years, and we owned a gorgeous grey “Ragdoll” cat named Rascal, but we were just browsing in a big pet barn one day (I have no idea why we were there; we just were…) and we both saw him at the same time. And it was love at first sight.
He was a male German Shepherd puppy, 7 weeks old, all floppy ears and huge floppy paws. We named him “Smudge” and he was a great dog. Huge (eventually), dominant, but completely loyal. And he loved us, and he loved chasing Rascal. But mostly he loved Patch, the blue healer we bought about a year later. The two became inseparable, and so it was hard when we had to put Smudge down. But that same afternoon, a very emotional Hubby bought our second Shepherd, Storm. She was from a breeder, and had a ‘glamour’ coat, which is halfway between a long haired and a short haired coat. Again, she was a gorgeous dog. Very sweet nature. She coped tremendously with a grieving Patch, and when he eventually needed to be put down (cancer), was more than happy to accept a black labrador pup, who we named Max.
Just a few years ago, Storm passed on. She’d eaten something she shouldn’t and her death was sudden and very traumatic for Hubby, who had lost his sister just a few months prior. Max soldiered on, half blind, mostly deaf, and partially lame, and bravely dealt with the puppy attacks of Aksel, Hubby’s next German Shepherd pup (short haired, this time). Then late last year, when we knew that Max was getting the worse for wear – Aksel was just too boisterous for him – we bought Rocky. He was a 7 month old Blue Heeler, whose owner, being physically disabled and about to move into a home, was no longer able to keep him. Aksel and Rocky bonded pretty quickly, and although they both were confused by Max’s passing in early January this year, their close friendship meant that there wasn’t the ‘grieving’ that our other dogs seems to go through.
Phew! That was a longer story than I had expected it would be!
Anyway, I started this entry with cats, so that’s how I’ll finish it. You see, I miss having a cat. But I don’t know how one would fit into our lives right now…