Dog with a problem

Val was moving bricks from one side of our ruin to the other, but our dog Samwise kept making things difficult by trying to bite the wheelbarrow wheel.

Then he dropped his ball into the wheelbarrow.

"There it is, throw it for me."

Val ignored it and kept loading the bricks, and Samwise got more and more agitated as his ball disappeared under a pile of bricks.



Eventually Samwise could take it no more, and started moving the bricks to retrieve his ball. Once he had it, he retired to a safe distance and looked repoachfully at those who would not throw his ball, but hid it under brioks.

Sitting dogs

Our dogs waiting for permission to eat breakfast: Samwise, Ariel and Squiffylugs..

Our dogs kill a rat

This morning I went to the dentist at 9:30, was finished by 10:00, and got back home at about 10:15 to find that our dogs had killed a rat. A large rat. Or at least some kind of rodent.



That's our dog Ariel with the rat.

I'm just wondering what it was doing in the garden, and hoping it didn't have rabies. Perhaps I'd better take the dogs to the vet for jabs just in case.

Spring is here!

It's been a colder winter than we've had for a long time, though not as cold as those I remember from my youth, But a couple of days ago the first new leaves started appearing on our mulberry tree.



The mulberry tree is the second biggest tree in our garden, but was not here when we moved in 25 years ago, It must have been self-sown from one across the road near the railway line, from which the kids used to collect leaves in the days when they kept silkworms. We never see much fruit from it, though. It's too big, and most of the branches are too high to reach, so the birds get most of it. In about October there are huge flocks of very fat doves swarming over and around it. And when the fruit that the birds leave drops, our dogs eat eat it, spending days on end under the tree until there is nothing more to get.



Our oldest dog Ariel (in the picture) is the greatest lover of mulberries, but the other dogs enjoy them too. Ariel is a cross Alsatian-Border Collie, and we hoped when she had puppies they might look a bit like her. She had several, but we had to sell most of them, and the one we kept isn't black with white patches, but is black with brindled patches, and neaver learnt ear control, so we call her Squiffylugs. Her father is a pure Alsatian.