Sunday, June 26, 2011

Doing Some Catching Up:)


We have been given this award not once but twice in the last week:)  A week that has been so busy that I hadn't been able to do a post to thank the lovely Caron, Zephyr and Astro at Hiking Hounds for the first award.  Caron is an inspiration in herself the way she is handling Zephyr's struggle with encephalitis and very scary seizures.  Please go and visit if you haven't already and say hi.

The second award was given to us just a little while ago by the talented Sue and her beautiful Greyhound, Song at Graceful Greyhounds.  Sue makes the most amazing crafted cards.  They have to be seen to be believed.  I am in awe of her talent and imagination!  She and Song love visitors and comments and if you pop over you'll be made very welcome.

Now I'm in a bit of a quandary.  Most awards come with 'rules' attached and this one is to pass the award on to 10 blogs who inspire you.  Well, there are lots of blogs who inspire me and I passed on my last Versatile Blogger Award to 13 of them and this award has been doing the rounds and has pretty much been passed on to every blog I read at least once!  But I think I can find a few that have slipped through the radar:)

Karen and her gorgeous Visla, Jersey, are at Doggie Stylish.  Karen manages to post at least once, often twice a day.  She must spend hours scouring the WWW for wonderful photos and videos to entertain us. Karen also makes stunning dog collars and Beryl has her eye on a particular one that I think she'll be wearing not long after I get my tax refund, lol!

Next is 24 Paws of Love who write wonderful, often thought provoking posts.  Always from the heart and todays post I really wish I had written myself, except I couldn't have done it nearly as well.

Then there are the 3 gorgeous Rotties, Bart, Gizmo and Ruby over at Rottrover.  The beautiful Ruby has entered a competition to win a cyber-date with the Relentlessly Huge Mango the Mastiff who is having a few seizure problems but has recovered enough to think about getting his glad rags on and taking out a very lucky 4-legged lady on the adventure of a lifetime:)  I think that's pretty inspirational!

And some new friends at Love and a Six Foot Leash deserve the award for the work they do fostering and sometimes rehabilitating Pitbulls until they're ready for their forever homes.  Aleksandra takes wonderful photos that really capture the character of their fosters:)

So there you are.  I know it's only 5 blogs instead of 10 but if I don't stop now this will be all the post I get done tonight!  And I haven't even put in a photo yet!  But that's easily fixed:)

Yesterday we came across an old friend of Frankie's who we hadn't seen for about 18 months.  He and Tigger hadn't forgotten each other and they had a wonderful reunion:)

Tigger is a bit of a funny chap and doesn't like every dog he meets.  I was hoping he'd like Beryl but she gave him a look that spoke volumes and he quickly decided that he'd stick with Frankie:)
Don't even think about messing with me Shorty!
Next catching up is our DWTDS competition has been judged and while we didn't win a prize we are so glad we were a part of it all:)  It was a lot of fun and again I'd like to thank Honey and Hsin-Yi for coming up with the idea and hosting it.  I think they're going to have a bit of a well deserved rest for a while now!  The winner chosen by the judges and also viewers votes was an absolutely delightful miniature dachshund, Prana.  Here's his video if you'd like to check his performance out.  It's worth watching just to see his little tail never stop wagging!  You can't help but smile the whole way through:)


Today on our walk at the river Frankie made another new friend, Lucas, a lovely young Irish Terrier.  Frankie quickly became his hero and Lucas had a lot of fun tagging along with him.
Wait for me Frankie!
Beryl got sick of Frankie having all the fun with other dogs the past couple of days so she thought she'd show him she was still fun too ...
I'm not so sure he thought it was fun, lol!
I've been really busy working the past couple of weeks but one night the week before that Beryl and I managed an outing to the opening of a new horse equipment shop along with a few other GAP Greyhounds.  Beryl really wanted to let rip around the shop and steal food off the table and grab some stuffie toy horses off the shelves but she restrained herself and everyone kept commenting how laid back and well behaved all the hounds were.
My eyes are going to burst if you don't let me at the food!
We also found time to try out a new walk we'd been told about.  It's not as good as down the river but it's not too bad.  I kept Frankie on the lead seeing as we hadn't been there before.

The walk is about 5 kms long and leads to the patch of bush you can see in the photo above which has a walk through it.  I was surprised how long it took us.

There wasn't anywhere for Beryl to let rip and have a run but it made a change to go somewhere different.

They both went on the lead when we walked through the bush reserve.  I didn't see any playing fields, lol!

Frankie got to go off lead on the way back.  So much to look at:)  We've only done this walk the once so far, but we'll go back again.  The kids have missed out on a few walks as I've been going to work in the dark and getting home in the dark but they've been good and not pestered me too much:)

Tomorrow we've got a GAP Greyhound walk in the afternoon so hopefully I'll have some good photos. I'll have to take Frankie for his walk in the morning so I'll be getting plenty of exercise too:)

Something else I've been researching and working on the past few weeks is shifting my blog over to Wordpress.  Being me I've decided to start at the finish and have it self hosted.  But boy, can I see lots of potential for me to stuff things up!  It will be a while before I make the move and any words of advice from those who have done it already would be appreciated.  I have already got my domain name and signed up with a host but it's dealing with themes I have to contend with now.  How do you shift over all the blogs you follow, one at a time?  I'm hoping to import this blog to my new one so have to find out how to do that.  It all takes time and reading through forums and stuff.  Oh well, it's keeping me out of mischief and giving me a challenge:)

Oh, and it's Saturday so it's time for the

It's hosted by Life With Dogs, Two Little Cavaliers and Confessions of the Plume and you can find the rules on any of their sites.  Why don't you join in?

Have a wonderful weekend:)

14 comments:

Cherie K. Miller said...

Loved the dancing doxie! Thanks for sharing all of your pics, they were great!

I'm dropping by the pet blog hop today - stop by to see the gorilla at the Calgary Zoo enjoying a little fun: http://www.pet-peeves.org/2011/06/25/calgary-zoos-breakdancing-gorilla/

Pamela said...

Wow, that's a big old blog post with all kinds of interesting stuff going on.

First--congratulations on the award. And you pass it along to some great ones too!

Second--loved the pix from the dog park and your walk. Did you notice, however, that the picture telling you to leash your dog was of a German Shepherd? I don't know if it applies to greyhounds and pig dogs.

Third--Good luck in moving over to WP and being self hosted. I've always been on WP so I don't know what kinds of glitches could come up when you move from Blogger. But WP has all kinds of plugins to help you do stuff. You might want to search online for plugins to move your blogroll over or do other tasks.

I started self hosting a few months ago and the transition was much easier than I expected.

Good luck. Can't wait to see you at your new site.

rottrover said...

Beryl and Frankie! Congratulations on your award and THANK YOU so much for thinking of us! This was a great post - we loved meeting your furiends! Frankie is quite the sociable fellow!! We visited the other blogs that you awarded to and are now following several of them. Thanks again!

-Gizmo, Bart and Ruby

Sue said...

Tigger looks a cutie. Had to smile at Beryls look to him though.

Lucas looks a mischevious chap. Watch out Frankie, he'll lead you astray:)

Now surely after being so good at the store, Beryl got some treats.

The new walk looks interesting.

Hope your switch to Wordpress goes smoothly.

24 Paws of Love said...

Congratulations on the award. I have always loved your blog.

Thank you so much for your kind words about our blog, they have meant a great deal to me and we really appreciate it. Thank you for the award.

We love finding new places to walk. And it looks like the dogs were having a good time.

I don't know much about switching to wordpress but I have heard it is usually easier than it seems. Good luck!

Karen Friesecke said...

Thank-you very much for the lovely award! I'd like to say that Jersey is blushing from the compliment, but she already knows that she is really, really ridiculously good looking!

Since you have an eye on one of my collars for Beryl, please let me know what you would like. Pick one out for Frankie, too. These are my gift to you!

you can contact me at info{at} doggiestylish{dot}com

houndstooth said...

I think you picked some great blogs to pass the award on to! Passing on awards is the thing I struggle the most with when my turn comes.

I still envy you your GAP get togethers! You have no idea how much I wish we had other Greyhounds to socialize with here.

That looks like a fantastically lovely place to walk! Bunny says she's free to tag along any time.

I don't know who you're hosting the new blog through, but I use Fat Cow. They've been outstanding on customer service. There's a widget you can get that will import your blog from Blogger into the new blog. It worked wonderfully for me! There's also a Google Friend Connect widget that I highly recommend, as well as Akismet. Akismet is a spam filter and it is very worth it to install!

Kristin G. said...

Congrats on your award! Very cool!! It looks like you had lots of fun on your walk. I always enjoy seeing Beryl in action. Such a good looking hound.

I think it's great you participated in the dance competition. I know that takes a lot of work, but looks like such a good time. That little dachshund has some awesome moves.

I moved from Blogger to WordPress, but like Carrie I use Fat Cow as a host too. I won't say the move wasn't without challenges, but I kind of enjoy solving problems, so it was ok with me. Now that all the work is done, I'm really glad I made the move. Good luck to you!

Kristine said...

Congratulations on the award, and on making the decision to change to a self-hosted platform. I just changed recently myself and while there were some unexpected problems, I am definitely glad I made the switch. Good luck figuring out that details. It's always good to learn new things, right? I have no doubt you will master the new system in no time.

Tigger is such an interesting-looking dog! I didn't realise how short he was until I saw him next to Beryl.

I hope you had a great time at the Greyhound meet-up!

genji said...

Congrats on the award. Will check out some of the links. After reading this, I feel the need to take my kids for a walk.

Unknown said...

gosh - that does look like a packed week!

I've always been on Wordpress from the very start (tried Blogger too) and much prefer it - although you don't have as many "social networking" benefits as it is not linked to Google so you don't get "followers" and stuff like that - but that certainly hasn't affected our blog traffic or making friends or anything! I find the Wordpress editing panel much easier to use than Blogger and you can do a lot more too with your layout, etc - it also seems to have a lot less issues than Blogger - I'm constantly seeing our Blogger friends having trouble with uploading pictures or commenting or signing in or whatever! I guess it's sort of like Mac Vs PC.

The "themes" isn't that complicated at all - you have the same thing in Blogger, except I think it's called a different name? They are just predesigned templates and you get a big gallery of "themes" to choose from - and you can even preview your blog in it before deciding to use it - just a click that's all - and then you can always change back. You have far more variations and options in Wordpress for diff layouts in the page - having the sidebar on the left or right, having 1 or 2 or even 3 sidebars or the sidebar at the bottom or all sorts of other fancy stuff.

You don't have to make the whole change in one go, you know - you could always import your blog to Wordpress first and spend some time getting used to the new buttons/ways of doing things and learn your way around the blogging software - and then make the move to self-hosting. I made the switch last year and although I had some problems (mainly because I didn't choose a well-tested, "popular" theme - I tried to intall a privately designed one - you're better to go with the popular, tested WP ones) - overall, I'm really pleased I made the move. But in my case, I hardly notcied the change in my day-to-day dealings on the blog because it still uses the same WP software - whereas in your case, if it's all new to you, it might be worth you swapping to WP first and spending some time getting used to it, rather than trying to do everything at once. You'll have enough hiccups & glitches that come up through self-hosting, without adding your unfamiliarity with WP on top of the stress! :-)

Good luck!
Hsin-Yi

georgia little pea said...

congrats on the award!

i'm feeling your quandry over the shift to wordpress. i'd love to as well but i think it's all a bit beyond me. i always have a problem scrolling down your blog. has anyone else ever mentioned this?

love the pics of playtime. that Beryl Look *BOL* - looks mighty familiar :p

Unknown said...

I forgot to add that even on 'free' Wordpress (wordpress.com) - you can still have your blog under your own domain name, for a small fee a year (about $15, I think) - this was one of the reasons I chose WP coz I didn't want to have "blogspot" or "wordpress" in my URL - so in WP, you can have the option of purchasing a domain name through them or just linking your WP blog to an existing domain name you already have and then people can just type in the simple URL (eg. 'greyhoundscansit.com') and they will be automatically redirected to your WP blog (your actual blog URl would be something like "greyhoundscansit.wordpress.com" but nobody need ever know that)

When you move to self-hosting, you can then repoint your domain to your new host server and disconnect it from your WP blog (which will just remain there). Of course, you could just do the whole move in 1 go too.

one thing to note is that you cannot put ads on your free WP blog - unlike Blogger which lets you partner with Google Adsense, etc - with WP, all the blogs are ad-free - unless you self-host. But I don't know how much you're making from your ads at the moment anyway and so how much of a loss that would be.

Hsin-Yi

World of Animals, Inc said...

It's so wonderful seeing you having a great time. We know that you all don't need a leash. You are all so well behaved. Thanks for sharing the wonderful photos. Have a great day.
World of Animals

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