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:)

Our DWTDS Entries Are A Wrap, Yay!!

Yep, all done and dusted, whew:)  Before I show them to you I better explain the background to our costumes and music.  Most people know Beryl and I are both Australian but New Zealand is home and I thought we'd have a real fair dinkum (oops, sorry, that's an Aussie saying!) Kiwi flavour to our routine.  And you can't get more Kiwi than Footrot Flats which is an iconic cartoon strip that ran for many years in the papers, was published quite a few times in booklet form, and eventually made into an animated movie.  Footrot Flats 'starred' a farmer called Wal and his faithful Border Collie sheepdog called Dog.

The author, Murray Ball, was born in Feilding where we live.

OK, so I'm Wal and Beryl is Dog and we're performing (dancing isn't the best description for our routine!) to Slice of Heaven which was the hit song from the movie.  If you want to check Dave Dobbyn and Herbs singing it have a quick look at this ...



And here is a close up of Beryl modeling part of her costume

Beryl and her bandana

Some more excuses background ... most of you know I get lost going around Rally O and Rally Zoom courses where the stations are not only numbered but also tell you what to do at each station.  So I confess to not having done any choreography except for the beginning and end of our routine.  Funnily enough they are both the same!!  And we nailed them, lol:)  The rest involved a lot of improvisation on both our parts.  At times I go wandering off without Beryl, I've got our next moved planned but forget to tell her what it is.  Other times she'll chuck in a move that she thinks is appropriate.  And I totally forgot to include her marching, duh, and I filmed about 5 different versions.  Enough of my babbling, here is the World Premiere of Beryl and Sue DWTDS - and I think I deserve a medal for my costume, I couldn't have flung anything less flattering together, but I look more like Wal than Wal does lol!


But wait - there's more!  We can't leave Frankie out.  The excuses background for his video is that he had not 1 second of training, no run throughs of things he can do and the choreography is pretty much all his:)  You will notice he isn't wearing the angel wings, they would have been shredded in 10 seconds, lol.

Without further ago here is the World Premiere of Frankie and Sue DWTDS (insert drum roll)


We'd like to thank Honey and Hsin-Yi for coming up with the idea of the competition and all the work they've put into their training tips and videos and the encouragement they've given to those of us who are feeling less than adequate:)  You two are a really special team!

Beryl and I had a lot of fun and we haven't finished yet, I'm determined we'll get the marching thing down and who knows what else?  Frankie had lots of fun just being himself and participating:)

Now we can relax and look forward to watching all the entries roll in and seeing lots of lovely dogs of all shapes and sizes having fun with their people!  You/we all ROCK and are winners because we participated:)