A 'ROCKY HIKE'

Dear Furiends,

Thank you so very much for ALL your get-well wishes for Mummy. Those hugs and licks and wags help her more than any medication, she says. We have been cheering her up with lots of gooey kisses like the ones Bookerman and Asa sent for her. Her cold is better but she says she has some sort of urinary tract infection from stones in her kidneys.

No, don’t get worried. It is all her fault, actually. Jabblog is SO right. ..!
Mummy has known since ages that she has those stones and is supposed to drink plenty of water to flush them out. But on most days the bottle of water that she carries in her bag comes back just half emptied! And we were told she is supposed to drink FOUR litres per day?
Can you believe it, she gets paranoid WE are not taking enough water in this heat and might form stones too and pours water down our throats with a hose!! No amount of protesting helps.
DOG! Does she mean to choke us to death?
Now, we cannot do the same to her and so you see the results.

Moreover, she is supposed to cut down on all oxalates and calcium and caffeine. In short, everything that is nice and yummy!
But No, don’t feel sorry for her. She hasn’t been doing anything of that sort. In fact, she has been gorging on Mangoes and ice-cream and chocolates and cold-coffee! Arms to beat the intolerable heat, she says!!

So even though we feel bad that she is a little sick, we think it is all her fault. We (including Daddy) feel a little guilty too, because we have been getting generous shares from her bowls and we never complained.
Hopefully, she will see some sense now that she is actually feeling unwell.

Anyways, we got her to help us post about our weekend pawdventure..our ‘rock-hike’.
There are a number of these rockscapes dotting the city. These are about 2500 years old natural rocks formed by hardened lava from ancient volcanic eruptions.
For the more imaginative types, the rocks take the form of a mushroom, a frog, a tortoise. This place that we went to had one that looked like, we feel, a giant eagle sitting poised over the city.

It will not be long before most of these rocks are gone for ever. No, not earthquakes. Neither the wind nor the sun, but humans again. These rocks are being regularly blasted away to make way for human habitations. There is a 'Society to save the Rocks' trying to create some awareness.BUT mummy says they can probably just save a pawful.
Why can’t they keep the rocks and make a nice park where all of us can go play. There isn’t one decent park where we can go to without someone screaming in terror ‘take the dogs away!’
Silly SILLY humans!
Anyway, we had a lovely time that day. As you can see, there wasn't anyone around for miles and we could explore the terrain without a care.

(Mummy was more interested in the rockscape than us!Can u spot us?)

(WOWIE!!We found a cave!!)

(Buddy got immediately busy!)

(Oh!Whoever you are down there, PLEASE come out)

(Inspite of asking nicely, cajoling, crying and trying everything possible, nobody came out)

(Buddy tried calling another family of lizards, but to no avail)

(Hrrrmph!How rude.We only wanted to play)

(Ginger decided not to waste a perfectly beautiful evening and explore instead)

(Buddy was still busy. So it is just Mummy n Me)

(An Obelisk!Mummy was reminded of Dan Brown and his symbology!)

(Did someone want to say, 'I conquered'?)

(The sun soon decided to retire for the night..)  

(We too headed home...)

We really wish all of you were here.
We had a great time that day. And mummy says hopefully we can go back many times before someone destroys all those lovely rocks.
Whatever will happen to the Squirrel and Chameleon and Lizard families there?

Pondering,
,

JUST A HELLO

Dear Furiends,
Hope you all had a lot of fun over the weekend.
Mummy isn't feeling very well, beginnings of a cold from what it looks like. So today we can't post a 'real post'.
She took a little time off to update her own blog and has agreed to help us post this photograph.

This is from our weekend 'Rock-climbing' trip...err..sort of...! It was more 'Walking on Rocky Terrain' than climbing! But it was a lot of fun!
Will get her to write about it later and also post some more (read, more flattering) pictures.

Till then, keep wagging. We will come visit you all soon.

,

A BIRD Gets Personal Training!!!

There was this interesting article on Friday 4th June, in the newspaper Mummy and Daddy subscribes to, that we want to share with you.


It said, ‘Obese kookabura gets a gym, personal trainer’
!!!!
Now, Really! A Gym and personal trainer for a Bird? And here we have to run till we drop, everyday. In this heat too.

Here's the picture from the newspaper- 'THE TIMES OF INDIA"

(The Laughing Kookaburra bird with her trainer!)

And this is the news clip that was published:

An Australian kookaburra bird is undergoing personal training after growing too fat to fly because she ate too many sausages.
The kookaburra got into trouble with her weight when residents at a Sydney park began feeding her sausages at barbecues. The porky kookaburra weighed in at 565g, nearly 40% heavier than a normal adult bird, rendering her so unfit she couldn’t fly.
“Out in the wild she’d eat a whole small animals, but sausages are just too much of a good thing,” said Gemma Watkinson, Sydney’s Taronga Zoo wildlife hospital nurse. A Sydney resident brought the bird to the zoo after spotting dogs chasing her along the ground. REUTERS

SIGH! Why do we Dwags have to walk and run everyday, battling the sun and the rain, and not get an air-conditioned gym?
And we never get enough sausages too.

,

A GLIMPSE of MY PUPPYHOOD

Guess what these are?

One day when I was this little puppy, daddy and I were playing Football on our terrace. I jumped up to nose-kick the ball, as i always did. Suddenly there was blood trickling down the angle of my mouth. Daddy was horrified and instantly guilty, thinking he had broken something with that football.

But guess what? It was just a loose baby tooth that had fallen off!!! I was more intrigued than anything with all the fuss daddy was creating. The bleeding stopped immediately afterwards and over time, my (very lovely) permanent teeth grew back.

Of course mummy kept those two teeth. Actually it is just one tooth and a small chip off another.

(You can see how tiny they are actually)

I don’t know what happened to all the other baby teeth. They had fallen off sometime or the other, without me or Mummy or Daddy noticing.
Mummy is very, very glad and thinks she is lucky she could collect those two. She says it is a part of my puppyhood, preserved forever.

PEE ESS: Sometimes Mummy feels a little bad that we never got to see any of Buddy’s puppyhood. He is a real sweetheart and she thinks he must have been a cutie-pie as a puppy. We could get just one puppy picture of him from his earlier family. Will post it someday for you.
But we are very thankful he is with us now.

Wags,

,

TRUE COLOUR THURSDAY #6

RASPBERRY, Raspberry, RASPBERRY!


Frankly, we haven’t even seen a raspberry. Mummy says she has had it probably just about twice in her entire life till date! And here we are supposed to play TCT on Raspberry??
Berries are rare in this part of the world. We get to see just strawberries in the supermarkets, packed in fancy boxes and sold at a ridiculous price!
That too for just about a month in the whole year, when the hill stations and relatively colder (north and north-east) parts of our country produce them.

We didn’t even know there were many different colours of this fruit till we researched for our TCT today!

Courtesy: Google

But we did know about a number of benefits associated with this fruit.

1. Source of Anti-oxidants (50% higher antioxidant activity than strawberries) and vitamins that help build up immunity.
2. Anti-cancer properties
3. Prevents Age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), the primary cause of vision loss in older adults
4. One of the few fruits which has very little impact on blood-sugar levels. So safe in diabetics.

We know Mummy hands out generous advice about benefits of healthy eating to her patients. But personally we believe it is much easier to pop one multi-vitamin and anti-oxidant pill daily!!!
Daddy says the world will anyway reach a stage when we will just pop a pill for everything!
Dog forbid!
Oh! We are diverting from the topic!

We found a few interesting facts about the history of raspberries we want to share with you.
a. Wild raspberries are thought to have originated in eastern Asia.
b. Early hunter-gatherers, travellers and their animals spread the seeds all over the world.
c. The first record of raspberries being cultivated is found in an English book on herbal medicine dated 1548.
d. Varieties such as the loganberry and boysenberry are thought to have emerged from accidental or intentional crossbreeding in Europe and Northern America.
e. Today, the largest producers of raspberries include Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany, Chile and the United States.

We tried our best to find ‘raspberry’ around us.
Please tell us you like what we found, **(wink)** because we are not very happy with what we could manage this time.
The first place was the refrigerator. The bread-box cover looked pretty much ‘raspberry’ to us but once photographed, it looks more pinkish :(

This container says ‘Blueberry and Raspberry’. But don’t you feel the artist (not at all a good one. Honestly, look at his drawings) has his colours all mixed up?

Mummy’s spectacle frame and Mummy’s hair-clutch are better examples, definitely.

Hint of Raspberry in this cushion in mummy’s cozy corner.

Raspberry in Mummy’s wardrobe. She loves this dress!

A raspberry candle in Mummy’s zen-garden. ..Sniff..sniff…lovely fragnance!

A transparent gel candle. Can it qualify as raspberry? we secretly think it doesn't really, but suspect Mummy photographed it because she loves it!

Raspberry flowers in this bed-cover.

And of course, we have to include Mummy’s library as usual. This dust-jacket was the closest to raspberry amongst ALL her books.

Then, there is this miniature 'Ginger' in a pretty raspberry frock, sitting beside a raspberry mug on Daddy’s table.

Oh! We almost forgot. A squeaky toy in our toy-basket in Raspberry.

This one is the best! This fixed-fruit jam claims to have some raspberry among other fruits.

(Ginger wasn't in the mood)

(Buddy, our Family clean-up guy, did the honours!)

We really hope you liked them all. And if you want to play along, please let 'BLUE' ,who is the host of this lovely meme, know,
Wags,

,

Sand Bubbler Crab: FACE OF THE WEEK #2

Our ‘Face of the Week’ this time, is this little fellow-‘The Sand Bubbler Crab’

Remember our trip to the beach? We found him and a number of his friends pottering around, religiously making these lovely patterns.
Mummy told me to stand absolutely still and not dig after him so she could get a few photos of him. And being the good girl that I am, I let her.
I am glad because I think he is a very interesting and artistic little fellow and I am very pleased to present to you his exclusive photos, up close and personal!
Don’t you think the patterns he makes are exquisite?

We researched him for you. And here are some cool facts about our ‘Face of the Week’.

1. He is also called ‘The Soldier Crab’ because he sometimes moves around in large herds.
2. The small balls of sand he forms are called Crab-Pellets. He scrapes the sand into his mouth, sifts any organic, edible matter and rejects the sand grains in the form of a ball!
3. He breathes through his legs! He has a little membrane in his legs which helps in exchange of oxygen.
4. He has some stiff hair on his underbelly that helps him stick to the sand and draw water from between the grains of sand for rehydration in the heat.
5. He is very sensitive and quickly withdraws into his burrow at the slightest hint of movement may it be life-forms around him, a flying leaf or a plastic bag, only to re-emerge
6. When the tide comes in, he withdraws inside and seals his burrow. And he waits for the next low-tide so he can go back to his pottering!

Even as we watched, a large wave washed off his beautiful handiwork, bringing with it a small conch but making our little friend disappear into his home.
Till the next tide, I am told?

Pee Ess: Thank you so very much, Dear Pawple, for the understanding our predicament (and inconvenience due to our Secretary-Editor’s busy-ness).
We are glad to have so many Furiends who understand. Btw, we still are struggling to catch up with you all, but rest assured we will definitely make it.

If you want to see more faces, please visit 'Spacial Peepol' . Maybe you will want to join this meme.
Wags,