A nice long walk ...

An Alternate title could probably have been "A day in the life of a dog" ... seeing I probably would have only had to Add a little bit to include the other things Diesel did that day.
(woke up when DH did, went for a morning walk with him, came home and slept until I woke up - which was rather late due to the night owl habits I seem to have in the school holidays when I am not at work, alternated between following his people around (to see what was going on as they came and went and did stuff, and try and get toshare any nice food they may have) and sleeping until the thunderstorm came - at which time running around the back yard barking at the thunderclaps seemed like a fun thing to do - no, no fear there - just that they were right overhead and loud, so barking back at them seemed like a good game ... at which time I decided that it would be nice to go for a walk ... after which the previous activities of the day resumed - alternating between keeping an eye on what his people were doing and sleeping ... ah "its a dog's life" LOL

Anyway ... back to the subject of this post ... which is also my A post for ABC Wednesday - now At the start of its 6th time Around (but I missed the first 3, and about half of the 4th and 5th rounds, and what I did post was mostly on A different blog - lol - Actually most of my posts will be At that other blog - that one is my main blog - this one belongs to my Animals - lol)

so ... here we have ... A post (not sure if it is Awsome or just Awful ;-) All (well - Almost All) About A nice walk in the rain, And the sun, And A swim ... etc:

[lots of photos go next, with comments about them]

[and this is where this post got saved as a draft and kind of forgotten about for half a week - because I ran out of evening before I Added the photos ... so now it is going to be a few days late ... or even later if I don't add all the photos and post this now - lol]

Now where do I start? - I guess A good place to start is At the beginning - I have A good excuse for including A cloud photo ... Although I think Anything in the Atmosphere Already qualifies for an A post Anyway ;-)
The weather looked a bit ominous ...

... but we went for a walk Anyway ... like I said at the start of this post - the stormy weather was WHY we went when we did - lol

yes ... we had only gone a little way when the path started getting spotty with raindrops:

... which gave me An excuse to include a photo of the flowers (not that I need An excuse to include one more photo when there Are About 30 more of the things in this post!)

Diesel didn't care about the rain - meant it was cooler so he could run around going nuts

eek - freaky looking creature eh?

we saw some skippawobbellys (slang for kangaroos and/or wallabies)

which would have been chased had they not been on the other side of the fence ... but they hopped away anyway.

guess where they hopped to? - yep closer to the dam we were planning on going to (if figured if the dog was going to get wet and muddy anyway, he may as well go for a swim and get really wet) ... so he got put on the lead to walk right past where some of them were sitting in the long grass, and around to the other side of the dam where the water was closer than the 'roos were.

I can see at least 4 'roos in the tall grass on the other side of the dam in this photo. (but I am sure there are more hiding there)
Oh goody - now the dog is having his swim, and the water is nice and clean (not all muddy) he might be a bit cleaner than he was.

of course now that he was nice and wet, and fairly clean, what must a dog do besides roll on the ground?!

oh well - I guess he will dry faster ...

except - guess what he rolled IN

yep - duck poo! ... and ugh - look at all that stinky mud/etc all over him!

so I threw something in the water so he would go back in (I couldn't find a stick so I threw in a small rock - which he will also dive in to try and fetch - lol) ... not sure how much of the duck poo washed off though ... so when he seemed to want to keep walking I decided we may as well head down to the further away and even bigger pond

which is off in the distance in the middle of this photo (you might need to click on it to go to the full size version to see it properly)

of course he ran ahead and was already in the water by the time I got there

he chases the ducks, but they swim faster than he does so he gives up and swims back again.

eek - it's the Loch Ness monster?



It is quite a big pond ...

and if you look at the water you can see it is still raining - lol (you might need to click on the photo for a bigger one again) ... but it wasn't cold so we kept walking and headed off around the pond.

The rain really brings out the colours in stuff - like this gum tree bark on the ground.



I don't think it would be possible for a dog to BE any wetter than this!

Often he never bothers to shake himself when he comes out of the water ... but sometimes he shakes himself while he is still IN the water
... pity about the pink plastic rubbish - one can't go anywhere close to where people live and not see rubbish ... sigh.

ooooh - should I go chase the swans?

actually he already had - but they just swam over the other side of the pond and he gave up - the swans are not silly. (not that the dog would hurt them ... although if a dog did try to catch/pick a fight with a swan I am fairly sure the swan would win!)

a nice breeze, which makes this photo look like it was cold and bleak - but the rain has stopped and the breeze was warm, not cold.

and if you click on it and look at the bigger version of the photo you can see road that comes down the hill (the one we walked down to get here from the other pond) on the left hand side of the photo ... home is somewhere in the distance behind the trees/other houses/etc somewhere in the middle of the photo.

this is right down the othe end of the pond.

(actually it is near where the previous photo was taken, but facing the other way) - gee that grass and stuff is green!

It is not quite so green further away from the pond (but there is some green grass there amongst the brown stuff)

and this is the other side of that other end of the pond. It is sort of a very wiggly L shape (if you really stretch your imagination) and the houses are only on one side -  and those hills are in New South Wales - our suburb is right next to the ACT/NSW border - in fact I think the border is about where the power lines are - the cows just behind them are in NSW but the pond is in the ACT
(I kind of find it amusing that I can lie in bed on a summer night and hear sheep and cows going baaa and moo in another state! - especially seeing that, because for the first 10 years of my life I grew up somewhere that wasn't so close to a border I was probably about 10 years old before I ever got to travel to another state)

That last photo was where we headed off away from the pond (even though the dog wanted to keep going around it/in it/whatever - lol) and this photo is near there, but facing the other way (not that it matters - lol)

- I picked some flowers from a vacant block near the pond (they are still building some of the houses around it - there were none at all when we moved to where we are, and the pond was kind of in the middle of cow paddocks, but now the area it is almost all finished being built up with houses ... and some picnic shelters and playgrounds and stuff.)

er ... yes - the doggy was soggy.

and I think he was probably more "live" than that silly looking green box. (they are something to do with the underground power ... so there are a lot of the things around the place next to the footpaths)

The rain also brings out the colours of the green grass against the wooden fences ...



hmmm - this pair of wattle birds were having fun.

they were in these trees that are along the road we walked beside on our way home.

the rain also brings out the colours in the red seed pods that have fallen off these grey wattle bushes.

the pods are not attached here - I picked them up from the ground and sat them on a branch so I could take a photo of the colours.

when I had taken that last photo I turned around to see what the dog was doing - and this is what I saw:

"what the?" - that path that heads off to the right is the laneway that goes to the street our house is on (and our house is about 100m away from the end of the laneway - so the dog usually either heads off down that way to see if he can find one of the neighbours cats, or heads over to the bike path, where those white posts are, for a sniff - but this time he was lying down on the grass!)

ahh - so that is what he is doing!

it seems he found a bone ...

... which he proudly carried home.

(because I didn't want to wait there while he ate the rest of it - lol)

hmmm - that was only SOME of the photos I took - sometimes I take A lot of photos! - but imagine how many more I might have taken if we had gone walking around sunset?!

this photo was taken that same evening - I took the photo in Belconnen (about 10minutes drive from home) when I was there dropping something off to DD at her work.

And this was Diesel a bit later in the evening - still a bit damp so his fur is all nice and crinkly looking.



And this is him trying to sleep ...

... but sometimes - wherever he lies down - the cat comes and sits next to him! LOL

And ... Another day (the next day Actually) same pond Again ...

but this time was DH and I both taking him, and he didn't get to go swimming, and we only went to one end of that pond, not All the way Around it (or in to the other one first ... lol)

And this post is going to be Another day later because this newer post editor thingy Also seems to insist on doing some weird formatting things - like Adding a pile of silly stuff inside div tags that messes around with how I want to Arrange the text and photos ... And it will take A while to fiddle around and fix things, And I still need to Add all the stuff about what the photos Are (At the moment there is no text in Amongst the photos, but there should be once I post this ;-)
... And I Am not doing All that stuff now - because, seeing someone seems to have stolen a few hours from my evening, it is now Almost sunrise, I am getting tired and I really do need to go to bed before I fall Asleep on the keyboard!

ok ... now it is the next day, so I am back here adding all the descriptions around the photos (and swearing at all the odd formatting stuff it Automatically put in there ... just to make things difficult? - lol)... and I was part way through that when DH came in and told me about a website he found - where I could go and double click on all the places I walked to draw a line on the map that shows where I went, and adds up the distance I went ... (the website is http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/ ) of course it is easier to just do it roughly so it probably looses some of the actual distance I went by rounding off all the corners ... which is why it only ended up being 5.5km (although it probably wasn't any more than about 6km that I walked ... but with all the back and forth and round in circles the dog does when he isn't on the lead - he probably went twice as far!

I guess now that I have added All the photos And All the writing, I had better Actually post this sometime soon ...
- sometimes blogging can take way longer than it should - like this time - I re-sized All those photos (because the originals are huge) and I cropped some of them and had to rotate at least one ... and for some odd reason one of them was sideways when it got to my blog! ... so I went back to the photos on the computer to see what was going on - and (even though I had saved it AFTER I rotated and then cropped the edges off) it too was sideways - but - even weirder - it was sideways the OTHER way! ... some weird glitch or something in the image editing program I was using I guess ... and possibly also another weird glitch in blogger ... I eventually got it to save with the dog the right way up - started again from the original photo and the only thing I did different was that I cropped more off the sides so it was a rectangle not a square ... A is also for Ampersand - and the blog editor thingy also has a habit of Adding bits of html with those in them in odd places - the &  with things after it - that reprasent things like space and brackets - so if I type them in here they will just show up as spaces and brackets and stuff - unless I get really creative with how I do it - which I did in one blog post once ... on one of my other blogs ... but I would have to fiddle to remember how I did it, and it took a lot of fiddling to get it to work anyway ... which is probably why that blog post took ages ... it is Amazing how much time one can "loose" while having fun (?) fiddling with bloggy stuff/etc - lol