Doing Stuff/Fixing Stuff/Sticking Stuff in here ...

... I just "undecorated" my blog ... I figured it was time to take off all the Christmas junk - seeing Hot cross buns and Easter eggs have been in the shops for a month now (yes - they were there by the beginning of January! ... who wants to be thinking about buying hot cross buns and chocolate eggs that close to Christmas? ... yes I guess some of you do - those of you who don't have to actually PAY for it all ... LOL)

Anyway ... is it time for a few more animal photos?

ok, why not?

These photos were all taken sometime last year (not in any particular order - this is just the order I found them in when I went digging around in my photos)

This can be a dangerous game to play with a cat:

(yes that is MY blood on my hand - Spook has very sharp claws)

Diesel looks like he was trying to blend in with the decor ...

well ... surely Mum put that quilt on the chair so I could sleep on it?!

er ... Diesel x Stevie Wonder?

(DH's sunnies - big ugly ones that fit over his glasses)

This is not Spot either - this is Oscar ...

... at least that is what DD told me she named him (her? ... I can't tell)

Not Spot, probably not "Skippy" either ... but he wasn't particularly bothered about me being there.

He wasn't particularly bothered about the electic fence he went through just afterwards either.

Maybe I should have named this one "Spot"?

- a ladybeetle (some call them ladybirds - but it is not a bird, some call them ladybugs - but it is not a bug it is a beetle - so I call them ladybeetles ... or ladybirds ... depends if I am in a scientific/technical mood, or if I am not really thinking about it and/or just calling it what I did as a kid - a ladybird ... LOL)
This one was just about to fly away (it did that just after I took the photo!)

Nothing much goes to waste around here ...

... "mmm burnt toast"

When we go walking, there is no point in me throwing sticks - Diesel tends to ignore them - he likes to fetch rocks ... fist size or bigger! ... and rather than bring them back, he "hides" them next to bushes/etc and/or drops them and lifts his leg on them! The only time this odd dog will fetch sticks, is if they are thrown into water ...

... and the bigger the stick, the more fun he seems to think it is!

Talking about water ...

... guess who just noticed that there are FISH in this bucket?!

This is not Spot either ... it is an "inchworm" ...

... not that inchworms are actually worms - they are caterpillars ... lol

btw, I was at an opening for some art/textile exhibition a few years back, and I found a little green inchworm on my parsley ... I showed it to someone (who turned out to be one of the people who had organised the food!) and they got all worried and thought I would be upset about finding a buggly in my food - and they were surprised when I told them I actually like finding things like that - because it means the food was fresh and healthy! ... if it had been sprayed with chemicals there would have been no inchworms on it! ... and if it had been in cold storage for a few months there would have been no inchworms on it ... but it had been freshly picked from someone's home garden that morning - inchworm and all - LOL

(yes I ate the parsley, and NO I did not EAT the inchworm ... not that it would have done me any harm ... but the inchworm wouldn't have liked that!)

ok ... that will have to be enough pictures for now ... because that is all I am putting here for now ;-)

... I am surprised this editor thingy isn't having a hissy fit actually - it usually doesn't like it when I put too many pictures in one post and then try and re-arrange them and type stuff ...

correction - it IS having a hissy fit - when I preview it - all the spaces are missing and it is a mess!

... but there is one little trick I can do that seems to make it do what I want ... at least for now ...
(my rambling on must be hard enough to follow as it is - let alone if the spaces between the lines are all missing/in the wrong place!)

Something looks different here ...

One day I might post something else here ... but Christmas could be here before then - LOL

... but in the meantime, I decorated this blog for Christmas, because Soozii told me to ;-)



and, yes, you too can ...


... have an annoying blinking and flashing animated gif on your blog ... I had one here too ... but I just came back now (the start of Febuary 08) and "undecorated" my blog (that red background was a bit too much!) and I also edited this post and removed the animated thingy, because it was driving me bats looking at it!

Dogglephotos

Diesel, in the garden, a few weeks ago:

I think he was "helping" me take photos of some insect I had just found and put in the bush

Here he is, a few years ago (Feb2003), in almost the same bit of garden (within a few feet)

Another cute photo from Feb 2003

and another ...

and another ...

we found him asleep on the bed - he had just had a bath ...

... and his fur was all "crinkly"

anyway ... that is enough digging around in really old photos ...

Here is one I took this year ... but it was several weeks ago:

yes - he loves eating cauliflower!

... and pumpkin!

... that was a few weeks ago ... I threw some old seeds into the vegetable garden late last year, and up popped a couple of bean and pea plants, and several pumpkin plants ... and the pumpkin plants grew, and grew, and grew ... all over the vege patch and out over the lawn ... and Diesel thought they were wonderful - he would go outside and walk around sniffing amongst them and then come inside ... and we could tell what he had been doing from the weird smell - pumpkin leaves have a distinctive weird smell about them, which seems to 'stick' to his fur or something ... because it would take several hours before the fur on his head didn't smell funny any more!

Once the pumpkins started growing, he started chewing the little ones that fell off, and one day DD (dear daughter) and I went outside and found this pumpkin in the middle of the back lawn ... went over to look at it and Diesel came and dragged it over to where he likes to lie, and started eating it ... I think he may have been the one who picked it too ... LOL

For some odd reason, he always has liked eating vegetables ... he eats most "people food" ;-)

... but he does seem to really like cauliflower and broccoli and pumpkin etc ... and of all odd things - he really adores wasabi cashews! (yes - hot and spicey ... makes him drool but he keeps coming back for more - he ate a whole packet of them once!)

anyway ... I have other stuff I should be doing, rather than this ...

Spook

I wanted to "point" to a photo of Spook, because I found yet another person who has a cat who looks very much like her, and I realised that all I have on this blog is a photo of half of her (I posted a photo in the middle of last year - Diesel and Pixel were in the middle of the photo and Spook is sort of half in the corner ... LOL)

So ...

This is Spook:



... making friends with a table leg. (She was trying to rub herself on my leg, but I kept walking away to take a photo ;-)

The other 2 people who have cats who look very similar are The Crochet Dude (a picture of Cleo, one of his 2 cats, is here ) and this person http://sparklinglotusland.typepad.com/ (who has a picture of her cat, Celeste, here) - I just found the link to her site on www.inaminuteago.com/blog (the person who is running the TAST challenge I am doing all that stitching for ;-)

Anyway ...
I still have a load of washing to hang up on the line under the pergola, and I should have gone to bed about 3 or 4 hours ago - I have to get up in the morning and go and do some "UNdying" with a couple of other people from the Scquilters yahoogroup.
(we are going to mess around with cheap dark coloured fabric, and some bleach ... )

Are you sure that stick is big enough?

I was outside this evening, taking a couple of sunset photos and looking for the comet (I saw that a bit later when it got darker ;-) and Diesel found a stick in the yard, so he took it to the middle of the lawn (well it was a lawn, before it kind of died in the drought) and started chewing it ... maybe long sticks are more fun?
hmmm ... there is some yellow string behind him ... I think he stole that from me the other day.

Oh ... about that comet ... I did get one sort of half decent photo ... I am just about to go and put that on www.aykayem.blogspot.com

The Green Eye of the [not so] Little Yellow ... Dog

"There's a green wild eyed yellow idol dog
to the North of Kathmandu " in the pumpkin patch!





(apologies to J. Milton Hayes, who wrote this poem ;-)

The pumpkins seem to do well with a bit of water from the washing machine hose ... so many leaves that Diesel dog gets lost in there ...

Merry Christmas

Season's Greetings, Merry Christmas, and/or happy whatever else you do, or don't, celebrate at this time of year ...

Dogs, Cats and Crochet ...

I was just posting something to my main blog ( www.aykayem.blogspot.com ) and I also included this photo of the scarf ... on the dog ...



note the cats on the bed WITH the dog! LOL ... the dog only chases the cats if they run ... btw - the dog is called Diesel ... and that is Pixel (who is almost 17 years old!) lying almost on top of him ... and Spook is half out of the corner of the photo (she is the one who came and sat ON the scarf as soon as I laid it out on the bed)

actually, I was going to just post some other photos here, and had this editing window open too ... and accidentally put the photo and stuff on this one ... luckily I noticed before I posted it - LOL

Now for the other photos - the ones that I was going to put here!

... they will have to wait until later - have to go out somewhere shortly so I will save this as a draft and finish putting the photos in whenever I remember to log back in and do it!

... A few weeks later:

I wonder what photos I was going to put here?

Oh well ... I guess I will just add the one I was going to post now (I found this draft here when I logged in to post one photo here, and a few others to http://www.aykayem.blogspot.com ) and then I can post the others when/IF I remember what they were ...

so ... in the meantime ... here is Diesel, sleeping on one of his favourite places, in one of his favourite positions ... weird dog!

btw, the blue thing in the bottom of the photo is a cushion cover I did, in Tunisian crochet, a few years ago ... the light blue (and dark red but you can't really see that in the photo) design is done in cross stitch after the thing is crocheted ... I think I made up the cross stitch cat design - it is cats because the friend who wrote the cushion cover pattern (and taught me how to do Tunisian crochet ;-) loves cats.

gee - the stuff I have just written about now matches the title I gave this post when I first started writing it!

LOL

Mmmmmmmmm, coconut ...

This might work ...
(if it does, it is a video of Diesel, eating some dessicated coconut that was past it's "use by" date ;-)




if it didn't work, then I guess you will just have to go and look at it at http://youtube.com/watch?v=eQnfT6QpjYU

Cute Puppy + Water = ?

This is the same cute puppy as the other photo (this one was taken within a few days of that other photo too) ... we went and watered the trees, that our Landcare group had planted, next to a pond ... and, of course, Diesel had to go for a swim ...



yes - that is grass he is standing on - you can see why the trees needed some water!
(it was hot, it was dry, it was windy, and this photo was taken 2 days before the bushfires came in to Canberra in January 2003)


Here is another photo, same place, a couple of weeks later ... same dog, after doing the same thing, but this time he found more mud ...




and ... a few days later, same place, same thing again -
(except this time we were not watering trees - it was a stinking hot day and the kids wanted to go there for a swim!)




and ... if you can't find mud - then some dust will do!
(the joys of living in a new estate with all the building sites/piles of dirt/etc nearby - and yes - if you look closely among that dust, you can also make out the shape of one very grotty child who was definitely going straight in the bath/shower when she got home!)



oops ... where did the evening go?!

... I will find some more photos to put in here later (ones when he is older, and covered in even more mud/etc ;-)

goodnight

a silly cat thingy, and a cute cat thingy ...

This blog seemed like a good place to put this URL
- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4057591681481453187
(maybe I should resist the temptation to go look at "featured blogs" that come up on the log in page when I log in to post stuff on one of my blogs? :-)

of course, while I was there, I had to type "cat" into the google video search thingy and see what else I found - there were quite a few silly things,
and ...
... a cat riding a pony!
- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5990602603926912016

NOT Spot :-)

... but a blog called "Spot" just has to have a picture of a cute puppy in it!

His name is Diesel



(he is 3 years old now, but he was only a pup when this photo was taken, in January 2003)

A blog called "Spot"

Why a blog called "Spot"?


Why not?


When I was learning to read at school, we had a reader about some kids and a dog called Spot, when my kids were little they used to like books (and the TV show) about a different dog who was also called Spot.


On the TV show "Star Trek" the android, Data, has a cat called Spot.


So ... after some absent minded daydreaming earlier this evening (about how my other blogs are here on blogSPOT) ... I decided to have a blog called Spot


Now ... I guess I had better go and edit it and add my bits to it, and change a few of the weird colours that it has on the template that I used. (knowing a little bit of basic html comes in handy ... could also be dangerous too I guess - especially seeing that the only html I know is what I have worked out/taught myself while messing around with web pages and blogs and stuff! ;-)