Summer update…

Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

It has been more than one month since my last update. I hope I do not lose my loyal readers again. I had so many things to do this summer. I went to bed about midnight almost every night. I redesigned HG’s company logo and letterhead. I found out that HG is very fussy customer. I also designed his company website which I learned so much about XHTML and CSS. I think in the future when my new website finish I will share some of my knowledge that I learned so far to someone else who might find it is useful. Well, I think that might be enough for my excuse for not updating my blog for a long time.

Garden Update

Summer this year seems to be the best summer since I have been here so far. I am getting darker like I was when I was in Thailand. Some days I found that it was too hot for me to be in the sun. Our garden looks very nice now. I wish Lha and P’Lo were here at this time of year, so they could enjoy our home grown crops. We harvested all of the garlic we planted over winter. We have all sizes from big ones to small ones. The small ones have only one clove per head. We have 76 garlic heads in total this year. I gave some to our neighbours to try.

We also harvested our first early potatoes, Red Duke of York. We got about 11 kg. Then we harvested more of the second earlies. There are two of them, Estima and Maris Peer. We had about 25 kg. Some of them are huge. I am glad we harvested them because the plants started to look ugly. It took us 3 days to harvest the second early potatoes because it was too hot. I gave some of our potatoes to our neighbours to try as well.

Other than these main crops in our garden, we also have lettuce, beetroot (for the oldies), parsnips, carrots, pak choi, Chinese broccoli and courgettes (green and golden). We had some flat leaf parsley, coriander and wild rocket. These three I have in tubs. They are herbs that we use quite a lot in our cooking. They are very easy to grow. I like rocket leaves in salad and pizza. When you buy them from the supermarket, they were about 99p for a small handful. So far we used about 6-7 handfuls of them which were very good. They are now flowering at the moment which means there are not many leaves we could use but the flowers are very nice and we may get some seeds out of them, who knows.

This year we have 4 courgette plants, two of them are green and the other two are golden. They were very slow to start with but once we started harvesting some of them they gone daft, like last Friday we took 10 of them to Alva for mum and dad and today I harvested about 8 of them and gave them to Charlotte. They are not my favourite vegetable but HG likes them. I think I will have them one plant each next year.

Pepper update

Last Friday was Pepper’s birthday. He is now one year and 2 days old. He got quite a lot of presents.

• Two chew toys from grandma and granddad They came from France and were in the shape of bones.
• Educational soft toy, bouncy ball, more squeaky balls for the football field and (best of all) the elastic that went round an old fitted sheet. It didn’t cost anything but he could play with it for ages, putting his paw on it and letting it ping back to his (or HG’s) nose!
• A dumbbell shaped toy and some treats from Sophie, Daniel, Auntie Fiona and Uncle Jim. He also got a thing to throw his ball in the football field. This thing is superb - it can throw the ball a long way, you don’t need to bend down to pick up the ball and (best of all) you don’t have to touch his wet, disgusting, slobbery ball!

Before his dinner time, I prepared a birthday cake for him. (see the photos at the end of the post) It was made of his normal food and some treats. I mixed his dry food with some tinned food and Kong stuffing so I could bind them together. I packed them in a small dish and put them back into the middle of his bowl. I put 8 bone biscuits to support around it and put some more Kong stuffing in the top and covered with some Choc Drops. They are a specially formulated chocolate substitute for dogs because normal chocolate can be harmful to dogs. I put one dental stick in the middle so it could look like a candle. Pepper was beside me all the time drooling while he was waiting for me to finish his cake. He got to lick the bowls and spoons that I used to prepare his cake. When it was his dinner time we were all gathered around in the kitchen. I put down the bowl in front of him and we all sang happy birthday song for him. It took me about half an hour to prepare his cake but it was gone within 2 minutes. I was very happy that he likes my cake.

We gave him more freedom in the house in which he could go to lie down in the lounge and play with all his toys. He has a toy box where all of his toys are kept tidy at the end of the day. During the day, he could take any toy out of it and play with it. We did not yet train him to do tidy up. We also let him hang around in the garden where he was very good. I showed him that he should walk on the path around the garden which he seemed to understand very well. He likes to lie down on the grass and played with the onion skin which came off the onions that we hung up to dry. He sometimes tried to chase the flies and bumblebees. But just about a week or two before his birthday, he started acting strangely. He was a bit quiet. When I said “quiet”, I mean he was not very playful, kept himself to himself and only came to see us when there was food involved. At his dinner time, he would lie down in the garden until he heard us prepare his food and he would come in to lick the spoon as usual. After he finished the food, he would go back to the garden and lie down by himself. I noticed that he was quiet but as he did not do anything wrong so I did not pay much attention until one night when I took him out to pee before bedtime in the back garden without the leash. After he peed he decided to lie down outside on the grass and ignored my command. I called him to come to me many times but he did not come. I crouched down at his level, showed his some treats but nothing seemed to be successful. I was very upset and I had to kind of drag him to the house. I could tell that he was upset too because he went straight to his crate and did not come out to drink before bedtime as usual.

Next day he was normal during the day. When I had to take him out at night, this time I put him on the leash. After he peed, he resisted not to come with me to the house. I had to pull him hard to the house. Again he was upset and went straight to his crate. The next day he made me so angry because he did not want to come out of the crate to go to pee. I was tempted to close the crate and leave him there overnight without taking him upstairs. I put the leash on his collar while he was lying in the crate ignoring my call. I had to pull him but he resisted and his collar came off. I had enough and HG had to deal with him instead.

That night I was so worried about his behaviour. I read the book “The seven ages of your dog” by Jan Fennell. She mentioned in the fifth age (18-28 months) which is not yet Pepper’s age but it seems to fit his behaviour, that at about this age some dogs can be a bit too confident and might be preparing to challenge for the leadership of the pack. She talked about the ultimate sanction to encounter the challenge. Her concept is in the wild the leader of pack may physically eject a younger wolf from the den or force it to live on the outskirts of the pack and it would only be allowed to rejoin the pack once it showed it had learned its lesson. Once I read I thought I would give it a try but I had to convince HG to cooperate. He thought it was too tough and he did not think he could do it. I told him that this method will only work if he and I were on the same page. It took him a day to think about it. Finally he said he would give it a try.

On Pepper’s sanction day, in the morning HG gave him food as usual but Pepper did not finish the food and went to lie down by himself in the lounge. The food was taken away and put in the fridge. I came downstairs later and I did not talk to him, not even have eye contact with him. We pretended that he did not exist. It was very hard but his ignorance of the call command in the house was my biggest concern because if he did not even come when we called in the house, would he come to us when we were outside. That’s unacceptable. Almost all day Pepper kept himself quietly in the lounge. Pepper came to his food tray looking for food for a couple times during lunch time, so we decided to let him have his food and he finished it. There was no walk and play on that day. At dinner time, he finished his dinner and went to the lounge. When we had our dinner, we closed the door in the dinning room, so he could not join us. We tried to talk and laugh louder so he could hear. It got his attention that he was not allowed to join our dinner. He came to the dinning room door and lied down at the door for almost the whole time we had our dinner. I felt like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel when I saw that he could feel something different. He normally sleeps upstairs in our bedroom but not that night. We put him in his crate downstairs to sleep away from the pack. I went to bed that night with a hope that he could learn his lesson very fast so we did not have to continue this sanction.

In the next morning, we decided to try if he had learned his lesson or not by calling him to come to us. He responded to our command enthusiastically. He came with his head down, like he normally does when he did something wrong, his tail was wagging so much and he put his head on my lap for a long time. We thought it was the sign that he had learned his lesson. He was getting better after that day. It took him a couple days to get back to his normal and we were pleased to have him back.