Another Cracker

Yay! We already know one "Cracker", little Yorkie belonging to Steak-Lady in Portmarnock, Co Dublin, but now we've found another - 3 year old Border terrier cross, shaggy and red-brown. Great for an extended race about with in the Rec this morning.

And some photo's. Dad's solution on how to get some 10 foot chestnut poles up to the allotment, some signs we are well into spring - the tiny tete-a-tete daffs - plus still hanging in there from Christmas, the helebores.

Also (says Dad, rather embarrassingly) a good haul of salad potatoes which should probably have been lifted at least 8 months ago. No matter, they are in good nick and the humans assure me they are delicious. Like having a very early 2009 crop, while most people's (including Dad's real ones) are still chitting in trays in the shed!

We're off to do Question Master on a Friends of Kings Wood quiz night. Have a good saturday night

Deefski

Irish Hallowe'en

kBy the wonders of technology and a borrowed laptop, a first ever report from "the foreign". We are en famille, at the Silverwood's place roughly in the middle of Ireland, and we're here to see the mad Hallowe'en celebrations tonight. The Irish "do" Hallowe'en in a more lock-stock-and-barrel way than anything we get in England, and they wrap in as well, any desire for fireworks that the English get out of their systems around Guy Fawkes Night

So here we are, after an adventurous journey up on Tuesday night, when it snowed. Dad had seen some stuff about "wintry showers" on one of the screens at work, and we'd left earlier than normal, and a good thing too. Real snow started on the M25, just north of Dartford Bridge, in the dark, and the traffic was soon reduced to 35 mph or so.

Great big flakes were coming down, and swooshing towards the windscreen like one of those "star-field" screen savers. It was so thick that it even laid on the motorway surface, and we couldn't see the cats eyes or the white lines. Dad latched onto the tail lights of a 4x4 and hoped. Some unlucky guy in the fast lane went too far to the right, put a wheel into the gravel trap on the central reservation, slithered to a stop, and had to get his passengers out pushing through the snow to get back onto the tarmac.

We survived an hour of that before the next driver swap on the M1. Here, Mum took over, the snow stopped, and we were soon doing more Mum-like speeds northward. The normal long distance rhythm for us is 2 hour stints of driving followed by a comfort stop for dogs - we have explored the grass and trees in more motorway services than it's probably healthy to know!

We made our ferry in Holyhead and there, as ever, we dogs get abandoned in the car on the car deck while the humans sneak off upstairs, on this occasion having booked a cabin to sleep in. It all goes quiet and boring and we get some shut eye, round to 06:00 and the ferry docks in Dublin (North Wall), and Mum and Dad come back to the car to rescue us.

We drive through the dark to Portmarnock's "Country Club" where we're taken onto the sand dunes and beach for another walk as the first glimmer of sunrise starts to lighten the sky. It's beautiful here, especially looking back towards Ireland's Eye (small island) and Howth Head, all lit up with street lights. The dunes are alive with rabbits.

Refreshed and comfortable again we head for the Steak Lady's house to catch up with our old chums, Yorkies Cracker and Rosie (not to mention try to steal all their chews and bones. Nobody had warned them we were coming so they'd not hidden them very well). The humans have a good fried breakfast (Dad just lurves the Steak Lady's potato cakes).

There's loads more to tell, but that's enough for now. Sam the Spaniel, George the Seal (I kid you not) - more soon

Deefer, Travellin' Babe

A whole week!

Yeah I know - it's been a whole week since I last posted. There's so much going on! For a start the humans deserted us from Thursday round to Sunday, airborne to Ireland to visit the Steak Lady in Portmarnock, and the Silverwoods in Co. Laois. The occasion was the First Holy Communion of "our" youngest neice, J-M, daughter of the Silverwoods.

The function itself happened in the church in their home town but then everyone adjourned to Portmarnock where the Steak Lady held a big party celebration. That's why Mum and Dad came home smelling gorgeously of the two tiny Yorkies, Cracker (red-head, top of picture, licking her lips) and Rosie (front of picture (always!)) and the very elegant Siamese, Seti.

More of that visit later - Mum and Dad were no sooner back than the abandonned us again to head for the Big Smoke to see Dad's hero Mark Knopfler at the Albert Hall.

I may have been a week without you, but I promise I will make it up by posting more stuff on this today.

Deefs

Cracker and Seti

Readers who were with me a year ago might recall the time we passed through Portmarnock (Co. Dublin, Rep. of Ireland) early in the morning and called in on the house of the Steak lady. Here I, as a pup in those days raced around the house unearthing all bones and toys buried by the house dog "Cracker" (a tiny Yorkie who was, in the absence of Steak Lady (holiday in N Africa) being house sat "en famille" by the neighbours; the house was deserted!).

I brought them all proudly back to the kitchen, where Mum or Dad would take them off me with "That's Cracker's" and put them in a wooden bowl on the worktop. I nipped off to find another, and another, and another, till the bowl was full of stuff, and Dad had to leave a message for Steak Lady explaining why there was a bowl full of old bones and chewed toys!

Well, Cracker, the tiny Yorkie has now been joined by a Siamese (Seal point?). The family has always had Siameses, the most recent being called Piewacket, who lived to a ripe old age (20 plus I think) and passed away only a couple of years ago. This new cat is named Seti, following Steak Lady's fascination with all things Egyptological - Pharoahs, Pyramids, the Nile etc. Google it and you'll find that....

"Seti I was the father of perhaps Egypt's greatest rulers, Ramesses II, and was in his own right also a great leader. His birth name is Seti Mery-en-ptah, etc"

Today's pic is of Cracker and Seti curled up in the bed.