Q: When is your dog not your dog?

A: When you've bought a microchip instead.

Hello.

I'm afraid that our modern life has led me to begin sounding like a bad first-year philosophy tutorial, but: we recently had to fill out a change of ownership form for our dog. Our dog that we have owned since he was legally saleable. He came fully microchipped, you see, and we were given all the papers, food, certificates etc etc etc ad nauseum that one could want to collect with a 9 week old puppy.

Fast forward a year, and...we decided to register him with the National Pet Register, just to ensure that if he did wander, he would have every chance of getting delivered back to us. That was when we made The Discovery: our doggie's microchip number is different to the one on his paperwork. The vet confirmed which chip number was right, by scanning the pooch. Then came the rigmarole of calling the National Pet Register to correct the problem.

Which can only be corrected by filling out a change of ownership form.


Am I the only one who thinks this is seriously out of kilter? I bought a dog, not a microchip. I was against the chip anyway - unnatural, controlling, etc etc - but went along with it because of various regulations and flat out 'no, you may not buy this puppy without a microchip' -type statements. And now I find that I really did buy a microchip, and that the outer casing of furry dogginess and slobbery, enthusiastic goodness doesn't actually rate a mention in this whole debate.

*Sigh*

What a strange world.

Lucky it's got things like dogs in it.

Savings

Leo single-handedly harvested our dried beans we'd saved for seed the other evening. With intent concentration in every line of his little body (oh those capable little baby boy fingers!), he tried out different ways of opening the pods, plucking beans and dropping them into his bowl. Then we had belly laughs when we blew away the chaff.

From. Our. Own. Patch.

We are so excited!

We have harvested the very first potatoes that we grew our very own selves!!

They are a variety called pink fir apples, and are best when boiled or steamed. Yummy, knobbly, slightly pink, and best of all: the kids ate loads and asked for more!

We are grateful to have a harvest at all. At first, it seemed that our spuds were not going to work out. We tried growing them in tyres, starting out with one soil-filled tyre, and adding more tyres full of soil/mulch as the plants grew, as suggested in various permaculture/organic gardening books we know and love...but they didn't work so well. The potato plants died off before they could flower, and seemed to rot, stem and all. I did some web research to see if we were having our very own Irish Potato Famine, but no, something went inexplicably wrong with our spuds.

So, we decided to just dismantle the tyre towers and grub through to see whether there was anything in there. And lo! We found some spuds! There wasn't the bumper crop that the tyre-growing potato contingent had spruiked, but there was a modest bucketful. Enough to get us and the kids excited, anyway.

Tangling, with yarn.

Why does wool do that?!

Wind it into a lovely, big, hand-dyed, unbroken hank, tie it in three places, leave it alone in a bag for 2 years...

...and spend 3 evenings, with several hours on a weekend included, untangling and weighing this:

I suspect that the wool has been talking to the electrical cables that tangle themselves behind the computer when we're not looking.

Heat-enforced end to blogging break...

Hi. I just had to come out of blogging seclusion to say:

Where is Autumn? It is way too hot for mid-March. We got up to 39.7 degrees (celcius) here today. That's just crazy-talk. Our garden is dying a slow death. When people ask what is in the veggie patch, I say, "Crisps."

Also, did I mention that there has been no rain? We are on tank water only in our area, so can water our garden at whim, but: last week our tank ran dry. It was a really primally scary thing to run out of water. Yes, we called a tanker and had some water delivered, but still. We. Ran. Out. Of. Water. The long-threatened event that is in the back of our collective minds had a preview at our house! And let me tell you it was not fun. Not in the middle of a heat wave, anyway.

We're meant to be heading for more moderate temperatures in the next few days. Wish us luck.

Crafting roundup

Despite all appearances of inactivity, there has been a slow trickle of crafting over here in the last few months...

Winter knitting, with first a hat for Poppy, who chose the wool herself. A little persuading out of a very fluorescent shade of pink took place, I must confess. I'm not confident that I could knit whilst trying not to catch sight of bright salmon pink wool. Fuschia was much more bearable:

Then a pair of wristwarmers for me. These had the virtue of being finished in time for winter wearing, and also featured my first attempts at cabling! I was very pleased to actually finish a project for myself in the actual season I began it in...and the best thing about these? The wool was such a bargain at our lovely local op shop. And I still have 3 balls of it left!

Then I was at a friend's house for a fortnightly craft group and made this:

Everyone was a little nonplussed. Myself included - I'd meant to try making these a long time ago, after seeing them here. I think it's been about 2 years since I first learnt of them, and how to make them, and now I discover that they are called Penny wheels or yo-yos, and also that they are springing up all over the East coast and North of Australia. Who knew?

Not quite beach weather

Today we visited my cousin's grandmother, known to us as Baba Luba. She lives in a place called Black Rock, in the bayside suburbs of Melbourne, which turned out to be only about 45 minutes by car from our house.

Poppy was very excited to learn that Baba Luba lived very near the beach. Delighted, she proclaimed that she was going to bring her bathers...but we ended up having to wear this kind of thing instead:

Such is Spring in our part of the world.

Much fun was had at the beach, though. We found shells, glass worn smooth on the edges by the waves, seaweed to take home to feed the garden with, and Poppy's new favourite thing: rockpools!

All in all, a successful foray into beach territory, but a little more warmth, a little less wind (and rain on the way home) and a little more opportunity for actually getting wet, with actual seawater, is being looked forward to with great anticipation at our house.

Note: being responsible citizens and all, we did not souvenir seaweed from the beach for feeding the garden. We did not brandish great bunches of it whilst walking, and festoon a certain neice's pram with the stuff on the way back from the beach. I did not stuff it into a garbage bag to take home and then almost lose the lot to the dog before I got to soaking the salt out of it. That would be plain rude, and, I'm led to believe, illegal. Don't say I didn't warn you.