Sunday 24 August 2008

Dog sitting

Another week has passed on the prairie and first mention this week should go to Blackie the cat, who has had a stressful week as we have been dog-sitting a 2 year-old black Labrador, who for her own safety, she had to avoid for the entire week!

Despite this invasion of her home she continues to do excellent pest-control work. Apologies to the squeamish amongst you, but Blackie is a quite astonishingly good hunter and unlike many domestic cats, does not spend ages playing with her catches, but rather dispatches them quickly and then eats them in their entirety! I know that cats catching animals is frowned upon these days, but I'm sure eating local produce is much more "carbon neutral" than me providing her with tinned processed cat food. (I would, but she prefers to eat out!)

Our canine house guest, Hector, left on Saturday afternoon to fly on to meet his owners at their new posting in Germany and once we'd recovered from the devastation of having two dogs for the week (see top right!) we had a few friends over for a barbecue. It was an absolute feast with some obligatory Albertan beef and some huge crabs legs. We were stuffed!

Amongst our guest at the barbecue were Shane, Doug & Ed who were the winning Gentleman's Calf Roping team at the rodeo last weekend. All three were wearing their rodeo belt buckles (worth $300 each) and feeling justly proud of their achievement. Shane has been in the winning team two years running, not bad for a British army officer with no prior experience of ranching skills!

This morning, as has become the custom, we had more guests for banana pancake breakfast. As it's still quite hot (34c today) we drove the RV into the garden to provide shade. It did the job rather well! I'm really not sure what we'll do when the snow comes, it just won't be the same eating them round the dining room table with the heating on!

This weekend we've also found time to do some planning for our forthcoming road trip. My parents are flying out at the end of September and we're heading over the boarder into Montana and then round to Waterton Glacial Park and on to Nipika. We'll be taking the RV and they'll be staying in hotels. We should have a fair amount to blog about I think!

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