Outings With the Pup

When I first gave notice of Ollie’s arrival, I said something to the effect that it wasn’t “practical for people in our situation” to have dogs. “Our situation” primarily refers to the fact that generally speaking we’re not home for most of the daylight hours, which makes playing by the rules  of “puppies should be taken out every two hours to eliminate” (that got a big ol’ guffaw when we read it on The Humane Society’s Housetraining Page) rather difficult.

And it means that dear little Ollie is kept trapped in a miserable little corner of the bathroom for said hours to prevent him from using every nook and cranny of the house for purposes better served by bushes, which breaks my heart. It really does. So we try to find opportunities to remind him what fresh air is when we are home. Last week that meant moseying on over to the park adjacent our complex on one glorious Thursday afternoon to enjoy a bit of nature ourselves, bust out the old six-string, and let the smallest member of our family-like unit show them nefarious blades of grass who’s boss.

flying bb pup

along the way made friends with the harper-like pup at “the restaurant” (the only one walking-distance from our house, and so has earned its definitive article status)

little tiger pup!

had a big day!

not during an outing, but cute shot of his ‘i can’t believe you just woke me up with your photography tomfoolery again.’ face

Saturday he got a bit of a bigger adventure. We’ve heard rumors about a “View Point” that’s on the outskirts of Thung Song, and have talked about seeking it out for weeks (months?) now, and the day finally arrived this weekend. Our friend Jack joined us, and Ollie was in tow in my Peaches tote. He did surprisingly well. I’d even go so far as to say he enjoyed it.

these were harder shots to procure than you might imagine… i really wish this one was in focus.

the littlest biking beeb

The thing is, we didn’t find much success with Thailand’s whole “signage” system, nor were we able to very well “ask” the average passerby for assistance with our “impeccable” Thai. We drove for… an hour? and a half?, lost the trail about a dozen times, randomly came across another sign or two to get our hopes up, and finally, when we found that we were far closer to Nakhon Si Thammarat than we cared to be, decided to “settle” (quotation marks actually well deserved there) on a waterfall we’d passed. (One of the many, in fact).

We’d gotten rained on just a bit before arriving, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as is shooed some of the hordes away. We got the ticket people to change their rate from 200 Baht each to 100 Baht for the three of us (teachers should get discounts anyway but we didn’t have our work permits. Looks like our Thai can be useful after all!), and made our way to an isolated spot where we had a chance to soak in the calm ambience and watch the puppy play.

there were really fishes.

still too small to climb rocks, so the tote was employed for the entirety of the ascent

i’ll excuse the intensity of my double chin for the hilarity of ollie’s little face

a habit we should really focus on breaking… those little teeth are getting sharp.

tallest man in thung song indeed

it’s my tree in a tree

i want to submit this to the virginia board of tourism? also he stayed pretty much like that the entire way home… little snuggle bug.

elephant-ear bonanza

Both occasions ended up being a nice time for all parties involved (I think?), most notably Ollie himself. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and ol’ Trix (to whom, I might mention, we’d given free reign of nearly the entire house) has decided to show her displeasure and disapproval of our owning/loving another pet by leaving little bunny piles in places she knows she shouldn’t. Free reign has been withdrawn. If I wasn’t a million percent sure she’d dart off, never to be seen again, on an excursion to the park, she’d be more than welcome. Does anyone know if they make rabbit leashes?

In life news we went out to get a sofa yesterday and came back instead with a lovely outdoors table set… pretty much exactly what I’ve been secretly pining for since we moved in and where I’ve eaten every meal since we got it.

speaking of meals, wayne keeps encouraging me to blog about some of the food concoctions we come up with. i’m in support of this mostly, but i’m afraid a lot of it will just end up as, ‘we just pretty much did exactly what appeared on [one of the blogs listed in the ‘food’ section of my blogroll] except we couldn’t find this ingredient.’

OR, as happened above, ‘we were hungry and noticed we still had half a loaf of the cinnamon raisin oat bread wayne made [less the cinnamon, which we couldn’t find], a tin of tuna, and we’d just purchased cheese from tesco [not on discount as we were hoping, and we’d chosen the 18-months-aged australian cheddar solely on its merits of not bearing the obvious mold the others did]. wayne suggested i dress the tuna with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and olive oil [which, coincidentally, were the only practical ingredients we had for the task], and i made open faced melts. the raisins somehow worked with the whole thing and the sambos were quite tasty. we were thirsty and had no drinkable water so we cut up a watermelon and threw it in the blender.’ not really the most engaging or compelling food blogging but… maybe i could work out something.