Today marks the shortest day of the year. Sunlight is elsewhere on the planet. Thick clouds hang over the farm. And yet! There was that brief moment around lunch time, the inky moisture parted, and the sun shone. Sandra and I, plus the dogs, headed outdoors into the sudden warmth and basked in all its glory. The photons excited so much moisture against the trunk of a large tree that clouds of moisture were ejected as a sort of weird excited mist. Prior to that moment, it had rained for days. Not to worry, the moment was but a brief reprieve from the gloom.
The news is full of dire warnings. A super El Niño over here, deadly bird flu over there. The big dog Ollie, ignored the lot, and has just felt a lot of joint pain from the winter conditions. However, with some changes, things sure have turned around on that front. As I type away, the Bull Arab canine is lounging at his ease on the dogs white leather couch, pitting his teeth against the might of a large rawhide chew. As you’d imagine, there is a lot of slobber.
For those who may be blissfully unaware, the breed was created in the warm sunny Australian state of Queensland, mostly to hunt feral pigs. Last I checked, no such animals roamed the forests around here, so he has to put up with cuddles and firm boundaries. He’s as Aussie as the two Kelpie dogs. They look up to the big canine as their mascot. It’s not all respectful adoration though. Sometimes they’re trying to pinch the best chunks of his breakfast. Ruby the deft, is the fleetest, she never fails to take advantage of the milder manners of her companions. Dame Plum, clearly the boss dog, sometimes allows this, and at other times being hungry, warns her sister off with a well timed growl. Combined with her specialised solid crazy eye look clearly conveys: ‘don’t mess with me’.
Ollie has such a light coat that he struggles to feel warm at this time of year. Overnight now hovers around 3’C / 37’F temperatures, so he’d freeze to death outdoors. Fun fact: The canine never would have survived the sinking of the Titanic. -2’C / 28’F waters would have taken him out in minutes, and that’s despite being fit enough to dog paddle for hours. Nope, frozen dead he’d be.
Can you believe that he’s almost nine years old? Remember when he was a pup? I’ve no experience with such a large dog, and who knows how long he’ll be with us, but this year is the first that he’s physically struggled with the winter conditions. Being the canny and resourceful folk that we are, the question arose: do we take the big 40kg / 88 pound pooch to the vet once per month for an injection of anti-inflammatory stuff, or is there another option? We have tried the vet option in the past. That was with the original ‘fat’ boss dog, a Dachshund / Corgi cross, technically known as a ‘Dorgi’. She made it to 16 years. What we observed was that as the injection wore off over the month, the effectiveness declined. By the end of the month, the dog had returned to the world of pain.
With that experience in mind, a month or two ago, we hit Google search hard and went on a deep dive to ascertain what alternatives there were. It was interesting noting that those searches now firstly produced an AI overview at the top of the screen. I don’t much care for that thing, and never requested it. They tell me that unsolicited advice is a red flag! Anyway, ignoring that, we went further down the list and looked at heaps of suggestions. Turns out, there were a bunch of basic things we could do with the big dogs diet which would help him out. Being unafraid of conducting tests on the canine, we ploughed on ahead. Here is his breakfast nowadays:
We tried everything suggested on the basis that something has to work. His brekkie now includes: Home made yoghurt; a glob of coconut oil; home made mixed roasted vegetable (including pumpkin) with peanuts, pepitas and sunflower seeds; commercial kibbles; fish oil tablets; rose hip tablet; and a glucosamine and chondroitin tablet. At dinnertime, there are commercial kibbles and home made biscuits with the same peanut / vegetable mix, but with honey and oats, plus cumin and turmeric. The biscuits smell pretty good, and I’ve been tempted to try some.
He’s bouncing around like a puppy now, which is itself a problem. Jumping off the veranda, has lead to the occasional minor injury. He’s learning, we’re learning and the big dog is now monitored. Even the distance from the couch to the hardwood floors can be challenging on his joints, so we’ve constructed a step which he uses gracefully.
We’re managing this unexpected turn of canine wintry events by addressing issues with the dog as they arise. He’s doing fine. It interests me that the Google AI overview searches didn’t provide all of the many helpful suggestions. They could only be found by going deeper down the list and exploring what the websites themselves had to say on the subject. The alert person hears rumours about the impending death of the interweb…
This change to the search results poses other practical problems for us. Long term readers would know by now that Sandra and I run our own accounting business. We’re always thinking about ways to market the business. However, considering this new AI overview search function, I really wonder how many people would click on the links provided there, or even now scroll further down the page. It’s all provided at the top isn’t it? My gut feeling suggests that our advertising mad cash would not be well invested there, and truthfully, given the expensive direction it has chosen to go in, we might not be able to afford the service now.
However, there is a delicious irony to this story. This change has forced us to go back to advertising our business closer to home, like real old school style. We’ll still retain an interweb site just to prove that we exist, but due to the tech bros relentless pursuit of AI, that service has probably become less important now. A few local papers survived the tech giants onslaught, and they could use our support. There are local business groups to join. Fancy talking to people in the real world – whatever will they think of next? There’s heaps of different things we can do, but none of them involve spending mad cash with tech giants. My gut feeling with this recent change, is that the tech folks gargantuan reach has peaked, and is now on the decline. The old timers used to suggest that change begets change, and the revenge of the analogue was always going to be strange and unpredictable. But I never for a moment believed that the interweb searches would be made less useful. Yet, here we are. Ollie on the other hand is adapting to circumstances, and he’s doing just fine.
A more wintry week of weather would be hard to imagine. For most of the week it has rained, so we had very little chance to do anything outdoors. Check out what 99% humidity looks like:
At times the air has felt so thick with moisture, that a person wonders whether they could swim through the atmosphere to the nearby Mount Bullengarook and Mount Blackwood.
On Monday, prior to the commencement of the prolonged storm, we managed to completely fill up one of the two new steel rock gabion cages.
There was simply not enough dry weather to sew the cage up without getting drenched. Some week’s ’tis not to be…
There’s always other things going on, and some products baffle me. A good brand of Sorbolene (those who’ve ever had eczema, if you know, you know!) has some packaging where the little hand pump hose doesn’t quite reach the bottom of the container. Not wanting to waste the product, we did this:
For research and satisfaction of curiosity purposes, we measured out how much of the product could no longer be accessed by the short hand pump tube. Displacement provided a figure of around 18% of the contents suggested volume. It’s easy enough to use a spatula to extract the stuff and place it in another plastic container which can be sealed. The old timers used to say: Waste not, want not!
A rat appears to have tunnelled into the greenhouse. With the weather we’ve had, I’m hardly surprised by this rodent’s activity. The remaining chilli’s growing in there were all harvested. Rats are brave enough to nibble on raw hot chilli’s.
The winds and rain, or perhaps it may be rats and possums, have knocked a lot of pomello’s from the tree. Fortunately the grapefruit has very thick skin and neither critter has any chance of sampling the tasty core. When ripe the citrus fruit turns yellow, but even green they’re quite nice.
Any of the fruit which falls onto the ground is recovered and brought into the kitchen. No point leaving temptation in harms way.
Hopefully we’ll get back into work this week, and the forecast suggests the next few days will be dry and sunny. I sure hope so, the house batteries had fallen to 29% state of charge this morning.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 8’C (46’F). So far for this year there has been 567.6mm (22.3 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 497.6mm (19.6 inches)
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