My Year of Meaningful (2011)

I think I shall dub today "add photos day", as it's been awhile.

First of all, the royal neighbourhood pain-in-the-asses:

It's these donkeys (and 50 of their closest friends & relatives)

and these cows (give or take a few hundred):

who, given the current drought conditions here in BW are having their ways with my garden (and everyone else in the neighbourhood). I don't know if I ever wrote it down here before but in Botswana all livestock is essentially free range. I mean, fencing costs money, after all. Yes, they all belong to someone. Likely even all to the same farmer. Although we just read recently that 20% of all the cattle you'll see wandering around town are stray. Mom just wanders off into the bush somewhere and gives birth... possibly 30 km from home or...???

Most animals are free to roam around, foraging for whatever they can wrap their teeth around. When the owner wants to slaughter a cow, or use a donkey to pull something, he sends a herd boy or one of his kids out to spend a day or so looking for Bessie or whomever. It's not that complicated, really. They don't wander THAT far. But when all the grass dries up and there's nothing for them to eat, a lot of times they rock up in private gardens looking for chow. This happens throughout the majority of the winter (dry season). All of us have to be vigilant about keeping the gates closed unless you don't value your beauty sleep (or lawn, or garden plants, for that matter).

It's even a problem in the city-city too. They'll just go where ever they can find a bite. If that means crossing a 4-lane bypass to do so, hell that doesn't stop Tswana cows. The funniest thing I've seen yet was 3 cop cars halting traffic on the city's biggest junction, running around with arms waving, trying to shoo a few donkeys stranded on, and thoroughly grazing, off a very sweetly landscaped roundabout in peak-hour traffic.

We still have our precious little (giant) patient. His foot is slowly recovering but he just can't stop licking it and otherwise back-tracking on each day of progress that we seem to make. It's pretty much a case of 3 good steps forward and 1 step back. First of all, Sech asked me if he could please show off his balls to everyone on the internet:

I said, sure, why not. No one reads my blog anyway so that's a start.

This is the current state of his wound - you can see where he's missing all but 2 pads on the bottom of his foot. If it doesn't come across obviously in the photo, basically: This is a photo of half a dog foot. You can see 1 toenail- should be the middle toenail, now it's the far right side of the foot. Poor guy. But he's coming around, slowly. It's common opinion amongst my friends that we're actually not trying to cure him at all, because as soon as he's in top notch form, it's back to the BSPCA for him where he can finally get adopted and find his "forever home". Well I'll say this: there's definitely one soul in our house who can't wait to get rid of him. It's not me.... it's (obviously) Pissed-Off Reggie.

Poor guy. The only place Sech can fit comfortably in our house is the bed that Reggie & Reilly used to share TOGETHER (see above - does that even look remotely comfortable?!), and then Reggie's prize "retirement throne".... it used to be a people chair but after much abuse and rogue sparks from the fireplace, morphed into dog chair. REGGIE's dog chair.

Ohhhhh, poor Reggie.

I call this one "aw, come ON mom! Do something! I'm a frickin Senior Citizen for christs sake!!! Just look at these big beautiful cataracts!":

Meanwhile, Sech hits below the belt with a great big "Nanny-nanny-NYAAA NYAAAA! SUCKER!!!"

Billy's all like: "Don't even THINK about it you damn smelly old man!"

Nope. Not a chance, pal. (an attempt was made. it ended in tears, naturally)

Away from dogs and on to this weekend's camping.

Bush wine-rack:

Da Boyz:

I call this one "giraffe taking a big shit on the salt pan".

(you can't see the actual feces, but I promise it was raining down like uh.... pellets of poo)

Well, this trip through photo land started out with asses, progressed to balls, blood and gore, and ended up with poop. All in all a relatively high-quality blog with ever so high standards. I should say.

There's so many photos of camping but I'm getting really sick, really fast, of doing the blogger dance so I'm gonna call it quits here.