Sheep Dog

Ian and I were watching Charlie last night as she was rounding up Babbity who was in the pantry and Queenie who was in the living room. Her sheepdog tendencies are so strong, she takes keeping her flock together very seriously. It's obviously quite challenging for her as they disappear when they are on her blind side, but she doesn't give up, running round till she finds them again!

We were wondering if she would actually have been a very good sheepdog. And we also then wondered how difficult it is to train a sheepdog if they already have strong tendencies like Charlie. I can only imagine that if she had full sight and hearing, and had been trained from puppyhood, that she would have easily taken to rounding up sheep and doing clever things in fields.

Of course, we don't know her background so she could well have come from a working farm, although you would think that real farmers would understand the dangers of breeding dogs with the conflicting genes which cause blindness/deafness, and be more interested in the dog's temperament and intelligence than their color and the fact they have blue eyes.

Rain!

The rain continues! While it's a good thing, it's a bit boring now and hampering our asparagus hunting activities :) So I wonder if it will mean that this is a bumper year or a very bad year. Looks like it will be Wednesday before we head out and have a look, as high winds are forecast for today and where we go asparagus picking is quite high up.

Some of the young children in my class were highly excited because they had seen a rainbow last week - and I forget how unusual they have been with the lack of rain. The little ones can quite possibly have never seen a rainbow before.

The rain and wind had conspired to fill the chimney pipe from our stove with water, so Ian spent much of yesterday morning cleaning that out so when we lit the fire, it was less like a smokey sauna.

It will be interesting to see what this rain has done to the resevoirs.

Oh, and we noticed it had been raining in Kenya too. The two ponds are now almost one and I can see little patches of water in the background, so I wonder if that means we will see less animals, as waterholes may have filled up elsewhere..