New house

We’ve moved!

Much of our stuff has been unpacked, and the house is mostly set up now. Most importantly Internet access has now been enabled at home. We weren’t completely cut off, given that we each have smart phones (me an iPhone, M a Motorola Milestone running Android), but I did miss comfy surfing with my dual-monitor pc.

The dogs are quite settled now, although I think they found it very unnerving at first. The picture shows them sitting, quite bewildered, in a practically empty room in the old house while the removalists were loading the truck.

I was quite surprised at how unsettled they were at the beginning. I thought only cats were attached to their homes! The dogs weren’t as unhappy as Baubles the Cat used to get, in the past, but you could tell they were definitely not happy. I felt quite bad when I had to go back to work and had to leave them on their own for the day. They were super-glad to see me when I got home that day!

There was a very bad storm here in Perth on Monday (22 March) this week. Happily our new house was relatively unscathed. We had a bit of a flood in the yard, but the water drained away quite quickly once M worked with our neighbours to unclog the storm drains out in the street.

Peppi was very stressed by the storm. She was making choking noises and acting strange: licking the floor. We let her eat grass, which she did, with gusto. It seemed to calm her a bit (even if it did make her sick). She was very uneasy for most of the night, even after the storm was over and things were calm, weather-wise. I kept getting woken up by Peppi coughing in my face.

Thankfully she has recovered now – I think having some extra attention from M helped. Paco on the other hand has been perfectly fine – apart from being a bit stressed during the storm itself, he even tried to distract upset Peppi by asking her to play with him. While she was stressed she wasn’t interested at all, and he got a bit dejected.

We have a resident spider in our back yard – a very large and magnificent spider. I think it’s a golden orb spider (Nephila edulis). Its web is stretched between a magnolia bush and the garage roof. Note the many insects ensnared in the web. One of the first things I checked after Monday’s rain, wind and hail was the spider. It was fine! Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I like spiders very much. I hope this spider enjoys its home in our yard for a long while yet.