What a tiring weekend it was, I will be glad when weekends mean relaxation, instead of  a different kind of hard work.  However, the Statler is shifted into it's new home, now I just have to get all the cables and belts and bits connected in the right order,so we can sew a test quilt .  That can't happen for a little while, I need to source two little screws that snapped in the moving process. 

Mereth's DS Matt came in to help with the heavy bits, and afterwards I put him to work in the garden, trimming trees and digging up weeds.  We were all tired by 3 o'clock and I suddenly needed to be on the beach with the dogs.  Within minutes we'd arranged to meet John and Liz at Telowie, packed away the tools, gathered all the dogs in one hysterical mass into the car and we were off, running away.

 It was a lovely evening, the sea was calm and shone like a crystal, there were moody clouds high overhead, a cool wind and 5 deleriously happy dogs.

It was a lovely break from all the tension and hard work.  The dogs were never still, chasing each other into the water and out, running for the sheer joy of it.

That meant that most of the photos I took involved dogs in strange positions, caught in mid leap.

 In this one, Bonnie in the background looks like one of those monkeys that wash fruit in the river, Digby is a three-legged footstool, or maybe bagpipes, and Macca is similar to those plastic monkeys in the Barrel of Monkeys game.  A Barrel of Staffies would be trouble!

We were making our way back to the car, pleasantly tired and relaxed, when Dolly scurried ahead of us and threw herself down into a pile of seaweed.  We all know what that means, so everyone roared threats at her, and I raced over to haul her upright.  All we could see was her four white paws wiggling ecstatlically in the air, but when I got closer I could see the ugly truth; she'd found the remains of a carcase and was busy rubbing it into her back..  What the heck is it with her?  She's the only dog of ours that loves smelling dreadful.

She went on the leash then, while I found two clean vertebrae for John and Mereth's collections.  John uses bones in his art classes, as drawing props, and Mereth just collects them as curios.  The bones were bleached and didn't smell, and we decided they were probably from a dolphin, as there was something there that could have been a dorsal fin.  All very interesting, but Dolly reeked.  Back at the car, we covered her in hand sanitiser and sluiced her off, but I couldn't imagine driving all the way home, so we decided to go to the dogwash in Pirie and wash all the dogs.

The dogwash was brilliant, we put Bonnie, Pippi and Dolly in and washed them, then Digby and Macca.  It was chaos, with five wet dogs, but they were all well-behaved and squeaky clean in the end, and we could even blowdry them.

 'Sometimes I wish we had normal outings' I said to Liz.
'What's normal?' she asked.
'Well it doesn't involve a dead dolphin and washing 5 dogs' I replied morosely.