This post comes with a trigger warning: may be unsuitable for vegetarians and vegans. If you are squeamish turn away now.
Whilst the celestial orb was preparing itself for the early morning spectacle to slip into the earth’s shadow I was up to my elbows in blood and guts.
In the early hours of Saturday morning the longest complete lunar eclipse this century occurred when the earth passed between the sun and the moon and caste the big white orb into shadow. The sunlight filtered and refracted by the earth’s atmosphere bathed the moon and gave it a bright red hue and its name, a blood moon. The early morning was worth the effort to take a look.
Speaking of blood, destructo dog is now on a new diet. We joined what I refer to as the dog cult recently (aka dog training school) as I’m keen for Harper to be a well-mannered member of society. Anyhewz, they run a range of workshops on all things 
canine. I went along to one on nutrition which ironically was facilitated by a vegan who was extolling the virtues of a raw food diet. Subsequent research tells me that the raw food diet for pets is a controversial topic – why should all the controversy be reserved for people after all – but it does make logical sense to me. Before dogs realized humans are a great source of nutrition and security and domesticated us over 10,000 years ago, they didn’t eat carbohydrates, one of the key ingredients in many processed pet foods. Apparently all carbs do is deliver a burst of energy and upset the pH of their stomach if they eat too much. It can also contribute to what we call the ‘zoomies’ when doggo gets hyper at the time of evening when I’m ready for a quiet sit on the sofa. In the wild hounds ate meat (often several days old), greenery, and dirt and have a digestive system designed to process these things.
The pup has had a few digestive problems since she arrived, the detail of which I will spare you, so I decided to give the raw food diet a go. Off I went in search of the 
ingredients and spent several evenings elbow deep in about 40kg of chicken, beef, turkey and crocodile meat and various types of offal, which has a distinctive metallic smell. The whole exercise made me think of my grandfather who spent his working life as a butcher. He was a short, charismatic but volatile man – maybe it was all that meat. I have made up enough meals to fill up the freezer that I installed in the shed for this purpose. A week of probiotics and a slow transition onto the new diet and hey presto, the hound is already much improved all around.
Dogs love to help in the garden. My old girl Jarrah used to like to drop her frisbee into any holes I was digging, Harper prefers to assist with the digging and helped me make a hole to plant a Mulberry tree this week, which I then had to fence off to ensure she 
wouldn’t dig it up again. I have also weeded the vegetable patch and popped seeds for tomatoes, basil, zucchini, cucumber and pumpkin in punnets and placed them under cover in a small greenhouse. The broad beans are flowering and the other winter vegetables are sprouting with spring growth.
This week’s recipe has gone to the dogs and should not be served up to family and friends, but your four-legged mate will love this along with a bone every day. Apparently you should not feed weight bearing bones but raw poultry necks and carcasses, kangaroo tails, ribs and wings are all good. Apply the same kind of food hygiene you would to your own food preparation.
Raw food recipe for dogs
Ingredients:
- 400g lean meat of your choice
- 1/2 teaspoon of good quality cod liver oil or half a can of sardines in water
- 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon of kelp powder
- 1 egg
- 1/2 eggshell crushed
- 30 grams liver, kidney or brains
- 30 grams broccoli
- 30 grams capsicum
- 30 grams spinach
- I add a calcium supplement for the puppy
Method:
Put it all in a big bowl and mix it up. Adult dogs eat about 2% of their body weight, puppies up to 6%.
I feed my dog this mix, one bone per day and she’s had dog chips in a toy she can eat whenever she wants.
Image: Harper doing some excavating
Inset images: Blood moon; Harper; broad bean
ensure you get a piece finished. Short stories also provide a sense of completion and a bit of light relief from long form fiction which takes forever. Everyone who was given the same prompts will produce wildly different pieces which I look forward to reading when entrants start to share them in the discussion forums. Round two is in September.
there in the late 1500’s. Then an infestation of potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) in Ireland in the late 1840’s robbed the population of their staple diet and about one million people died from the resulting starvation and disease. During the Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, more than a million people also emigrated to save their own lives, mostly to America and Canada.
basic structural elements of a story as without it your story is likely to flop soon after take-off or require endless re-writing to turn it into something that will engage readers.
points that each align with an archetype.
when they leave.
to the artist as their muse. In reality sometimes the subject itself acts as the muse and when you give a group of creatives the same task you will get very different outcomes – as many as the number of artists involved.
Hundreds of artists took a simple blank plywood artists palette to use to create an artwork. The palette’s became a playground for the imagination of the participants, and were indeed exquisite. No two palettes were alike but all shone with the passion and inspiration of the artists. One palette was untouched except for a pencil sketch of a cats head stuck to it with masking tape. It was as if the artist had mocked the process itself. Some were painted with scenes that inspired the creators and incorporated the palette hole into the design. Others were completely deconstructed and no longer recognizable from their original form. Palettes ranged from playful, through elegant, novel and disturbing and used a range of materials from paint to pewter to blood, glass, shells and feathers.
artists themselves across all art forms. Regardless of whether the creative output is painting, sculpture, writing or design within industry the process begins with a seeding incident, something that inspires curiosity and exploration.
conversation with a work colleague. I let the story take me in the first draft and expect that the end product (if I ever get there) will only contain a shadow of the original spark as development of ideas themselves change and evolve as they progress. Someone else who had the exact same two experiences might have written a romance or science fiction novel. I was drawn to crime fiction.
winter conditions before they witnessed the rocks move. A day after rain the pond was covered with a thin layer of sheet ice. The ice formed around the rocks lifting them clear of the lake bed. When the ice started to thaw and break up during the day some of it clung to the rocks forming a floating seat and the wind was enough to move them across the surface.
in winter and pluck oranges and tangelos for breakfast. The trees are mulched using stone mulch as we live in a high fire risk area and I didn’t want to put flammable material right next to the house. It does make maintenance labor intensive however. I’ve been contemplating for over a year the task of taking up all the stones to give the trees a really good feed and compost to boost production. The rock wall surrounding the citrus also needed some repairs where it had subsided. I finally attended to the tedious task this week. It’s quite meditative but it did make me wish for UFO’s or ice sheets to lend some assistance. Just imagine getting up one morning to find all those stones moved to one side without any effort from me.
tribulations and adventures of a sleek black horse. Black Beauty highlighted the issue of animal welfare and the importance of treating others with kindness, respect and sympathy. Important lessons for any child. Roald Dahl bought garden bugs to life in his 1961 novel James and the Giant Peach that explored the themes of friendship, death, hope, fear, abandonment, rebellion and transformation. I remember being fascinated by the giant caterpillar who had to tie the shoe laces on his many pairs of boots every morning. The book is still on my shelves and I pull it out and re-read it every now and then.
allegory of the Manor Farm ruled by pigs. As power goes to their heads the pigs start to run the place on the premise that “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” They become so much like the humans they overthrew that eventually they transform into humans themselves.
fair to stay things were going swimmingly. I had established a great routine of writing early, doing some exercise then either writing again, reading or heading out into the garden depending on the weather. Then along came Harper.
Many country dogs get adopted in Melbourne, and Seymour is a liaison point apparently. The industry is quite mysterious and I think there could be a great fiction story written about the rescue, movement and adoption of animals.
Staghound-kelpie cross at home. “Best dog he’d ever had,” he said, “affectionate, trainable and not as energetic as a kelpie. Likes to lie around on the couch and watch TV.” Sounded like an ideal writing companion.
people who dropped by and Bunning’s. Believe it or not Bunning’s has a very detailed dog positive policy and we were able to take Harper around the store introducing her to the weird and wonderful world of the great Aussie tradition of a trip to the hardware store.
