Portraiture is dead?

The owner of the The Blog World Picture Portrait Page has a goal of collecting a 32×32 pixel portrait of every blogger – or as close to it as he can get – world-wide. The page is in it’s infancy (my picture was only the 13th), but it seems like a fun thing to do.

A lesson for people who would poke

Poke the Penguin

Bye Bye, Puppy

Mum called last night with some bad news; the family dog, Deefa (aka Duffa and McDuff) is making his final trip to the vet this morning, to be ‘put out of his misery’. I guess he’s probably already dead, now.

It’s not unexpected. He’s 16 or 17 years old, and has had heart problems and seizures for a while now. In fact, they’ve nearly lost him to natural causes a few times, but he did recover. Over the past few weeks, though, he has gotten to the point where he can barely walk and he is having seizures constantly. For Mum and Dad to make the decision that this is the best thing for him means that he must have been in a bad state.

We got Deefa as a one year old when we were living in Coffs Harbour. He was supposed to be my sister’s dog, but very soon became Dad’s dog. I guess he identified Dad as the ‘leader of the pack’.
He used to be a master of escaping from the backyard. He used to enjoy riding in the back of the van. Mum used to spoil him each evening with two treats after dinner; rawhides while he could still chew them, dog biscuits when he could not. I have so many memories about him.

Even though I have not lived at home for many years, I still find that I am very upset that he is gone. Bye bye, Deefa.

Kosciusko Burning

Over the last few days fires have been raging in the Kosciusko National Park. The extent of the devastation is horrifying, particularly considering the loss of wildlife (including endangered species). The National Park is, of course, currently closed to the public because of the danger; I also think that either the entire park or (hopefully) just the damaged sections of it, will remain closed for some time so that it can regenerate.

All of this means that our holiday to Thredbo is likely to be cancelled. I phoned the Thredbo Information Centre on Monday, to see what the situation was; they said it was impossible to tell as yet and to call back on Thursday. So perhaps there is a chance that our holiday can go as planned? In any case, our airfares to Cooma are non-refundable, and can only be rescheduled with 7 days notice. That was yesterday. Hmm.