Big Al's Spot (& Annie too)

Well we are back from our holidays and probably need a holiday to recover.

Wales lived up to its reputation and it rained every single day, to tend to know this when you are in a tent. However all was not lost we had a 4 middling days and 4 days we were more than happy with, as the strong sunshine made up for the odd shower.

Both Anna and myself have quite reasonable tans on our faces and neck, you'd think we were away somewhere, nowhere else though, far to cold for bare skin most of the time.

Found a few pubs that were happy to take dogs and surprisingly Turbo was extremely well behaved at all times in the pub, which kind of makes up for his Houdini act out of the tent, that managed to get us "kicked off" our first campsite. Don't think he was bad or anything, just caught out without a lead.

Unfortunately I have to now drive down to London for work in the morning. Boo Hoo.

Plenty of suicidal sheep on this beach, after a great fall from the cliffs 

Turbo meets up with another dog on Horton beach and he really had a great time play fighting with this dog. We could see his owners anywhere,but he seemed to have a good time anyway 

A perfectly empty beach on the Gower 

The calm before the storm - Anna and Turbo enjoy a little evening sunshine at Newgale campsite, just before it all turns rather wet and windy for a few days. 

Great beach art provided by the following family, its a Farmer with a tractor and trailer.

I'm quite disappointed how it looks at a lower resolution.

This wee lad had great fun with his stick 

Windswept and interesting on the beach 

Turbo digs for victory 

Turbo loves his football 

Having received some steroids to help her cope with her insulinoma, Taz seems to be like a new dog almost. She is much more up and at it and besides drinking a bit more water she doesn't seem to be having any bad side effects. I guess time will tell.

Just how much improved? See for your self.



Take that you nasty water

Taz doesn't let bins get in the way of fun 

I probably shouldn't be counting my chickens or tempting fate, but I think that when you get good service you should talk about it, as it is all too easy to be negative about receiving bad service.

What am I wittering on about? Webhosting courtesy of brightservers.com/ I was curious as to whether I would be able to do "301" redirects on our site, should the need ever arise.

Using MSN messenger I sent a message and within a few seconds I had an answer confirmed that I did have the ability to use them and that there were two different ways of doing it (along with examples of what to do).

So touch wood I hope the service continues to be as good as I think it is.

Well after a tardy response from Portland, they are no longer hosting our berkswell.org.uk site.

So hopefully I might be a little more responsive towards updating my blogger and a whole lot more successful in actually having a site that people can look at.

Taz has been back and forth to the vets quite a lot in the last few weeks.

The first incident was Anna arriving home to be confronted by blood all over the floors and walls, necessitating a swift trip to the emergency vets at 11pm on a Saturday night. One injection, a box containing 2 antibiotic tablets and £113 someodds later we got to go home. We went to our local vets for another checkup and were relieved off another £30 odd.

A week later at 8am on a Monday morning we were awoken by a yowling and very distressed Taz charging around the downstairs and falling over, we assumed it was her blood sugar levels dropping too low and dosed her with honey and something to eat all the while calming her down with pats, strokes and our calming voices.

Thinking we could enjoy another couple of hours of sleep (Monday being effectively our weekend as we both work at the weekends these days - Anna hadn't finished until 11pm on Sunday night) we were awoken by Taz "howling" and yelping as if she had been very badly kicked or beaten. I knew almost automatically that it was more than her insulinoma and as she kept falling over and howling and charging around the house Anna phoned the Vets, they offered a slot in about 6 hours, which I knew was too long to wait, so we phoned back and they said to come immediately.

On arriving at the vets Taz was panting as if it was going out of fashion and howled quite a bit, on getting her into the consulting room we explained the situation, the vet took her temperature and immediately had us out into the back yard cooling her with cold water, apparently we were pretty lucky to have got her to the vets in time as he diagnosed Taz with Malignant Hypertherma, Taz had got too hot and couldn't control her body temperature and the panting just made things worse as she was burning up more energy than she was losing.

We got her cooled down and took her home, unfortunately our ability to control Tazzies "little episodes" by diet alone seems to be failing. A visit to the vets again on Tuesday is needed and Taz will either need to get steroids or have an operation. Both of these options are going to be dangerous for her, steroids will make an already fat dog fatter and an operation might be difficult as she is fat. One thing for sure the ability for us to feed her every 90 minutes or so is not something either of us is going to be able to cope with for very much longer.