Dog Days

I have been dog-sitting.

The dog belongs to my uncle and is quite the apple of his eye. So I had to move in to keep an eye on the dog while he is away.  The dog has been behaving thus far and in an effort to establish friendship has shown me its bones hidden all over the garden. He's a Lab of some sort and fairly gentle as dogs go.

As I am away most of the day a walker comes around during the day.  This hasn't stopped the dog from attempting to bamboozle me into a walk.  Most often he loiters around the house but now and then he comes and barks at me, these appear to be requests for bone time or walks. Or he will hang around hoping for food, his stomach is a bottomless pit.

Bone time is very sacred and must be adhered to every day, its the hour when he bonds with you by chewing on a bone while you sit close by.  I have to take a book and sit by him till the bone is chewed to the...bone.  Of late we seem to have swung back into winter which makes this slightly unpleasant - especially when the demand comes at 9:00 pm.

I am not entirely sure why but I talk to the dog in Tamil, maybe because its the language I employ for babies.  It hardly makes a difference to the dog of course who only responds to a few important words.  I sing nonsense verse to it once in awhile too but it always leaves the room when I do so which hasn't done much for my pride in my singing :-)

The suburb my uncle lives in is fairly unremarkable, there are streets of suburban houses, schools, the odd community centre, a Railway Parade.  Over it all lies that Anglo-Saxon somonolence (as Murray Bail once put it in a book) peculiar to the more far flung suburbs of Sydney. 

This part of Sydney is also quite green and leafy and is a part of town where the city's early vegetable gardens were established.  One sunny day the dog and I went for a walk.  The park nearby is a mix of native and foreign trees and full of bird life.  I took a picture of galahs which are abundant in this part of town. And just a few general pictures in and around the park.

Yesterday I was putting away some stuff and the dog looked extremely doleful.  It then struck me that it thought I was also packing and leaving. Much petting and endearments later he looked happier.  Of course when I do leave he will hardly notice because the family will be back:-)

Initially the dog-sitting seemed a bit of a hassle coming as it did in the midst of a busy work spell but it's turned out to be a bit of a change and a mini-vacation.  Perhaps a staycation keeping house and dog for people on real vacations is a perfectly acceptable way to step out of one's routine:-)

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Separately the guy I buy The Big Issue from informed me today that he was now married to one of his customers.  When I first met him he was homeless, separated, had lost custody of his children and had just started selling the magazine.  Since then he had bought a place, earned a diploma. And now the marriage.  It made for a happy story.