Dodo Au Go-Go

There's been a gap of some twenty months since I last wrote anything here. Basically, as you can see by my previous 2-3 posts, I lost my puppy-boy, Bodie. I grieved, cried, wrote down every single blessed memory of him I had, and cried some more. In-between, life, love and light gathered. Our much-longed-for Little One arrived. Bodie is our sky-angel, and Indi, his sister, is our earth-angel. We're a family of four. In my mind, we'll always be a family of five. Then, in quick succession: I took a new job, we made a giant move interstate and we moved from the four-season climate of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (emphasis on the freezing-cold bit of the four seasons) to the tropical north. Brisbane, Queensland, where heat, humidity, frangipanis, poincianas and very mild winters reign. For the past year-and-a-bit, we've been building new roots - as you do when you start making the unfamiliar everyday familiar - so you can live in it with some comfort. One...

In the late afternoon of our first truly warm Saturday of spring (27 degrees - woohoo!), my stumpy-tailed cattle dog woofer, Indi-Girl, and I went for a little stroll at Hassan's Wall. Hassan's Wall is a lookout with magnificent views of the Hartley Vale area which undulates gently between the Blue Mountains and the country town of Lithgow, in New South Wales. Indi hadn't been there before, and she was absolutely bursting to smell ALL the new smells AT THE SAME TIME. So to calm her down a bit, we walked a couple of hundred metres down the driving track, away from all the lookout points, just to get the scented lay of the land for a bit. For good measure, we wandered down an overgrown side track that didn't go anywhere. I'm guessing it's an off-the-main-track parking spot for the likes of the NSW Parks and Wildlife, or the NSW Rural Fire Service folk. Anyway, the little saunter worked, and Indi settled into a more relaxed mode of grooving around. So we bac...