On Sunday morning, instead of being greeted with a frenzy of tail wags, I was confronted by a rather dejected looking D sans his usual level of enthusiasm for his morning walk. D is my 6+ year old Labrador cross (we like to say the other half is hellhound cause he is large and black).

 A dejected D

His tail was also uncharacteristically listless and tucked between his legs. It is an entity in its own right as it not only wags left to right like most dogs but it can also wag up and down and when he is really excited go round and round like the rotors of a helicopter. This is the tail wag that I’m greeted with when I come home from work and I’m kind of attached to it.

He thumps it against walls, doors, cars, cabinets, people - anything that gets in its way. My D is an equal opportunity tail whipper. I tell people that the tail is the most dangerous part of this dog.

Although he perked up some after a walk, his tail didn’t show any signs of life and he kept it close to his body. After a little judicious examination, I decided that nothing was broken but he was obviously uncomfortable lifting it up. I adopted a wait and see attitude till the next day.

 His poor injured tail

To cut a long story short, there was re-emergence of life in his tail in the next 24 hours. By gradual degree, the tail is getting higher and higher and is starting to resume its full range of motion. In three days, he has gone back to beating his tail against all and sundry. Since I seem to feel his pain, I have been trying to insert myself between him and any hard objects.My well padded body must be easier on his tail then a hard door frame.

I figure he must have bruised his tail but for the life of me can’t figure out what could have caused it. Maybe one of us sleepwalked and stepped on his tail . Stranger things have happened.

I have been doing a lot of software testing in my job recently and I don’t know about you, but something about working through test scripts makes me very hungry. I figure it’s normal as a colleague does the same thing. Her weakness is Paddle-Pops.

My food cravings change from day to day. On one day it was hot chips, another day it was chocolate and right now I have this craving for a citrus cake that I made my sister for one of her birthdays. I included the picture just to show you how yummy the one I made looked and hey! I'm proud of my cake making and decorating skills. 

The cake is gorgeously soft and lemon scented. The frosting has actual lemon and orange juice as well as zest, so it is tangy, sweet, colourful and so wonderfully fragrant. The recipe is by Norma Poole who shares it so kindly on the AllRecipes site. Make sure to read the comments. There is this lovely one about a lady who made the cake for her husband's birthday and he ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day. I can relate!

Now to find time to make it again…

So on the weekend we went for a drive along the coast to check out a few craft markets. I was trying to identify some to take part in for the new year. We had just checked out one near Bundeena in the Royal National Park and it was a beautiful day. Warm and sunny with just a hint of cloud. It made a nice change from all the rainy overcast days we had recently.

Our next destination was Wollongong and we were driving down the Princes Highway when we happened upon a sign that said “Heavy fog ahead, use hazard lights”. There wasn’t a wisp of mist to be seen about the place. Clear skies and sun all around. We figured someone had forgotten to change the sign from the morning.

A couple of kilometres down the highway, there is another sign saying the same thing and the sun is still shining. Then as we progressed a bit further we started to come across misty conditions and there was heavy fog hanging around the trees and land on the side of the highway.  The day was suddenly overcast and the temperature had dropped about 7 degrees.

From perfect weather to fog in two minutes flat and this was at 2.30 in the afternoon. My only experience with fog has been in the early morning. It clears by 8.30 or 9.00am at the latest. I’d say eerie was an understatement. I felt as though I had been transported to the moors of Devonshire and the hound of the Baskerville’s was about to come galloping out of the trees.

But I needn’t have worried. As we neared Wollongong, the weather cleared up and the sun came out again. I have heard that it is quite common to have foggy conditions in that stretch of highway around Bulli. It was just unexpected on a late afternoon in summer.