My Tribal Blog

Goodbye to Theodore

hayesstw — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:50:20 GMT

Our dog Ariel had a second lot of puppies - five of them this time. They were born in winter, on 8 June, and all surviced, though they were born under a drainpipe, in the coldest, dampest place she could find, so they must be tough. We could not afford to keep any of them, and so sold them, and the last one, which we called Theodore, went yesterday. We were sorry to see him go, and he was becoming attached to us, and we to him, but I think he had a good home, with another pup a month older than him, where he will be loved.

Simon's birthday

hayesstw — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:34:59 GMT

It was Simon's 30th birthday today, and here he is with our remaining puppy Fluffy Lumpkin, now three and a half months old. . The other two have gone to a monastery about 25 km west of us, so maybe we will still see them sometimes.

Puppies at three weeks

hayesstw — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:48:54 GMT

Our puppies are now three weeks old, and their eyes are fully open. Soon Simon won't be able to hold all three at once, as he is doing here. They are looking less like moles and more like dogs, with wagging tails.

Puppies

hayesstw — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 05:03:36 GMT

Last year was a sad one for us, as three dogs died. First our five-year-old bonsai Alsatian Alexa suddenly took ill in the middle of the night, and died within an hour. We gor another Alsatian puppy, Ralf, and he ate his way into our hearts, but died 12 days later. We got him to the vet, and it was diagnosed as biliary, which was probably what killed Alexa as well. Then we got Mardigan, who was poisoned by thieves who stole our car. In September last year we got Samwise, who grew to adulthood, mated with Ariel (an Alsatian-Border Collie cross), and the puppies were born on 12 November. This photo was taken on 23 November, and can also be found in the photos section.

View from our front door

hayesstw — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:57:10 GMT

Our friend Sue in Cyprus posted a photo of the view from her front door here http://cypruslife.blogspot.com/2007/01/view-from-our-front-door.html and so did a whole lot of her blogging friends, so it seemed like a good idea to show where we live.

Dec 2006-Jan 2007

hayesstw — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 05:57:46 GMT

It has been quite a busy time. At the beginning of December we had a youth conference at the monastery site of St Nektarius and St Nicholas. At the end of it a new monk was tonsured, the Monk Seraphim seen in the picture with the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria, Theodoros II -- full report with more pictures at: http://methodius.livejournal.com/59807.html In November I wrote a Charles Williams style novel, and spent some time in December trying to polish it up a bit.

Writing a Charles Williams-type novel

hayesstw — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 03:33:40 GMT

November was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I issued a challenge to Charles Williams fans to try to write a Charles Williams-type novel. For those unfamiliar with Charles Williams, he was a 20th-century novelist, and a member of the Inklings, the literary group that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and several others. You can read more about him at the following web site: http://www.coinherence.faithweb.com And there is also a mailing list dedicated to his works at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coinherence-l For more about National Novel Writing Month, see: http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=130800

Running out of bandwidth

hayesstw — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:28:48 GMT

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit. This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven't responded to e-mails etc, that is why. There seems to be an idea the "broadband" means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I've never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth. Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.

Mardigan - 24 Feb 2006 -- 13 Jul 2006

hayesstw — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 12:56:45 GMT

On the night of 9/10 July thieves broke into our yard, poisoned our dogs, and stole our Toyota Venture. We took our puppy Mardigan to the vet, and he stayed there for Monday and Tuesday nights, and came home last night. This afternoon he had a relapse, and my son Simon carried him to the vet on foot (since the car had been stolen), but on the way he died. We also took the other dog, Ariel to the vet, but she was not so bad, and did not have to stay overnight. The poison is long lasting, however, and we will not know if she is really OK until after two weeks.

How I got here

hayesstw — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:06:09 GMT

I was updating my Growden family page at http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/GROWDON.HTM and used a couple of search engines to search for members of the Growden/Growdon family, and one of the things I found was a posting by Mark Growden on the death of his grandmother Verna. I wanted to make contact with him to find which branch of the Growden family he belonged to, but the only way I could do that was to join Tribal.net, which I did. So having joined, I thought I should have a look around, and found that it was faster and easier to use than both MySpace and Yahoo 360, which are based on a similar concept. I was looking for something like that ever since Yahoo pulled the plug on my Yahoo 360 page, and it seems, at least for the moment, that I've found something better.