Here is the recipe for the dog food.

And here is the recipe for the dog treats.

Since March, I have been feeding Smokey and Cloe homemade dog food using the above recipe.r I find it is a little bit cheaper than canned dog food and they eat it up just the same as canned dog food. I haven’t done the maths but I would estimate we’re saving at least $7 a week by making dog food at home (that’s $364 a year!) and you can make it even cheaper if you buy low grade pet meat mince (an offal mix of leftover bits and pieces from the butcher, usually about $1.50 per kilo) rather than human meat from the meat section of the supermarket (I usually wait until the mince is on special in the meat section – sometimes it’s pork mince, other times its beef or veal – it’s usually around $5 a kilo).

There is just one thing I do differently when I make this recipe, and that is that I add a whole packet of pasta, rather than just one cup of pasta (I usually make it with spirals or tubes). I make a huge batch (sometimes I make a double batch) and then when it’s cooked I let it cool and divide the batch out into freezer bags. Then each morning when I’m making my breakfast, I take a bag of frozen dog food from the freezer, put it on the sink to thaw and dish it out to the dogs in the evening (our dogs get fed once, at night and they are treated throughout the day). One batch of my homemade dog food can last the two dogs 9 or 10 meals each.

If you have a dog (or dogs), I really recommend you make a batch of this dog food and see how it goes down. It’s super easy to make, it’s inexpensive, healthy and the dogs love it. It doesn’t specify in the recipe but I cook mine in a huge stockpot in the oven at 180 degrees (celcius) for about an hour. When I first started with this recipe, I cooked it in the stockpot on the stove top, but that just made the bottom of the pot burn so it’s much better to cook it in the oven, you get an all-round cooking process going.

Here’s what my dog food looks like when it all goes into the pot:

Then when it’s cooked:

And here’s my 10 bags of dog food ready to go in the freezer:

Tim had a go at making the homemade dog treats using the recipe linked above. They turned out really well. He got 96 dog treats from the one batch of dough he made. He even bought a special little cookie cutter to make the treats for the dogs. Here’s how they turned out:

And two special little dog treats:

For two special dogs:

We took the dogs to the beach recently to see how they’d react to the water and the sand. We’re too scared that they will run away and won’t come back if we take them off the leash, so for now they stay on the leash until we can trust them. We can trust Smokey in our garden to come with us whenever he is called, but definitely not outside of our property. There are way too many distractions for him. Cloe is the same. Whenever she gets out the front, the first thing she does is run to the gate and tries to squeeze underneath it.

She was advertised on the local notice board as free to give away to a good home, as her previous owner was moving to the city and couldn’t keep her any longer.  Well, we had been thinking for a while of getting a second dog as a companion for Smokey, and in keeping with the tradition we have of taking on dogs that their owners can no longer keep, we just had to go and see Cloe. The n0tice said that she was approximately 2½ years old, a small kelpie blue-heeler cross. When we got there, we didn’t realise just how small she was.  She is a tiny little thing, probably not much bigger than a cat, and we think that she may have been the runt of the litter because kelpies/blue heelers are generally not small dogs.

We took her home to meet Smokey and he seemed to tolerate her, but only just (as you can see from his expression in the photo).  We’ve had her for about 3 weeks now and we can see day-by-day the two of them are getting closer.  Smokey allows Cloe to hang around him more and more and yesterday we even saw them both sleeping on Smokey’s bed together.

I know, Smokey, it’s hard deciding on what colour laminex to use on the kitchen benchtop.

Relaxing in the sun on the grass.

The first blue gum in the row is getting eaten by possums so I have to devise something to put around it so that the poor little tree can start growing. I am thinking about using shade cloth by stapling it to a few stakes so that the possums can’t get into it. These little trees are still so very young and very small. I’m hoping in the next few weeks they will put on a growth spurt as the weather gets warmer. We have 6 more Blue gums which we’ve purchased which are still waiting to go into the ground. Unfortunately where we bought the pottosporums from has sold out of them so we now have to wait until January to get some more pottosporums to plant in between the blue gums.

Speaking of possums, one of them decided to pay us a visit on the back patio. We managed to snap a photo of him before he ran across the roof.

A couple of weeks ago at the Sorrell market, I bought these 3 beautiful purple daisy shrubs for $10. I will plant them in the garden bed below the study window because there is already two shrubs there which have purple flowers. I thought I would make a purple themed garden bed.

We went back to the Sorrell market last Sunday and I was hoping that the same guy with the daisies would be there so that I could buy 3 more to go ino the bed nder the lounge room window, but the guy was nowhere to be seen

On a different note, I have finally found the perfect dinner set. This one is from Target and I love it. It ’s called Gingko and it contains not only a bowel, large plate, small plate and mug, but it also contains matching placemats, coasters, salt & pepper shakers and napkin holder.  

I bought two of these sets so I now have a nice dinner set for 8 people. The set goes so well with the new table that we just purchased at auction and the bowl that comes in the set is a decent size. (Is it just me or are the bowls that come with dinner sets these days just way too small?) You can actully put your cereal in these bowls! And I love the design on them, so simple and understated. It wasn’t long before the first plate was broken, though. Smokey must have jumped up at the kitchen benchtop and knocked one of the small plates onto the floor, smashing it into a hundred tiny pieces. I was so disappointed that I only had 7  of the small plates left that I went back to Target the other day and bought a third set. So now I have an overabundance of 12 dinner plates, and 11 small plates, 12 mugs, 12 place mats, 12 coasters, 3 sets of salt and pepper shakers and 3 napkin holders. At least we’ll be okay for plates if we have a lot of people come round I suppose if any of the other pieces get broken, then there are still plenty of replacements to go around. 

I really wanted to get the first home owner grant and stamp duty rebate so I decided to find a job in Tasmania and move down here for the required 6 months. After jetting down to Tasmania for a round of interviews one day, I managed to get 3 offers of employment. I chose to take a job which involves typing court transcripts. Luckily for me, my boss at my job in Sydney offered me a 6 month leave of absence, and said that if it doesn’t work out in Tasmania and I decide to go back to Sydney, they will leave my old job open for me. I grabbed at the offer, as it was a great fall back if it fails down here.

I then set about purchasing a 6 x 9 foot trailer and filled it with 3 months’ worth of business stock, our washing machine and our clothes dryer, plus my clothes and my computer, and set off driving from Sydney down to Melbourne and then from Melbourne onto the Spirit of Tasmania ferry, across Bass Strait and into the port of Devonport at the top of Tasmania. We then drove from the top of Tasmania to our house south of Hobart in the Huon Valley. We traveled approximately 1,588 km 3 days. Tim came down with me for the drive and to help me settle in for the first week. Unfortunately he just wasn’t able to stay with me and live in Tasmania as he decided to stay in Sydney and keep working until August when he would be eligible to get a transfer with Australia Post down to Tasmania.

Prior to leaving Sydney, it just so happened that one of Tim’s friends had to move from a house to an apartment and, as a result, wasn’t able to keep his 2 year old American staffy named Smokey. Sure enough, I was going to need some company while I was down in Tasmania by myself for 4 months and we have a good sized block of land, so we agreed to be Smokey’s new owners. We arranged for Smokey to be flown from Sydney to Hobart and two days after we arrived at our house after the long drive from Sydney, we collected Smokey from the airport.

Since arriving in Tasmania, things have gone well enough. The first few weeks of being here was particularly hard, with starting a new job, looking after Smokey and looking after myself. It has been hard – much harder than I thought – living here by myself with Tim in Sydney so far away. To my dismay, I soon discovered that we have some bogan neighbours who enjoy having drunken parties every weekend. One night I had to call 000 because they were fighting and throwing bottles, swearing, yelling, screaming and threatening each other. As a result of these parties, I dreaded the weekends and every now and then I booked poor Smokey into the local kennels and flew to Sydney to be with Tim for the weekend and to get a good night’s sleep.

The new job typing the court transcripts basically requires a complete re-learning of everything that I have ever learned working in law firms for my entire working life. Things like capitalisation of “Court”, “Subpoena”, “Affidavit”, “Exhibit” – things that come naturally to me – is not the right way at the new place I am working at. Unfortunately, I keep making the same stupid mistakes and I am finding it extremely difficult to do things the right way. I feel like I’ve been institutionalised for the last 6 years and I now have to re-wire my brain for this new job.

The new job, though, was nothing compared to looking after Smokey by myself. I had never previously owned a dog before, not even when I was a kid, and I found it to be a huge responsibility (almost a burden) – I felt like I suddenly had a baby that was dependent on me. I was pedantic about making sure he had fresh water and a bowl of biscuits before I went to work. Smokey is after all Tim’s dog as well, and if anything happened to Smokey it would be my fault. After Tim went back to Sydney after that first week he was here with me, Smokey sort of represented Tim in a funny way. During that first week that we arrived in Tasmania (while Tim was here helping me settle in), Smokey had jumped over the fence three times. Poor Smokey has had a hard life so far, and he is not yet even 2 years old. He was placed at the dog’s home after his first owners couldn’t keep him. He spent 3 or 4 months at the dog’s home before Tim’s friend took ownership of him. Then Tim’s friend only had him for 4 months before he ended up with us in a completely different environment than what he is used to. Smokey is a classic city dog and had never seen horses, cows, possums or chickens before. Next door is a paddock with a few horses in it and unfortunately our fence was just not high enough and the distraction of the horses proved too much for him. As a result of his constant escaping, I had to get a new (higher) fence put in at a cost of close to $7,000. Fortunately, the money has been worth it as Smokey hasn’t even tried to escape since the fence went up

Tim found out soon after returning to Sydney after that first week he was here with me that the prospects of getting a transfer with his job at Australia Post are pretty slim. It seems that the postie jobs in here in Tasmania are very tightly held. It’s very rare that someone leaves Australia Post in Tasmania, unless they retire. And even then there are 10 posties already in the queue waiting for transfers from Sydney. So Tim’s chances of getting a transfer were promptly flushed down the toilet. After a couple of months of separation, he decided to quit his job and move down here with me, which of course was a massive relief for me, especially considering the rawkus neighbours partying every weekend. Tim has now been here for 3.5 weeks and I feel so at home and I can sleep more peacefully at night now. All we need now is for Tim to get a job. He has applied for 3 or 4 jobs (all different kinds of jobs from cleaning to electricity meter reading) and hasn’t heard back from any of them just yet. Everyone we talk to seems pretty confident that there will be something for him.