Growing up: Nurhan

Nurhan's take:

My little boy is growing up. He's six and 3/4 months old and already he's bigger than the vast majority of dogs we meet. But he still moves like, not just a puppy, but a Newfie puppy... as though he's on a ship's deck in a seaway. He manages to trip over his own paws on a regular basis.

If anyone believes dogs should only be walked on the lead, they should see Kin when in turbo mode. He charges off (normally into the longest grass), tail held high, back end fishtailing, like a boy racer's car in the road, running in tight loops until he wipes out, and given his moment he carries on going for some distance before having this shocked look of, "how did that happen!" On the cuteness scale it's quite a bit off the top end. Beautiful to see, the rampant joy in just being... my jaw hurts from grinning so much to see this!

Then again:

These are two of the distinct drawbacks of having a Newfie!

Now back into working. Working as a subsea installation engineer for an installation company, it's interesting work... but it invariably ends up being 'fire fighting' work. For various reasons, none of which have anything to do with me, the project can not be delivered in regular hours... everything has been left too late and there are more problems then there really should be for the products that we are to install. The upshot of this is that I have to work overtime, which I don't really want to do and I am not re-reimbursable for the additional time that I spend working; and we're not talking the odd ten minutes we are talking a significant amount of overtime. Fortunately Jan comes and takes Kin out at lunch, so I can be a wee bit later home... but do not like this state of affairs... I'll have to see what I do.

Sheep TV... trying to get the little chap used to the idea; so I can let him off the lead without him trying to introduce himself... if anyone has any suggestions on how to achieve this please let me know... efforts so far haven't been so good.

Had some sad news, Malo the boxer, had taken to biting and after trying various options to stop this he had to be put to sleep; that was sad and makes me all the happier that Kin seems to be turning  into a great dog, able to cope with my life style. I said I'd never have a dog being single... but then maybe I'd never be in the position to have another dog...

 Kin is now very proficient at retrieving balls. I'm going to start him with water rescue work soon... was kind of hoping that summer would come about at some point in time... still waiting. Fortunately I have lots of wet/dry suits and this lake is ten minutes walk from my house (and after the Kommune shut my local pool for a year, I've started open water swimming here, but not with Kin. Tried that once with Karma, got 1/2 way along the lake {~1 km}before he started herding me back towards the bank, as Newfie's have a habit of doing!).

Like Karma before him, keeping Kin dry isn't easy!

Although being a puppy, he does tend to get quite tired...