Mirrors, & population control: Nurhan's take:

Nurhan's take:

Kin & I have had company for some of our recent trips, with Ingunn & Zorro. Zorro is a nine month old pup who has an inexhaustible supply of cute poses (I strongly suspect that he practices these in the mirror, when Ingunn is at work), and most of the time Zorro & Kin get on well.


For a Newfie, Kin is surprisingly agile, and generally foregoes the Newfie habit of going through things, as opposed to go around them. Ingunn's theory is that he's following Zorro, who generally doesn't have the option of going through things.


After having the two 'boys' in the back garden, my back garden resembles a miniature re-enactment of the battle of the Somme, not helped by the snow, followed by heavy rain. Not even when Xo & Karma (two Newfies) used to play in the back garden did the lawn ever get in this bad state! Will be interesting to see how this turns out next spring/summer.


Having the two of them running around in 'Kin's' house does mean that he doesn't truly relax, and once (the dastardly) Zorro leaves, Kin has to gather his favorite toys before he can then go to sleep: 

(I know that this looks like a staged photo but it really isn't, he really did put his toy and bone in this position and until I got the camera out his big head was on top of them!).


New Year's Eve (NYE) in Norway is generally used as a form of population control. There are only ~ 5 million people in Norway, and NYE is traditionally celebrated by drunk folk letting off pyrotechnics, often by placing large rockets in 2 mm of snow and wondering why they fall sideways, causing much merriment as they ricochet off bystanders. Last year the government decided that the population density across the whole of Norway was too low to survive a really harsh winter and took the monumental step to ban rockets, but all other form of fireworks are still fair game for New Year's Eve. Thus when I got Kin, I bought:

To try to get him used to the sounds. Karma would go and sit on the back lawn and eat a pigs ear when the fireworks were going off, I'd like Kin to be the same; thus I've been playing this CD at a volume that made the neighbours curtains twitch and I found disturbing, whereas Kin's reaction wasn't really noticable:

(Intention was to put a video clip in so the firework noises could be heard, and his reaction gauged... but he didn't react, not even when I put a mirror in front of his nose to check he was still breathing!) So either playing with Zorro really tired him out, or I have good reason to be quietly optimistic for New Year's Eve.