A peaceful week with nothing earth-shattering to report, but sometimes those are the nice ones. I took Booty to the vet on Thursday for her regular review of medication (an anti-inflammatory and a painkiller) which she takes for her arthritis. Arthritis is not curable so we are in a programme of managing the condition and making sure she has the best quality pain relief. We've had a few discussions with the vet about the next steps and fortunately she is still at the bottom so to speak of the pain relief ladder. Some of the more heavy duty meds have potential side effects if taken long term, but it's important to remember that she is probably about 11 - put bluntly, she won't be here in ten years time, so that's much less important to us than ensuring a good quality of life at the moment. Fortunately she is in excellent condition at present - her weight is spot on and she is not suffering from muscle wastage on the affected shoulder which is something we are watching like hawks to avoid. As normal, she was very miserable when inside the vet, before he had even touched her, which is both funny and endearing, particularly as the vet is always very gentle and expert with her. I strongly suspect that like many dogs, the smell of the vets' is a deterrent.

In other dog related news, we've discovered that Andy and Boola are distantly related - they are first cousins, once removed - I think. I get terribly confused when talking about layers in a family tree - for instance, Jonathan whose blog is recommended on the sidebar is in fact my father's cousin, even though he is only just older than me which makes him (I think) my first cousin once removed but how that differs from a second cousin is a bit hazy in my mind. If you are one of those amazing people who understands this, please don't try to explain it to me - I strongly suspect it would make my brain explode. Anyway back to the dogs, put simply, Boola's grandsire is Andy's great-grandsire. There are also more distant and complicated shared lines on the maternal line, but that's definately one for the genealogists.

Over the weekend, we've been busy in the garden. We went to Greenmoor nurseries to pick up lots of nice bedding plants for the hanging baskets and pots. These are now all planted up and looking great, plus Andrew has been busy today renewing the grout between the slabs on the paved area round the pond. We've been careful to leave some gaps as we're gradually getting self seeded alchemilla colonising some of the gaps and we like this.

We've also been on a voyage of discovery with our tadpoles - let me explain. Our garden is happily a haven for frogs and toads of all sizes and descriptions, and we do occasionally see newts in the pond too although I am not sure what species they are. During the spring the pond became a mass of frog spawn and we also saw lots of frogs doing the baby dance in the pond, as well as hearing them sing their songs of amphibian love every night. Fast forward, and the pond is now full of a huge quantity of adorable wrigglers - all rapidly growing, and now developing tiny back legs - I had assumed these were frog tadpoles. Now it seems I was wrong. Andrew spotted that as well as the clusters of black comma-like tadpoles, there were also some that were larger, greyer and a different shape. I spent some time doing some research on the net yesterday and it seems that the clusters are in fact toad tadpoles ("toadpoles") while the greyer, larger ones are the frogs. Toadspawn is laid in strings in deeper water so I would not have seen it when it was laid.

This afternoon, after making a cup of tea for Andrew while he was grouting, I went and laid down on the slabs and began watching the poles more closely. This is one of those magical things that I have enjoyed since childhood - settling down to watch a piece of the natural world closely and with concentration. When you do this something very wonderful happens. To begin with, you just see the obvious things, and you wait, and keep looking. After a period of time in concentrated waiting and attention, suddenly a small miracle happens. The whatever-it-is - a tadpole, a plant, a bird, a badger suddenly leaps into your focus and now you can see them clearly, and everywhere. They have crossed from the background to the foreground of your attention. This attentive waiting and watching, in a state of concentration but also deeply peaceful, is one of the most profound and lovely conditions I know - it of course has huge similarities with the state of of prayer, which is also often a condition of attentive waiting. It saddens me greatly that many people probably never experience this, if they have not been taught to enjoy and appreciate wildlife as children and more particularly the experience of watchful waiting - whether it is waiting for a badger cub to emerge from a sett to play at dusk or finding a particular type of wild flower in a certain habitat, or even looking for fossils on a Dorset beach.