Summer has been really strange in Melbourne this year. The sun hasn't come out much and it rains most days. It's still hot, but incredily sticky and as my human eloquently says....gross. (Yes, I use words like 'eloquent' while my law student human uses words like 'gross'....just go with it. :P) It's almost like we're not living in Australia at all...
Australia has been in the midst of a terrible drought my whole life (and much of my human's life). But this year, mother nature has turned the tables. Instead of drought, we have floods. You may have heard of the floods in Brisbane where over a dozen humans have died and thousands have lost their homes and everything they own. We've also had flooding in rural areas here in Victoria. It's horrible for the humans but us animals often get forgotten in emergencies and are often hit hardest by natural disasters. Both
pets and
wildlife have been severely affected by the floods. Please join us in
donating anything you can to help Queensland's animals.
Source: http://www.qt.com.au/story/2011/01/21/rescue-wins-hearts-/
We're all having a hard time dealing with the heat...what with having thick furry coats and all. So I thought I'd share some of the things our human does for us to help us cool down.
My human thought it would be good to use this cool blue ball that you may have seen in
this post and was inspired by this
frozen kong idea she spied on the
Never Say Never Greyhounds blog. I don't love kongs so using a ball was a much better idea in my book.
Anyway, first my human boiled some yummy things like soup bones, celery and carrots.
When they were cooked, she chopped them up.
She grabbed a plastic bag that she normally uses to roast things and put the blue ball inside. She then taped the bag so that it hugged the outside of the ball so all the soup would be contained within the ball. She poured the soup in once it cooled and added the chopped meat and carrots. Then she tied the bag tightly with a rubber band and froze the ball!
Yummy!
Even Iris wanted a piece of the action!
I have my ice cream and my shade....summer is pretty bearable I suppose.
In the future, my human said she will make a much smaller ball for me because there was no way I could eat that whole thing myself and it didn't stay frozen for very long. Also it made a loud clunking noise when I tried to play with it and I got scared! So smaller is definitely the way to go. She also said she wishes I would have eaten it on the grass because she had to clean the greasy soup stains off the pavers after me. :P I admit...I don't have the best table manners.
As for the three little pigs, my human always has to be very careful because they're very sensitive to high (and low) temperatures. So she always places their hutch between the big lemon and grapefruit trees so it's shaded all day. They also received a HUGE! water bottle for Christmas so they never run out of water. My human actually replaced this plastic one with a thick glass one (which was even better because it kept the water cooler), but the lady who was looking after us when our humans were on holiday broke it. So now it's back to the plastic one until she replaces it.
The guinea pigs also get a frozen bottle of water on really hot days. They lie against it and it acts as their own personal air conditioner!
What do you do to beat the heat in summer?
Love, Oscar and the gang
