2015-12-23

Christmas will be a different experience this year, my mother passed away on the 22nd of feb, we lost Diedjie due to cancer on the 13th of December (see the page dedicated to her memory). Thankfully we have grandchildren who will provide distraction and Akko, Diedjies heir to comfort us. He is cool guy who only get a bit excited when he knows that either walk or a ball game is in the offing. So the first Christmas without any of my parents (Dad passed away the year before), without Diedjie but with grandchildren who are now old enough to have some kind of benefit from the festivities

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Merry Christmas and happy new year to all readers.

2017-07-16

Another summer holiday where, so far, there has been more work than leisure. We are repainting the house, garage and outhouse. We recently were presented with our 4th grandchild which of course is a great event for us. Cannot believe that Akko will soon be 9 years old, it feels as though he was only puppy quite recently. Am beginning to realise that retirement is on the not too distant horizon. Life just rushes by.

2018-08-03

2018 will go down in our family history as a year where there were many unusual events. I decided to retire with effect the end of the month that I become 64. I therefore gave my employer 6 months’ notice of this on March 1^st.  Six weeks later our employer informed us of the closure of our operations here in Sweden and the subsequent transfer of our business functions to Filderstadt Germany.  I packed up the test laboratory equipment with immediate effect and as a consequence am now employed full time but with no meaningful tasks. This has enabled me to go home with full pay until the day I retire. I check e:mail and telephone messages regularly and that’s it! It has been a long hot summer with unprecedented temperatures in excess of 30°C and no rain for so long that we have felt the necessity to ration water and live in constant fear that our well will dry up. Our youngest daughter and her husband have separated and we have helped our soon to be ex son-in-law to move out to a flat. Pretty much concurrent to this we have helped our son move in Karlstad from his student flat to a storage facility and also temporarily to us while he waits for his new flat to become available on September 1^st. Back home after our 1^st trip to Karlstad I saw that my trailer had one wheel that seemed be at a strange angle. Investigation showed that the trailing arm on which the wheel is suspended was rusted away and that about 75 % of the arm was missing. The remaining part had a crack in it that was obviously progressing across the section and would eventually have broken causing the loss of the wheel which would then have only been attached to the trailer by means of the brake cable! The section was so weakened that the wheel had started to bend the arm. It was sheer luck that we made it home without incident and it left me wondering how in hell the trailer passed its’ MOT just a couple of months ago with no mention of this impending disaster. Our oldest daughters’ father-in-law passed away recently and we babysat the children while the whole family were at the burial service. We made a two week car trip through Europe where we first drove down to near Hannover where we visited a cousin whom we had not seen for years. After a few days there we travelled on to Calais and took a channel ferry over and visited more cousins on the English south coast. We also went on to Dorset to visit an old school friend. We did not go back via Hannover but travelled up through the European continent taking 2 days to get to Burg on the Fehmarn island where the ferry would take us back to Denmark and so on. We covered almost 4000km in our new Toyota RAV4 hybrid that returned a brilliant 54mpg.

Akko our German shepherd is approaching his 10th birthday and we have noticed a drop in his energy level and an increase in the grey fuzz round his muzzle. I am having difficulties in understanding where all the intervening time went from when he was a pup until now. I can only conclude that he is yet another fantastic German Shepherd like his predecessors, brilliant with people and especially children. I read recently in the quarterly kennel club magazine that in 1958 there was a call to ban German Shepherds from the country! This was because they headed the statistics of child related dog bites that required hospital treatment. Focus has long been transferred to the Pit Bull Terriers and Am staff types. After almost 40 years involvement with the dog club and 14 years being in charge of the mental testing unit, my experience is that it is never a problem with the dog. It all has to do with the owner. This is confirmed by all research literature and similar. We have long had a saying at the dog club: You get the dog you deserve! Both the Caesar Milan programmes and his equivalents in the UK and here all show that when someone has problems with their dog it is they, not the dog, who requires training. After 5 successive German Shepherds with HS Maxa,  HS Bonny, HS Holly, together with our children and subsequently Diedjie (Deedee) and now Akko with our grandchildren, all I can say is that the 1958 reported events  are about as far away from our experiences as it is possible to get. None of them have ever shown any aggressive tendencies towards humans adult or infant. For me this says that the dogs were good material and we did nothing very wrong in our upbringing.