beyond the deathly hallows

well i have finished reading this:


it was quite traumatic. partly story wise, but partly because now there are no more books and i did so enjoy reading about harry. they are not the best pieces of literature ever penned and i have a few gripes with what she did in this one (not giving away any ending, which i think was entirely appropriate), but there was just something a little bit magical about the whole series. by that i mean the whole world she created spoke to the lonely little book worm girl that i used to be, and what i thought childhood friendship should be about.

anyway. its done and im a bit sad about it.

in the meantime, we have been to albury and back doing this crazy thing called flyball, which now both our dogs do. jem has been going for a while and has earned enough racing points to be a flyball master. miss possum we have been training for a while and she has been a challenge because of her really major herding instinct, which has her wanting to go round up all the other dogs who are running (this is not actually part of the game!). so thats why we took her to herding school initially, to learn how to work with a working dog.

so she went into the ring this weekend just to get some practice runs, but she did so good she ended up being part of the team. she didnt cross over once, it was great!

here she is looking like a bit of a mad thing racing!


here is the rest of the team lining up:


we came second in our division, beaten only by a faster team, and then the team won a trophy for being the most consistent team all day. trent is very proud of the trophy, and the dogs think its kind of cool too:


they also won dog food and some other things from the sponsor, advance, including these weird plastic bags. i collected everyone's who didnt want them and am using them as project bags:


i think these might be most useful when travelling and for outdoors, but they are kind of dorky. so the search for the perfect knitting bag continues.

speaking of knitting, i needed to get some plain black sockish-ply wool to make trent another pair of socks with because i won two balls of patonyle at a certain yarn harlot event but its not enough to make long socks and considering my crap LYS doesnt do patonyle, i thought i would do contrasting bands/heels/toes in plain black. so i thought bendigo, and then i thought thats a large ball, what else can i do with black 5 ply, and then i thought, ah, socks and gloves and beanies etc for the flyball team (which is called the St George Phoenix by the way)*, so i bought the club colours:


and am going to start with wrist warmers in a fibonacci sequence, then do socks in the same (thanks caffeine fairie!).

so there you go.

the potter-less
k (will be wielding my wand just a little bit longer!)

* the name phoenix happened because traditionally all the teams at the club were called the Dragon-somethings. our last team was called the Snapdragons but there was An Incident and we split up. Given that three of the team are mad potter fans, we came up with the Phoenix, you know, the thing that rises from the ashes etc etc.