I must immediately confess that the title of this post is not entirely accurate. Firstly, the cow in question may actually be a young bull (I never got close enough to check its naughty bits) and secondly it was actually our neighbor’s garden that was invaded, not our own. Even so, it was quite something to look out of our bedroom window and see this:

Seemingly it’s quite a regular occurrence. Another of our neighbors has a pock-marked front garden thanks to a major cattle-trampling, and apparently an adult bull was in our front garden in the early hours of the morning a few days ago. Sadly we never heard or saw anything of it, and our less than stellar guard dogs never made a sound. Similarly my boy Biggles – who thoroughly enjoys woofing at the farmer’s cattle when they’re safely secured in the field opposite our back garden – fell strangely quiet when one of them turned up just a few yards and one thin fence away from his home territory.

Dad! There’s a blummin’ cow next door!

Think I’ll just keep my head down though – it’s bigger than me

Back indoors we’re finally getting down to unpacking the last few boxes left over from our move. For once Beanie and Biggles are being genuinely helpful with disassembling the boxes ready for binning, though the Biggly boy did have a little set back at one point..

Sometimes my boy’s pretty smart, other times he acts like a fully paid up member of the Hard of Thinking Club. This was one of those times.

We awoke this morning to a blanket of snow. Beanie and Biggles headed straight out to the garden for a pre-breakfast romp.

C’mon Mum!

How to play double tuggy

And how not to do it

Beanie wins!

Biggles prepares to retaliate

And attacks!

But Beanie counters!

And the chase is on!

A new Beagle-proof fence at the bottom of the garden is now complete. Behind the cute little gate is our secret garden – a little burn and a riverbank full of wildlife. It’ll be fun for the dogs to go out there for a paddle when they’re supervised.

Doesn’t it look inviting?

It was soon time for our morning walk. The sky was blue, the sun was blazing and everywhere was crisp and white. We decided to give the beach a miss and head for the cycle track.

We’ve been in our new house now for nearly two weeks but it doesn’t feel like that long – the days have just flown by.  We finally got our broadband up and running yesterday so it’s time for an update.

We’re all pretty much settled in now. The house is fantastic, giving us all way more room than we had back in Glasgow, and the garden.. well I’ll let this snippet of a play session do the talking!

Beanie and Biggles absolutely love their new garden! Back at our old place we often needed to “encourage” them (aka stick a toe up their bums) to get them to go out in unpleasant weather, but here they’re clamouring to get out for another play session all the time. In fact they’ve been doing so much chasing that Beanie’s managed to wrench one of her nails, but it’s healing well and she should be back to full garden duty in a few days.

We’re spoiled for choice for dog walks too; there are lots of cycle/foot paths cutting through beautiful countryside, exciting new parks to visit, and of course the beach – which now takes just a little over 10 minutes in the car versus the 45 minute slog from Glasgow. No prizes for guessing that the beach is our favorite walking location at the moment!

Of course it hasn’t all been play and walks this last fortnight. There’s been floor laying and decorating (the PaintPod is a good thing) and we’ve coated the hall in a special type of Dulux paint that’s supposed to stand up to daily scrubbing when there are fresh mud splats to remove. It’s good stuff I can tell you, but I think Dulux should ditch that wimpy Old English Sheepdog from their adverts and get a Beagle on their paint cans – then people would instantly know that this stuff is seriously tough.

Our two intrepid doglets were more than willing to help with all of this DIY, but for some strange reason we felt that more progress would be made if we gave them a bit of time in their crates. I did let Biggles assist with the assembly of our new bed though, and he was really good at picking up the parts I needed just when I needed them. He just wasn’t very good at bringing them over to me. I read and re-read the instructions but nowhere did it say “grab large bolt M8, run off into the hall and chew it”. Still, he and Beanie kindly offered to be the first to test the new bed when it was built:

I keep asking myself if there’s anything negative about our house move, anything we’ve lost, but it’s hard to find a single thing that hasn’t been more than compensated for by what we’ve gained. For example, Biggles has lost his favorite step.

On the other hand he’s gained a whole corridor, so his dreams of world domination are finally starting to get back on track!