At the beginning of January, I decided to take up a challenge or two. I had a look around the blogosphere and found several, and the first one was the 30/30 dog walking challenge hosted by ‘You did what with your Weiner?‘.

The idea was to get all of us couch potatoes out of our armchairs, and the dogs off their couches and out of their beds and moving those little legs – whether we possess two or four. Or possibly three, as in the case of Sid.

So every day during January we have tried to do just that, and apart from the three or four days when we had to travel down to Papworth for OH to get his heart checked out, and one day when it was bitterly cold and neither of us felt very well, we did it! Even on the day when it was bitterly cold and neither of us felt very well we did walk the dogs, but (though we didn’t time it) it was probably a tad short of 30 minutes.

And even when we were down at Papworth, the dogs got their exercise at Brambleberry, and we got ours at Papworth, navigating the endless corridors and stairs. I’m pretty sure we walked more than 30 minutes on every single one of those days!

On the whole, it was a successful challenge, and worth doing, because it made us think about how far and for how long we were walking each day, and it made me dig out my pedometer and discover just how lazy I’d got. We might have walked the dogs for at least 30 minutes nearly every day, but I haven’t made 10,000 steps more than once or twice.

This week the weather has been much, much better, with the snow reduced to the odd greyish, shrinking smear where there used to be a snowman or something. The skies have even been blue once or twice, and as you can see, the dogs have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air.

We’ve walked around the village, I’ve taken Jeffie off on a couple of longer jaunts over the fields for an hour or so, and on Wednesday we drove to Ferry Meadows to walk around the lakes for about fifty minutes.

We don’t intend to walk less in the future, although I won’t perhaps be keeping track in quite the same way. Our habit is to walk the dogs twice most days, with one walk being about half an hour and the other usually shorter, and on days when it’s more convenient, to walk them once, but for a longer period of time. This suits us all and we’ll continue with that.

Anyway, since we have now reached the first of February, the 30/30 challenge is now officially over. So, our thanks to ‘You did what with your Weiner?’ for the nudge towards a healthy lifestyle, and a reason not to slack off during one of the worst months of the year!

Well, alright, ‘Hello, damn great BIG fellow’!

I had just gone upstairs for my morning shower when OH called me.

‘There’s a big beetle here!’ He said. ‘I think you ought to come and take a look!’

Naturally, I abandoned my shower, grabbed my camera in passing, and went to see what he had found. I have him trained fairly well, you see, so now I know that if he says it’s a big beetle, it’ll be a big beetle.

He’d found it when he went to open up the Z3. The poor thing (the car, not the beetle) hasn’t been used lately, what with all this horrible weather, and he wanted to put the battery on charge to make sure it wasn’t going to die. The beetle, which unfortunately had already died, was clinging to the door sill, just underneath the edge of the driver’s door.

And as you can see, it was a big beetle. Very, very big.

At first, I couldn’t think what it was. I’d certainly never seen one before… or so I thought*.

I got one of my insect books and started looking it up. Most big beetles in this country belong to the scarabaeidae, but unless it was a deformed dung beetle – unlikely – it wasn’t one of those.

Could it possibly be a weird kind of cockroach? It certainly had long, fine antennae, but it’s head wasn’t right, it had wingcases, and looking at it sideways, it wasn’t particularly flat – in fact it almost had a kind of keel shape on the underside. Certainly, it wasn’t about to sit very square on the table.

Nope, definitely not a cockroach – they have spiny legs, not feathery legs!

And it turned out that the ‘keel’ shape was a kind of a clue. I began thumbing through the pages and finally found him. Or rather, her. For this appears to be a female Great Diving Beetle.

Now the big question is this: What the dickens was a Great Diving Beetle doing hibernating in a BMW Z3 sports car, when she should have dug herself into the mud at the bottom of the fish pond …. oh, OK. Don’t answer that. I think I’ve got it.

This was a Great Diving Beetle with delusions of grandeur. And upwardly mobile Great Diving Beetle.

Well, at least she tried.  But she’d never have been able to reach the pedals.

* I had seen one. Several, in fact. But usually, they’re clinging to something just under the surface of a pond, swimming through the shallows, or – as the name implies – diving.

It’s been a little bit of a difficult week for dog walking.

First of all, the snow that fell about two weeks ago is still hanging around and much of it has turned to ice. Temperatures have been hovering around freezing or below, and the air has been viciously cold and it makes life a tad difficult for those with a three-legged greyhound who hates wearing a coat or boots.

Sid recently had a leg injury which took over a week to recover from. There were three or four days when we had to virtually carry him everywhere, which was no fun for anyone, and we certainly don’t want him slipping and falling on the ice and injuring himself again. So when it’s been particularly bad, we’ve made him wear a boot. The funny thing is that when it’s really slippy, he’ll accept it, but when he thinks he can manage, he’s a cantankerous old fart.

Even so, we’ve been managing to keep up with the 30/30 challenge until this week, when OH had an appointment with the Department of Nuclear Medicine at Papworth (all the while saying ‘there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine!’). Since the weather was so bad, and this appointment was so important (‘Aaah, don’t worry, I’m FINE!’), we booked a hotel room so that we could make our way there the day before. This proved to have been an excellent idea when we woke to freezing fog on top of the snow and ice. It was a relief to know that from our hotel we had a seven mile journey instead of an hour thundering (or not) down the A1 and the infamous A14. At rush hour.

Naturally, we had to take our dogs to their holiday resort hotel, otherwise known as Brambleberry Kennels, where Sid bounced in all happy and excited, and Jeffie looked at me as if he were being abandoned. For LIFE. In a PRISON. to be tortured. They live in the house with a bunch of other greyhounds, by the way, with a choice of dog beds, couches and armchairs,not in a concrete kennel block with a shredded paper bed, but you’d never know it if you listened to Jeffie.

They were to stay for two nights to make sure we could keep our appointment and get home safely, because those little fen roads out to the kennel are narrow, caked with ice, and bordered on both sides by dykes, some of them containing very deep water indeed. We didn’t want to attempt them in the dark, having survived Papworth’s stress test* (‘There’s nothing wrong with my heart!’) only to die of a lethal mixture of hypothermia and drowning. I don’t know about Sid, but Jeffie would sure miss us!

But then the nurses at Papworth said they needed to do another round of tests (‘I don’t know why, because there’s nothing wrong with me … ‘) and could we come back? OH asked how soon that could be, and on hearing that they could fit him in the next day opted for that, which meant we couldn’t spring the dogs from prison fetch the dogs from Brambleberry for yet another day.

So, there were three days when walking the dogs for thirty minutes was simply not possible. If it’s any consolation, they got plenty of exercise running about the Brambleberry farm, and we probably got even more exercise negotiating the corridors and stairs of Papworth hospital!

On the days we were home, the dogs did get walked for a minimum of thirty minutes, and we’re just going to have to be content with that, this week.

I can’t tell you how the test went at Papworth, because they have to send the results to be converted into a 3-D model on a special machine in another part of the hospital complex and then they wait to be read by a consultant and are finally sent to our doctor.  I’ll let you know, when I know.

But if you ask OH, he’ll tell you it’ll say he’s fine.

* The stress test – for vulnerable, as-yet-undiagnosed patients – involves lying on a bed and being injected with something that simulates taking part in a fun run. Apparently there is a CRASH team on hand because some people can’t take it, but in fact OH (‘There is nothing wrong with me!’) did just fine, and only experienced some tightness in his chest and rapid breathing .. oh, and hot flushing. Ha! What with the daily nausea caused by his anti-smoking pills, and now the hot flushes, he is at last beginning to understand what it’s like to be a woman!

Well, some would say there’s not much to be happy about when the snow starts to thaw, apart from the fact that you can drive to your destination without ending up in the ditch. It turns to slush, and it’s patchy and messy.

However, if you really look around you, you will find that there’s still plenty to make you smile.

All these pictures were taken this morning in our little garden. The bulbs are starting to poke through the melting snow, and the hazel catkins are out. There are already new buds on my Captain Jack rhododendron, and the hydrangea petiolaris, but everyone knows about those kind of things, don’t they? Ho hum.

Up there at the top, a single red cotoneaster berry is highlighted against the snow – one of the few to escape the attentions of the birds. It made me smile.

I thought I’d go and see what else there was, and look!

Was this a visit from the Amazing Four-Legged Blackbird? Or perhaps the Miniature Garden Yeti? Who knows!

I took a few pictures of snow, because some of the formations did make me smile, but they don’t look as amazing in photographs as they do in real life. I found some interesting patterns, especially where drops had fallen from branches. These ones made it seem as if we aren’t the only ones who like to write our names in the snow …

… this clearly being a thrush, since she has signed herself ‘M’ for ‘Mavis’.

But it was on the way back that I found something to really light up my day. A yard or two from the thistle feeder, which I keep topped up with niger seed for the goldfinches, a single feather, probably from a blackbird. It must have been there a day or two, because it’s kind of sunk into the melting snow.

Isn’t that perfect for ‘How to be HAPPY!’? Feathers are common wherever there are birds. Snow isn’t unusual in winter (depending where you live). But by a happy accident, this particular feather has made itself a little cave without being at all damaged in the process, and it’s survived the many to-ings and fro-ings up the garden by the dogs, often at very high speed. Isn’t it enchanting?

Oh yes – and we got our dogs back this morning, after our little jaunt to Papworth two days running. That made everyone happy! And they’re so exhausted from the excitement of being with all those other dogs for a few days that they are both flat out and snoring!

‘How to be HAPPY!’ is a brand new meme. It’s about finding the little things in life which bring a smile or a glow of warmth to our hearts and souls during our daily lives. Why? Because it’s the way all these little things add up which truly determines if we are happy people, not the big stuff like a lottery win.

To enter, write a post about one thing which has made you happy in some small way recently – it could be birdsong, a favourite smell, a particularly good loaf of bread, a blue sky, anything! Then scroll to the bottom, click the Mr Linky graphic and add your blog post details to the Linky which will appear in a new window, and you’re in.

If you’d like, copy the badge (up at the top of this post) and paste it into your own.

Oh, and it would be nice if you popped round to visit and comment on a few of the others, too!