teck ghee park Archives - We live in a flat

Donna? She is hiding somewhere. Can you spot her? Somewhere in the grass.

Right there. No, nevermind the topless man. Look further in front. Do you see a little bit of ear and forehead poking through the green blades, two beady eyes no doubt looking this way. We visited this park again where there is a tiny dog run.

There was already a Schnauzer there and boy did he over-react. Barking and jumping and all excited. The Indian man the dog belonged to invited us into the dog run but I had my misgivings. Donna may be bigger than the Schnauzer but she has not had much success at one of the more popular dog parks particularly with the excited dogs that rush at her and I didn’t want her to start developing a fear of entering this tinier, less popular dog run too!

Lucky for us the Indian man was gracious and vacated the dog run for us. So Donna had the time of her life galloping around off-leash like a crazy horse. Meet Donna and her photoshop clone Donna-02 again! They fly like the wind.

People do yoga in the park, sometimes they sit and reflect or relax. I have not thought much about my faith, religion or spirituality. My identity card says I think everything is free but My P thinks I lean towards atheism. When I was younger, I had faith that I can do anything, now that I am older, I harbour more doubts and disbelief.

Spirituality is a concept as alien to me as it is to Donna probably. I suppose you can say neither the dog nor I are very reflective. Perhaps we live too much in the moment?

All I know is I am most carefree when we are out and about, the sun is not too bright and hot, there is a cool breeze and there is lots of time to spare with nothing harrying on my mind. You feel like you are at one with the surroundings and there is nothing that can bring you down.

See her fly.

She had a great time, until this text message beeped in my phone at 11:15am: “Hi today got lesson 11am!” from my driving instructor.

Oh crap.

“I knew you were trouble when you walked in…” – Taylor Swift

Music dogs and kids shouldn’t sing when their humans/moms are around ;P

Anyway, the recent weekends were busy for us with various medical, family and other commitments that we were not able to find the time to take Donna to the dog park. As a result, Donna hadn’t had the chance to be off leash and let loose somewhere outside for quite some time.

But we always made sure she gets her everyday walk at least once a day. The other morning at the park we saw a squirrel and a pigeon around the same tree and I stopped to take a picture. Unfortunately by the time I clicked, the squirrel is plastered to the tree and the pigeon was on the other side of the tree so… well, can you spot them?

And as I was amusing myself with my camera phone, Donna was sitting by my side, and a man walked by with his beautiful black dog. And that black dog was pulling and prancing around even as the man continued walking. And the most amazing thing? Donna remained sitting with her loose leash!

Picture: Pretty, if restive, pure black dog. Yes I sneaked a picture, but their not identifiable anyway :P so it hurts nobody!

We continued our loop around the park when it struck me that there was something new near the fenced enclosures that I don’t believe were there before! Ok, they were just “pick up your dog poop signs”. But for the longest time I was lazily wondering what the fenced enclosure was for.

And since there was no other signage identifying the use for the enclosure, I took it that I could bring my dog inside and just give her the luxury of running free on her temporary private grass patch for a while.

Although I start to get some misgivings within 5 seconds of getting in there. For one, the gates were designed to be latched from the outside and there was no hole for one’s hand to go through to comfortably latch the gate from the inside. So yes, we left the two gates unlatched.

Two, for an empty enclosure, this place is surprisingly full of flies! and red ants.

Three, Donna started sniffing the unknown bone like things sticking out of the ground. I kicked one and it broke and I still don”t know what they are. Some form of fungus maybe. But given my dog’s penchant of suddenly deciding to perform certain hazardous taste tests, one can’t be too careful.

Four, the remnants of a large tree could have been interesting, except that it was crawling with termites.

She didn’t take the opportunity to run much, being more interested in sniffing out the new place. But we did have to run once we got out of the fenced enclosure, just to shake off the flies.

The good news was Donna returned home with no ticks or other such parasites, the bad news for her was we showered her thoroughly anyway. Muahahaha!