But first – before I forget – my blog friend, Oskar the Mini-Schnauzer is hosting a fantastic new game called “All About Your People“ starting today (Fri 16th July) - to play, all you have to do is to do a post telling us all about your humans and then you must add your link to Oskar’s page with ‘Mr Linky’ (here) – please visit Oskar’s blog for more details and to get ideas of what kind of things to tell us about! I do hope everyone will join in and play – we all know so much doggie stuff about each other but I know our humans all help us a lot with our blogs so it would be nice to find out more about our human families! I will be joining in and doing my post on my humans this weekend as soon as I can!

OK - now, there’s been a bit of an exciting change here – our neighbours on one side gave their house to some other humans in return for a lot of money paper…and so a new family moved in. I knew there was something different the minute they arrived – I could smell it – so I had to go and check it out – and then I realised… they have a doggie!

She is a black Labrador-cross named Molly. How exciting to have a new doggie neighbour!

Except that she isn’t friendly at all! It’s not like we haven’t been properly introduced. When the new Neighbour Humans arrived, my human,  Hsin-Yi, asked them if us doggies could meet on the street outside our houses first so we could say hello on “neutral ground” rather than through a fence. So we did and I thought it all went really well – I mean, she didn’t exactly run up to hug me but we sniffed each other’s bums politely and walked around each other, nice and relaxed…(sorry – there are no photos ‘coz Hsin-Yi was busy supervising our meeting and couldn’t take pictures!)

But then after Molly settled into her new home, every time she saw me through the fence - she would rush over and shout nasty things at me in a loud, barky, snarly voice – what my American friends would call HBO words! Oh! It was so horrible and gave me such a fright – so I would shout nasty things back at her. I’ve got a bigger, booming-er voice – so there! But then Hsin-Yi would hear and come out and give me a Telling-Off for having arguments with other doggies!

So unfair! It’s not my fault – Molly is always the one who starts it! I can’t help shouting back if a Grumpy Doggie shouts horrible things at me through the fence. Even Molly’s humans said sorry when they heard and told us that she is a bit of a grumpy doggie – in fact, I notice that she shouts nasty things at everyone and everything that comes past our houses! I mean – really! Isn’t it exhausting to keep jumping up constantly and shouting nasty things at everyone? And what a racket she makes!

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Hsin-Yi can’t stand dogs that keep barking and making lots of noise constantly so she has taught me that I can only shout at people if they walk straight up to our house and come to our gate. If people or doggies are just walking past our house, then I’m not allowed to shout at them ‘coz the street is for everybody to use and I mustn’t be rude. So usually, I just lie in the garden and watch them walk past.

But even if they come up to our gate, I have to stop shouting as soon as my humans come out to see who it is – or call out and tell me it’s OK. I’m not allowed to keep shouting and shouting just for the fun of it (anyway, I wouldn’t – what fun would there be in shouting and shouting? How exhausting!)

Of course, there are some special people who come to our gate every day – like the Postman - and I’ve learned that I mustn’t shout at them – so I just stand politely and watch them do their stuff. (Besides, the Postman might bring me nice parcels from my blog friends! ) I wish Molly could learn this too! All her constant shouting is giving me a head ouchie!

Hsin-Yi tried to help by coming to the fence with me and talking nicely to Molly and even giving her some treats, so that Molly would associate ME with nice things…but although she was all nice and wriggly with Hsin-Yi and wanted to cuddle up to Hsin-Yi through the fence, she kept giving me dirty looks all the time and if I so much as looked at her, she would start shouting nasty things at me again!

So in the end, Hsin-Yi said there was nothing we could do about Molly’s grumpiness – she is 9yrs old and her humans have let her develop a bad habit of grumpiness now and she isn’t living with us so Hsin-Yi can’t do any training with her – so there is no hope. Hsin-Yi says I will just have to stay away from the fence and try to ignore Molly when she is shouting nasty things at me.

So unfair! Now I can’t go and sniff around one part of my own garden – near the fence – because of Evil Grumpy Molly on the other side – and even when she shouts nasty things at me, I have to be polite and ignore her and not shout back! Humph! AND her humans keep her out in the garden all day (she only goes in their house at night) so she is always there all the time! I only go out in the garden when it is sunny to sunbathe – but every time I do, Molly is there giving me dirty looks! But Hsin-Yi told me I’m a very good doggie for ignoring her and I always try my best to make Hsin-Yi happy, because I love it when she talks to me in her Happy Voice and gives me cuddles – so I am trying my best to ignore Evil Grumpy Molly.

Anyway, soon I had other things to worry about than a grumpy doggie next door…you see, my humans started noticing strange things each morning when they woke up. They would find bags of things around the house with holes in them – almost like little teeth had chewed on them! Especially a bag of old clothes that Hsin-Yi was going to take to the charity shops – the holes kept getting bigger and bigger, until the clothes themselves started having holes too!

What could it be? Were we having midnight visitors?

Hsin-Yi said there was one way to find out: so she sprinkled lots of flour all around the bag and waited to see what would happen…

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…and this is what we found the next morning!

Tiny little pawprints leading from the flour around the bag to a hole by the stairs going down to the basement…I think we had a mouse!

At least, my humans thought it was a mouse because the hole was really too small for a rat and also, there was no small black poo everywhere, which is usually the sign of rats.

But what they were really surprised by was that this was on the other side of the living room where I sleep…

….so what was I doing when this mouse was scampering around, chewing holes in everything, they asked? Why wasn’t I sniffing it and jumping up to tell them, like any proper guard doggie would?

Well, er…um…I’ll have you know, I was busy! Doing important things!

Ahem, excuse me! Most doggies (or humans) might not understand this – they think sleeping is only a boring thing you do when you have nothing more fun to do – but us Danes know that sleeping IS a very important activity all by itself – in fact, it’s one of the most fun things you can do! I’m always busy sleeping for most of my days, you know. So it’s not my fault that I was busy doing this important thing when the mouse decided to come visiting!

Anyway, after a lot of grumbling from Hsin-Yi about me being “a useless dog” – my humans decided to go and get some ‘humane mouse traps’ because they didn’t want to hurt the mouse. They hoped they could catch it and take it far away to a new home somewhere else.

Well, they got the humane mouse traps and put peanut butter in them and put them down for 3 nights…but nothing happened! But there were no more chewed holes either. So my humans thought maybe the mouse had decided to go and make its home somewhere else…

…and then a week later, my humans were horrified to wake up one morning and find little bits of black poo everywhere!! And something had climbed up on the shelves in our pantry and chewed holes in our bags of oats and nuts! RATS! And this kept happening every morning. Hsin-Yi tried her ‘flour trick’ again but nothing was coming out of that little hole – which meant that they were coming from somewhere else. My humans tried to find a humane trap for rats but nobody seemed to sell any nice ways of making rats go away! They were all horrible cruel traps and poisons and Hsin-Yi felt terrible about killing the rats. (She really likes rats and would like one for a pet – they are very clever and you can train them to do all sorts of tricks!) But you can get bad sickies if there is rat poo around the house everywhere…so in the end, after a lot of thinking, Hsin-Yi called the Landlord Human and the next day, a Pest Control Man came and put poison down for the rats…

The house on our other side has been empty and forgotten for a long time - but now there are new humans moving in and they are building the house again, so they have knocked parts of it down and dug up lots of the ground around...and it's only since they started doing that, that we've started having midnight visitors. So my humans think lots of rats and mice must have been living in the empty house next door and now that they are losing their home, they're coming over to ours!

Hsin-Yi was very upset about poisoning the rats but she felt better when she remembered that if rats lived in the wild, they would have enemies that would kill them and eat them too, so I guess this is sort of like that…

Well, that’s enough talking about grumpy, yucky things!

Sammy the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

Now I want to introduce you to 2 new friends: Sammy the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who lives in Missouri in the faraway place called America, and Oscar the Maltese Terrier who lives in Melbourne, on the other side of Australia!

Oscar the Maltese

I feel very honoured because both Sammy and Oscar sent me messages recently, telling me that they have been reading my blog for a loooooong time (Sammy’s human reads it almost every day!) and that I’ve inspired them to start their own blogs!

So they have only just started their first posts and I thought it would be lovely if you could pop over to say hello to them if you have the time because they don’t know anybody in Blogland yet and so don’t have any visitors to their blogs yet!

I’m sure you’ll enjoy following their adventures!

Right! Just before I go, I’d like to share with you one of my important daily duties: saying goodbye to my human, Paul, and seeing him off to work!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et0XZOb4vO8

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Look out for my next post which will be all about my humans!

(If I had a dollar for every time someone said that when we took Honey out, I’d probably be richer than Bill Gates by now…

…still, maybe they have a point! ~ Hsin-Yi)

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She was hoping to do another ‘Ask Honey’ post last weekend but just hasn’t had the time – so she says Sorry and will hopefully find time to write it next weekend.

Whew...I'm just run off my paws with work...really need a holiday...

But I have told her that I cannot go the whole week without posting to my blog! So I made her get up extra early this morning so she could help me post this while she was having her breakfast, before she dived into her Work Thing again.

Well, a few weeks ago, just as I was settling down for my morning nap in the sun, I saw a suspicious-looking man stop his car-machine outside our house and walk up to our gate. Of course, great guard dog that I am, I immediately jumped up to face this intruder…but first, I decided that I’d better run in the house and grab my Duck Stuffie for moral support!

But as I rushed up to bark at him, he suddenly called my name! Yup, he told me that he had a parcel for me! ME! Hsin-Yi thought he must have made a mistake but he said No – he had a box with ”To: Honey the Great Dane“ written on it!

It was my Pawdance Film Festival prize from my blog friend, Norwood!

In case you missed that great event (where have you been?) – Norwood hosted a fantastic film festival and all us doggies (and kitties) could send in our movie entries for different categories. And can you believe it – I won both the Comedy and the That’s Entertainment! categories!

If you missed them, here are my winning movies:

• Comedy: The Massage  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHoxrCTBaGQ
• That’s Entertaiment!: Murder on the Dance Floor  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjNEC9p7KZk

I was so honoured to win – thank you so much again to everybody who voted for me!

And I couldn’t wait to see what was in my parcel!

Oooh! The first thing I saw was a big bag of TREATS!!!

They are made from “lamb lung” and they looked delicious! Hsin-Yi was very impressed that the greedy Customs people hadn’t taken them for themselves – Norwood, you have the honour of being my first blog friend to get past Australian Quarantine with yummies!

And then I saw something even more exciting than the treats…

OOOOOH! What’s this?

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It’s a tennis ball dumbbell!!

How exciting – and it makes a squeaky noise too (although I am not really a ‘squeaky dog’, to tell you the truth - not like some of my doggie friends who go MAD for squeakies) but I DO love the tennis ball feeling in my mouth and the way it bounces around.

Oooh! I had to do a Happy Dance!

Hsin-Yi is really happy too because she has been looking for a dumbbell to help teach me some of the formal Obedience retrieve exercises. I had a really lovely wooden one back in NZ which was made for me by the human of one of my doggie friends at the training club – but that broke when it was shipped here to Australia, so I had no dumbbell! And all the ones Hsin-Yi saw in pet stores were made for doggies with little dainty mouths…certainly not for doggies with big slobbery gobs like me!

Besides, I have to admit, I’m a bit – er – fussy when it comes to the kind of things I will hold in my mouth – I like them to be soft, like stuffies, and don’t like to hold any hard plastic or even wooden things (Hsin-Yi had to stitch a towel around the middle of my wooden dumbbell to get me to hold it!). Well, this new dumbbell is perfect coz it’s lovely and soft to hold in my mouth – it feels just like a tennis ball!

So now I can’t wait to start training with my new dumbbell! Thank you so much, Norwood!

(By the way, if any of you want to know – it is called a KONG Air Dog Squeaker Dumbbell)

There were still more wonderful prizes in the box - a bubble-making stick, a strange growing towel, a director’s card from Norwood – and two beautiful trophies!!

Paul is very jealous of my trophies – I think he secretly wants to steal them – he says he never got such nice trophies and awards as I do from my blog friends – even when he graduated from Human Vet School!

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Well, he’s not getting them – they’re mine!

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Oh! Before I go – I must tell you about my blog friend, El’bow the Mastiff who lives in Belgium and who is having a special contest in honour of his birthday!

El’bow is inviting everyone to make a birthday card for him – it can be a traditional paper one, an e-card made by the computer box or even a video card – and the winner will get a great prize made by his human, Sanne, who is very creative and makes the most lovely things (did you see the pawbag and bandana she made for me?) So here’s your chance to get creative too! The deadline is 25th July - for more information about the contest, click here.