This post ought to have been posted a while back, but I’ve only just got round to editing the images!!!! … …
With my job, finding time to meet up with friends is often not as easy as it could be – with evening and weekend work a given. However, at the end of March, we had arranged to visit F0rester up in Leicestershire, along with Marbles and Acey. What we didn’t know when we arranged it though, was it would also be a chance to head off to Birmingham for the Pup Social.
The afore-mentioned work issue meant that we weren’t able to arrive at a normal time on the Friday night, instead arriving around 1AM in the morning – although everyone was still up, they were in the process of retiring to bed. Only the essentials were unloaded from the car – my dog cage and a bag with clothing in it! As we set this up, I had a need to go to the toilet and while I was up stairs, I went and jumped on the bed, as puppies do, with poor Acey – who insisted I had far too much energy for 1AM!
We retired to bed, and over a leisurely breakfast the next morning, we made arrangements for going to Birmingham. For ease of space, it was decided I’d drive as I have the largest car. We set off, and arrived in Birmingham, and while I put the contact lenses in which have become part of the Spot image, the others (Colin (my owner), Marbles, Acey and Frosty) went off to find a cash machine, and by chance, met up with Scamp and Rex while loitering on a street corner π
We all headed off to Boltz, and to the Pup Social, where we arrived and started getting changed and after that immediately joined in the fun playing with squeaky toys! Fuga joined us later on as well, and was enjoying playing with the toys. The great thing was, there were loads of pups there, but in the main, we were all playing together, batting toys around and generally making a lot of noise! A small paws (sorry, pause!) occurred while BossBear presented a pup with his collar, and we all sang “Happy Birthday”. After this, play continued, and with a few drinks consumed, the 5 hours of the main part of the afternoon was soon over!
We all headed out to a local “All You Can Eat” Chinese restaurant and had dinner, while my group debated whether we’d go back for the evening bit. We eventually decided we would, but only for an hour or so… 2.5hrs (nearly 3 hours!) later, we were still there getting ready to leave! Although there were less pups in the evening, the same good natured atmosphere continued with pups playing and having fun. At one point, we changed one pup in to a game of “Puparoo” as we loaded all the squeaky toys on his back!
Marbles also encouraged us all to do some dancing, so a group of pups ended up doing The Timewarp, YMCA and generally dancing to other songs… on all 4s!
All in all, the pup social was a fantastic event, and given it’s all organised free of charge, I think it is a credit to the organising team… as circumstances permit, we will definitely be going back again.
Again, Sunday started as a lazy day (getting home at 2AM and having the clocks change to 3AM, due to British Daylight Saving time, wasn’t quite part of the plan!) where we enjoyed some breakfast… then we got started on the other aspects that we wanted to do, with Forester wanting to do some experiments with gunge, and some UV plans. As we got the room set up and others started mixing up gunge, I took the opportunity to “test” the UV (nearly 1kW of UV lights in a small room!) and the camera by doing some test shots in some Lycra, which have come out really well. You can see the pictures of this at the end of this post.
We then carried out the gunge experiment, but didn’t have time for the artistic UV that was originally planned – so I guess we’ll just need to arrange another time to go back π
As we cleaned up, a nice social discussion around the table with Pizza meant that the weekend drifted to a nice, comfortable conclusion – and we had to set off home again.
Theres a few more UV images from the day, but they are worthy of a separate post of their own!