Wilma the whippet has arrived + Updates on my blogging

After a rather long time planning and waiting, the new family dog is finally with us, and we decided to name her Wilma. She is of the breed whippet, which looks a lot like a greyhound, but it is a lot smaller. They are also a bit slower than the greyhounds, but despite this, some of them reach a speed of 50km/h, so they are still very fast compared to most dog breeds! She can probably already outrun my other dog if they had a race, even despite her only being 8 weeks old.

It's really nice to have a puppy again, but boy does she have a lot of energy! It's a good thing that the weather is so nice, so that we are able to spend most of the days outside where she can play with the other dog and her toys without making a mess.

She is notoriously difficult to photograph since she is constantly running around, but I think I got some nice shots of her after a hundred or so blurry photos!

It is actually pretty difficult to get your hands on a pure-bred dog in Norway

One would assume that it's easy to just go ahead and buy a dog, but the reality of how this is in Norway is very different. Some dogs breeds have a demand that is much higher than the supply, and this is true for the whippet. To make it even more difficult, it is generally much more difficult to get the female ones.

So when we wanted a female whippet, we had no idea how much time it would take to get her. We contacted many different breeders, but all of them had waiting lists. One of them had just put out an ad on a Norwegian version of Craigslist called Finn.no, and she had one female left for sale. We were lucky enough to contact her before she took the ad down, because she got 80+ e-mails and phone calls from people who wanted to buy her during the 24 hours the ad was online!

At this point we felt pretty lucky to be selected as the buyers! Anyone with some sense of economy obviously sees that the breeders should increase their asking price, but for some reason they all seem to sell whippet puppies for NOK 15,000 (roughly $1.800), but I'm not going to tell them that as a buyer. I think the price is high enough, but it's pretty much the normal price for a pure-bred puppy in Norway. The pug was actually a lot more expensive when I got him 6 years ago though.

Where are all the science blog posts?

I'm sure some of you have been wondering about this, and it's a good questions. Unfortunately I cannot offer you a good answer. I'm honestly a bit burned out after having written a few hundreds of them in the time I have been on Steem. It takes a long time to research, write and edit a full science post, and lately I just haven't found the motivation to spend my (very limited these days) free time on writing. Instead I have been using it to enjoy the abnormally hot early summer we got here in Norway with my family and dogs.

This does not mean that I have any plans on stopping. I just need some time to recuperate, and this probably means that I will post less than originally planned during the summer. I do however have lots of ideas for upcoming science and nature posts, so they will be back again soon. Hopefully I will find the time and motivation to return to writing 2-3 each week, while working my way back towards writing daily again.

Thanks for reading

I really appreciate everyone that are coming here to read, comment, and upvote my blog posts! I'm sorry for being so slow to reply to most comments these days! I hope everyone is having a great week, and hopefully I will see you in the comment section?