Robin McKinley's Blog, page 205

The Day After

 

The frelling birds were tuning up when I got to bed last night.  I'm bored with boiling large pots of water*.   And when yesterday afternoon I casually thought, oh, the plumber's coming tomorrow, I'll just boil more water tonight . . . I forgot about doing the dishes.  Surprising how many gungy dishes one woman and two hellhounds can generate, especially after midnight when you didn't think you were very hungry anyway, and when hellhounds take several hours to eat their supper so the slightly s

La Traviata

 

I'm coming back on the train* from having seen Renee Fleming in La Traviata at the Royal Opera House.  Beam.

            It was also pretty fabulous.** 

            This was my coup.  I have spent my opera going career fairly consistently missing the big names in the big titles–I mean the big names in the big titles I want to see.***  I missed Bryn Terfel in the Flying Dutchman a few months ago†, merely the latest in my catalogue of shame.  And I should have missed Fleming in La Trav, only I hear

Itty Bitty Triumph, Medium-Sized Disaster

 

I have no hot water.  After no hot water—when was it?  Thursday?—I twiddled with the controls* for a while, which usually makes the boiler snap to attention, and it did.   It seemed to have reset itself somehow which I knew was not a good sign, but it was roaring and gurgling again and I figure you let roaring-and-burgling boilers lie.  By morning I had hot water.  Last night . . . nothing.  Twiddled again and . . . nothing.   No roaring.  No gurgling.  Not even a whimper.  No, the whimpering w

Guest Puppy Post by Lucy Coats

A teckel. What is a teckel? I hear you cry. Well, it's a very large wire-haired dachshund, bred to hunt boars and badgers*.  Very fierce? You think? Well not at the start when they look like this….  More brown slugs than attack dogs here!

 

 

 

 

It was January when I was informed that A Teckel Goddess Was Born.  Did I want one?  (I did).  Could I find a Welsh name beginning with K for her Kennel Club pedigree certificate **.  I could (with difficulty). Cloghaneely Kerridwen seemed a little long for

Another typical day

I am going to bed early tonight.  No, really.*  Which means that since it's already the middle of the night by normal standards I'd better get my skates on.  What was that thing I was learning to do that I seem to have mislaid again?  Write short?    Yes.  This is one of my life's tragic burdens;  an inability to write short.**  

But I have managed to let myself be suckered into helping Vicky ring the Old Eden bells up tomorrow morning.  Whimper.  Saturdays sometimes approach the concept of a day

The saga continues

 

It's still hot.  And it's doing that catching-up-with-you thing, when it doesn't cool down enough at night so you're already starting from half-warm the next morning.  I have turned the Aga off.  I've lived at the cottage for five years and this is the first time I've turned the Aga off.  Usually even in gruesome weather we get enough of a through breeze on our hill that it gets sucked down through the cottage with all its windows open:  and the Aga is on one side of the kitchen island, and the

Pupdate – and then there were five

by B-Twin

Pups are now six weeks old.   Little bundles of tooth and claw.  And cuteness. ;)

The "spare" girl has been sold and gone to her new home.  It wasn't the girl I was originally planning to sell but they way their personalities have turned out I changed my mind.  Just the three boys to sell now.

The two being kept are Brighid and Bramble.  ("Big Girl" and "The Shrieker")  Quite different temperaments so it will be interesting……

So.  To the cute pictures. :)

It has been hard to get pictures th

Norma

 

Made it. 

And it was pretty fabulous. 

* * *

I woke up this morning at 8 am because the phone was ringing.

 My alarm was set for 8:30. 

The person on the other end of the phone was a robot.  From my credit card company.   Their fraud division is having kittens (again) over my peculiar card usage.  I suppose I do have peculiar card usage–I pay it off the end of every month, which is peculiar enough, so anything I do flags my account.  Not to mention the fact that I've told them at least four gazillio

Hysterical

 

None of the emails I've sent in the last two days went out.  Did you get that?  None of the emails I've sent in the last two days went out.

I got suspicious when I had an email from Merrilee wanting to know why I wasn't answering the phone at the cottage when I'd emailed her this morning to please ring me at the mews.  So I went investigating the back cupboards of Outlook, because it won't tell you these things,  and . . .

None of the messages I've sent in the last two days had gone out.  They'r

My OBE-winning husband

 

 It is much too hot.  It was 91 in my garden this afternoon, according to my maximum-minimum thermometer, when the hellhounds and I had panted back to the cottage from the mews in what should have been the cool of the evening but was reading 86 on the as-it-happens thermometer.  Note that both the max/min and the as-it-happens are in the shade.*

            I have blown what few unmelted brain cells I had available today on PEGASUS, so how fortunate that the pertinent issue of one of the Hampshi