Good and bad. And good and bad.

 

I had a totally out of the blue kick in the head business letter about crap I had entirely forgotten about this morning and it's made the whole day look like one of those dystopias where you can't go outdoors any more because of the zombies and the poisoned air and the radioactive swamps.  The kind of business, furthermore, that you can't do anything about—the letter was from a nice honest bureaucrat saying 'I thought you'd want to know this is what happened.'  Well.  I'm not sure I did.  I invested a lot of energy into forgetting.*

            Since I couldn't concentrate on work, and my voice had totally seized up so practising for my voice lesson was less than worthwhile**, I left for said voice lesson early*** so I could stop at WH Smith's on the way and clean out their A6 itty-bitty sketchpad supply.  And they had . . . two.  Two.  They had stacks of gigantic A3 and A2 watercolour pads, but TWO itty bitty drawing pads.  So I went to the nice young man behind the till and asked if there were any more, and the Very Nice Young Man said he'd check the stockroom.  I glanced nervously at my watch, but I should still be okay.  He was gone long enough . . . I should have got out my knitting.  He came back with one more pad and said he'd doublecheck on the computer . . . and the computer crashed.  At this point I could hardly say 'oh never mind I'll come back in February' so I . . . pulled out Pooka and proceeded to text Nadia that I was trapped by a crashed computer at WH Smith and would be there soon.  Another tiny paradigm of the good and bad of technology.  And Nadia even got me singing.  Once I got there.

            Meanwhile, Old Eden practise tonight was on to be a bust.  It's August, everybody's on holiday, and I get tired of phoning round for the same old excuses and/or leaving messages on robot-voice machines so I never know if I'm leaving them in the right place or not.   I was thinking about cancelling but Roger went all gung-ho on me and said we had to get those bells rung, and he's right:  Old Eden's bells are as cranky as they are at least partly because they aren't rung enough.  So I had clawed two more people from the shadows to make five with Niall and Roger and me, and girded myself for going when I would much rather have stayed home†.  We'd just made a mess of ringing up, and ground our way through a touch or two of nothing in particular when Felix showed up.  Felix?  I'd even—madly—asked him yesterday at service ring, when he put in one of his semi-annual appearances, if he could come to Old Eden tonight, and of course he said no.  But with Felix we suddenly had six, and four of them really good ringers, and suddenly the evening improved.††

            Not so terrible a day, then.  And now there is chocolate.††† 

* * *

* Another jolly, uplifting encounter:  Hurtling down Market Street toward the beginning of the footpath.  A woman and her ratbagging Lab have just turned onto it.  The woman leans down, without looking to right or left—if she had, she'd've seen us, but then I suppose she wouldn't have cared—and takes its lead off.  It shoots off, full tilt.  The woman saunters after it, no doubt brimming with the joys of a beautiful summer day in a small Hampshire town.  As we're about to catch her up she meets two friends and they stand chatting.  She has absolutely no idea where the dog is, or what it might be, you know, doing.  Now, what do most dogs do relatively soon after they get out for their walk?  Which is what this one's exuberance was certainly suggesting was the case here.  They have a crap, right?  I passed the idiot woman and her friends, rounded the corner and there was the dog . . . having a crap.  I nearly went back and shouted at the woman, but I didn't.  We rounded the next corner . . . and I was busy picking up an offering from Darkness when Idiot Woman and her dog came round it after us, the dog prancing gaily, and of course Chaos shot over to talk to her, hit the end of his providentially-and-foresightfully-cranked-in-to-halfway lead and . . . I haven't yet fallen in the crap I'm trying to pick up, but it could happen some day.  I yelled, Chaos subsided^, and the woman, looking supercilious, prepared to walk past us vulgar peasants.  I said, loudly and clearly, Your dog sh*t in the path back there, by the stream.  She said, What?  At the time I thought she was just being a jerk, but in hindsight I think she was reacting to my language.  Ha.  Granted I am extremely foul-mouthed anyway, but I use the word 'sh*t' for, uh, sh*t.^^  I say 'crap' when I remember to, and I usually do remember to, but I was not in a good temper, and . . . I carefully repeated exactly what I had said before, a little louder, since she seemed to be having trouble hearing me, and gave her more exact details as to where she could find that which she was responsible for.  Then we'd better go have a look, she said, grandly, and swept away.  —Sure thing, honey, we both know you're going to wait till I'm out of sight and then proceed as before.  Grrrrr. 

^ Mrs Redboots wrote:  It's not so much that they [the hellhounds] are magnificently well-behaved – they are, of course, but – it's that they have been magnificently well-trained! They are Very Good Dogs because they have a Very Good Owner, and that's not something you can say about every dog by any manner of means!

Snork.  You're seriously deluded, but you're sweet.  I do really well in the 'making my dogs a part of my life' and 'besottedness' categories.  Not so well in the 'training' category.  Our greatest virtues are that they are very good natured, and I'm rather skilled in suppression.  Your family's gundogs would laugh themselves silly if they ever met the hellhounds.  I think these guys are the worst trained dogs I've ever had and that's a combination of their—most especially Chaos'—cluelessness+, and my lack of grind.  I do enough grinding on bell ringing and singing and story telling and so on, and . . . I was very interested in Diana in MN's comment a while back about champion obedience dogs whose owner still had to keep a sharp eye on them because there were temptations they could not resist—down here at basic damage-control dog-owner level, that's pretty much how I look at it.  I need to see what they're going to react to before they do.  And your best defence is still your relationship with your critters.  In terms of what's penetrated his brain++, Chaos remains almost frelling entirely unfrellingtrained.  But he's extremely attached to me.+++  

+ Oh?  Were you talking to me?  Do your words have meaning?  No, no, tell me after I chase this leaf.  

++ Brain.  Well.  Whatever. 

+++ And apologies also to Diane in MN, who did suggest 'On the internet no one knows you're a dog' as the motto on my iPad.  I thought about it.  It was on the short list. 

^^ I also punctiliously use the appropriate verb tense.  Punctiliously.  

** The your-voice-is-a-part-of-you is such a ratbag.  I know I've grumped about this before and I undoubtedly will again.  A piano is a piano.  You may play it like a giant anaconda^ with a hangover, but it will still be a piano.  When it's your frelling voice, not only your playing ability goes paralytic under stress, so does your instrument.^^  

^ It's much harder without fingers.  Pity the poor musical anaconda.  

^^ I wonder if anacondas sing?  You don't need fingers. 

*** Nadia has seen/heard it all before.  And it did give me an excuse to be useless at Italian.  Siiiiiiiiiiigh.   

† Sulking optional.  But I'm still not sleeping.  Tired sullen crabby person. 

†† The bells didn't.  But the evening did.  I have now rung Antelope.  I have no idea why a bell method has been named Antelope.  Generally speaking gazelle-like leaps from place to place on the method line are an indication of going horribly wrong. 

††† And possibly . . . Montezuma.  I tell myself that my game crazes wear off pretty fast.  Possibly because I'm so terrible at playing games.^ 

^ Whatever works.