A Bully Halloween

 

First practise at the abbey in something like a month tonight . . . and I don’t have to fall on my sword.  Hurrah.  Progress.*

The weather’s been dubious to downright hostile all day;  when the rain let up on my way to the abbey I knew I’d get a parking space in the abbey car park and not have to park at the bottom end of town.  But at present if I didn’t know better I’d say that Sandy had sent a minion to the south of England, who is out there blasting the storm drains and ripping up sheds and paving stones right now.  I traditionally find weather like this kind of cozy—so long as current fauna, in this case the hellhounds, have been out fairly recently:  they can keep their legs crossed a long time if necessary, and I would probably die of the dirty looks if I tried to make them go out in it—but I am presently hampered by a small hobgoblin** with an unpredictable eliminatory schedule.  A small hobgoblin being suppressed on my lap just now, and requiring me to type . . . sort of one and a half handed.  She’s so much bigger than she was three weeks ago*** that I can mostly suppress her with an elbow, so long as she is recognising the concept of suppression at that moment, but it’s still difficult to type with the heel of one hand glued to the blank space below the keyboard edge of my laptop.

CathyR

PamAdams wrote on Mon, 15 October 2012 23:08

Three guesses as to who is going to be leading this pack!

Do you think we need as many as three?!

No.  Next question.  I realise, sheepishly, that aside from the lovely swathe of tummy for rubbing on a bitch, it’s just pleasing to have another girl around.†  It’s now two against two.  The boys don’t stand a chance.††

Diane in MN

It would be nice if puppies got solid sphincter control at about the same time as they figured out what outdoors is for, but it’s never happened that way with any puppy I’ve known.

And then there’s the weather.  Who would stand around outside to do their business when they have a nice warm comfy crate indoors with hot and cold running slaves who will CHANGE THE NEWSPAPER?  I did manage to get her outside for the evening crap, but . . . she can just pee in the crate tonight.  I don’t like standing around outdoors in this stuff either.†††

Anne_d

Chaos is actually getting out of bed and playing with her? Wow, Chaos is a very good Hellhound uncle indeed. Perhaps they’ll like her better once she slows down a bit, say, less than the speed of light?

I realised that poor Chaos is trying to teach her to play.  She just goes gonzo as soon as he gets within berserker puppy range.  But I caught him doing play-bows in front of her crate, and I don’t think he was teasing her—I think he was saying, like this, you twerp.

I need to get them all back up to Third House’s garden and let them sort it out.  But Southdowner warned me that I needed to get the holes in the fence mended before the hobgoblin found out where they were because she’d then just go through the mended fence knowing there was a hole there.  Atlas finished hammering in the double-annealed, triple-case-hardened steel posts yesterday—plus putting chicken wire over the frelling pond—but now it has to stop raining elephants and hippopotamuses.

Mangan_nina

My vet turned me on to canned pumpkin, and I always have some in the house. For reasons unknown, it seems to fix whichever problem they are having, too runny or too stuck! And? Dogs like to eat it! Just give her a big spoonful about 2 times a day, and see if that helps her bowels settle down? It’s worked beautifully on my Chihuahua, my Sheltie and the Dachshund from hell…

It’s on order.  I am relieved to say.  Back when I still had a metabolism and liked to eat things with calories in them I tried to find tinned pumpkin over here for Robin’s Fabulous Pumpkin Bread and Ginger Pumpkin Pie and the health-food shop finally ordered me some from France.  But the UK is now apparently importing good old American Libby’s.  Assuming it arrives, of course, and the UK web site listing it (and, just by the way, taking my money for it) is not a snare and a delusion to sadden the exile with the erratic puppy.

I’d forgotten about pumpkin.  You’re about the third person who’s mentioned it.  Thanks.  I’m pretty sure I tried it on the hellhounds, but they had a specific problem.

Now I should have some kind of jack-o-lantern topic bridge here—Other Interesting Uses of Pumpkins—but I have to go sing in the hopes of not totally embarrassing myself next Monday.  And clearly this is how tonight’s post must end:

SarahAllegra

“Everyone, lookit the bully in his Halloween costume!!”

http://pinterest.com/pin/516647388471940131/

* * *

* We are not talking anything too glamorous, mind you.  The usual suspects stumbled through a little better than sometimes is all.  But I rang plain hunt on forty-seven on one of the middle bells.  After coming disastrously unstuck a while ago from a middle bell—I know plain hunt is the same frelling idiot-simple pattern over and over and over, but I can’t count that high, and as soon as I lose my count I lose my place—I’ve been clinging to the front where it’s harder to go wrong even if you do miss your count.  But the problem with eleventy-jillion bells is that there are way too many possibilities.  You can ring the front forty-eight (forty-seven plus tenor-behind) or the back forty-eight or any slice of middle forty-eights so long as the ‘tune’ sounds nice.  I grabbed what I thought was going to be the two and it turned out to be the twenty-nine (or so).  Eeep, I said, or anyway thought, but it was practise night so what the doodah.  And it was okay.  Yaaay.  One more small pathetic mark down in the corner of a very large chalkboard labelled Mastering Method Bell Ringing, sigh.

I also managed to treble-bob to Kent minor, but I can do six bells, even at the abbey, more or less, sometimes.  Theoretically I can ring it inside—but almost certainly not at the abbey.  But when Gemma had a turn on the treble I stood behind the three to watch . . . and promptly got horribly lost, not because of the whole ringing-in-a-queue thing that makes ropesight at the abbey such a challenge, but because I’m trying to learn the three-four to Kent minor on handbells and my brain overheated and started presenting random verses from Jabberwocky instead of the method line.

** Happy Halloween.  Only the trick-or-treaters going as deep sea divers or goldfish are at all happy tonight.

*** THREE WEEKS.  IT’S ONLY BEEN THREE WEEKS AND THREE DAYS.

† Don’t ask me what this means.  I don’t know.  It’s probably Species Confusion and appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on page 1071.

†† Unless Peter decides to suffer Species Confusion also and go all Gender Solidarity-ist.  Feh.

††† I used to lose Rowan in the snowdrifts in Maine.  Well, she was white, with brindle spots.  The spots could easily have been rocks dug up by an overenthusiastic plow.