Too Much Blog Material (Again)

 

Last Street Pastors training weekend this weekend.  What I hadn’t got around to telling you because THERE’S BEEN SO MUCH GOING ON is that my dog minder quit without warning a few weeks back.*

The first two SP training weekends had long Saturdays and Sundays—longer days than I wanted to leave the hellpack for.  Pav is still a puppy and she has to be crated when I’m not there frelling SUPERVISING and being shut up in a crate all day is not the stimulation a manic hellterror needs—and We All Know about the hellhounds’ interesting intestinal challenges.  I pulled out the training schedule for weekend three and discovered . . . Sunday ended early.  Faint hope dawned.  It was not ideal, but this meant I had only one day I absolutely had to make emergency arrangements for. . . .

I’ve told you Southdowner has family on the south coast, which is her excuse for coming through here to check on Pav occasionally.**  And so I threw myself upon her mercy.***  Don’t you feel an OVERWHELMING URGE to visit your family the second Saturday in October?  And then you could stop on the way and . . .

Southdowner, who I would bet money had no intention or desire to visit her family on the south coast the second Saturday in October, and whom I am planning to recommend for sainthood on the next intake†, said yes.

So that was Saturday sorted.  But I thought I’d better check about the short Sunday.  So Friday night while we were milling around waiting for everyone to show up, I asked Llewellyn about it.  Oh no, he said, it’s only the training that stops early.  After that there’s the commissioning service.  What with one thing and another, that’ll be about two and a half hours. . . .

TWO AND A HALF HOURS??  THAT MEANS SUNDAY IS GOING TO BE LONGER THAN USUAL.

I fell down in a heap and gnawed on the carpet.  Llewellyn looked at me in alarm.  Well, if he decided I wasn’t suitable SP material anyway that would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?††  But he didn’t.  We’re a small group of trainees this time.  He probably didn’t feel he could afford to lose anyone.

Saturday was fine††† although I suspect Southdowner of supplementing Pav’s lunch a little since there was half a bag of dog food missing and Pav’s belly was dragging on the ground when I got home‡.  Maxine, who has child minder problems, had also been looking forward to the short Sunday, and we had discussed what to do.  The official consensus seemed to be that the commissioning service was first and it was chiefly social milling around and whatevering after‡‡, so we decided we’d do a runner as soon as the Holy Panjandrum had finished the panjandrumming.  And I decided that I was going to tweak the hellcritter feeding schedule‡‡‡, grit my teeth, and hope for the best.

So this afternoon I had already grappled myself together and shot out to meet Maxine§ when Pooka chirruped.  Text from Maxine:  her car had died.  She’d already left to fetch me and . . .

Waiting for the AA§§ or Someone Like Him.§§§  Loooooong.  Paaaaaauuuuuuusssssse.

. . . her car is really dead.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  Now what?  A flurry of texts later—including to Llewellyn to tell him we were, at best, going to be late—and Eleanor, whom I am also nominating for sainthood, was climbing in her car to fetch Maxine and then pick me up.#  Eleanor and her car has been my back-up plan from the beginning of training## and she’d already told me that she and her husband### and the other St Margaret’s Street Pastor, Jonas, were going to come to the commissioning to wave our local banner a little since we were on Lesser Disconcerting’s territory and they outnumbered us better than twice over.~

The hellpack got another hurtle while all this was going down, me stopping under trees in the still-pouring rain to answer and send more texts~~.  Corey, bless her, swapped the training sessions so that Maxine and I missed the one that was less applicable to us~~~ and were there for the final ‘street craft’ session.

And then we were commissioned.&

. . . I’m a fully functional, qualified, signed, sealed and delivered Street Pastor, Llewellyn will give me my new team posting next week AND I’M TERRIFIED OUT OF MY TINY MIND.

* * *

* I lost my previous dog minder by using her too little.  I appear to have lost this one by using her too much.  I’m considering never leaving home for more than four hours at a stretch^ ever again.  It seems so much simpler.^^

^ Hellhounds have amazing ability for keeping their legs crossed when they’re not in digestive mayhem mode.  It’s just you never know when digestive mayhem mode may return.  I don’t know what Pav’s limits are or may eventually become since whatever they are they tend to be subsumed in worrying about hellhounds.

^^ All right, I’ll be gone for six or seven hours once a month SPing.  But that is the middle of the night into the small and medium-sized hours, and the hellpack should be willing to sleep through it.

* I’m reasonably sure she doesn’t mind hanging around for knitting, chat, hurtling, monks and/or roast chicken^ but it’s not like I don’t know she comes for Pav.^^

^ Serially

^^ I also think Olivia gets on the phone to Southdowner and starts panicking.  All right, all right, first bull terrier, steep learning curve, blah blah blah blah, we’re both still alive, okay?  And so are the hellhounds and Peter.  And the only scars are from tripping over her.

*** The thing is that both the hellhounds and Pav are . . . a bit of a handful, in their various ways.  I’ve had a few, you know, ordinary friends offer to fill in, but I would fear for their sanity if not their lives.

† This Street Pastor gig ought to be good for something.

†† The training has been fascinating.  Never mind the going out on the street part.  The training has been FASCINATING.

††† The drawback to the fascinatingness of the training is that much of it is, inevitably, about various of the common ways people screw themselves up or are screwed up by others.  Maxine reached her nadir of confidence about SPing with the paramedic last weekend.  I reached mine Saturday afternoon with the presentation on child sexual abuse.  SPs are only out there to provide lollipops and a listening ear, but the more we know about what we are or may be looking at and when to call the professionals the better.

‡ You may recall I’m supposed to be fattening her up so Southdowner can show her.  I AM fattening her up.  She’s four pounds heavier than I think she ought to be, which is a lot on something that is about the size of a large shoebox on legs.

‡‡ The whatevering included cake but maybe we could snag some on the way out the door.^

^ Note:  yes.

‡‡‡ Which chiefly meant feeding Pav an ENORMOUS breakfast, running her around for optimum through-put, and giving her a minimal lunch.  Hellhounds, eh, they’re only too happy to miss lunch entirely, and they don’t eat breakfast anyway.  Also, Sunday training starts and runs later than Saturday training, which fits in the hellcritters’ cough-cough normal hurtle schedule better.

§ In the pouring rain.  At least this means I don’t need to water the garden.

§§ Automobile Association.  Not Alcoholics Anonymous.

§§§ Any other Firesign Theatre fans out there?

# Aside from any question of suggesting giving normal people a lift in Wolfgang, who is health-and-safety-alertingly full of dog hair, spare leads, spare harness, spare towels, a bottle of water and a bowl, emergency Pav-retrieving rations and so on, there’s the question of a normal person driving him, since going with Maxine started because I can’t do the commute and the training.  Cars have come a long way in the seventeen or eighteen years since he was new.

## This was her offer, mind you, but I do keep reminding her that this is all her fault since it was her presentation at St Margaret’s about the Street Pastors that made me think, Oh!  They take old ladies!  She keeps trying to shift the blame to God.

### Who, when you ask him if he has any thought of becoming a Street Pastor, blanches violently before he says no.

~ Plus one random trainee from Smite-the-infidel, who has really been putting the miles on his car.

~~ Situations like today . . . I am totally on board with all this frelling modern technology.

~~~ We don’t SP schools—yet—which Lesser Disconcerting does.  We will, though, if Jonas has his way.

& It was a pretty much a church service with extra bits in.