I wish I’d never learnt even the concept of dogs

 

Pav is still in full bloody streaming heat and I want to run away from home.  Except I can’t because Darkness is trying to starve himself to death and my severely chapped hands* and I are the only thing(s) between him and the ultimate whatever.**  At that we’re not doing a great job.  He’s lost so much weight that he disappears behind his final pair of ribs:  there’s just spine and a tail.  Chaos is eating badly*** but he does occasionally eat a few mouthfuls that I haven’t had to pry his jaws open and stab down his throat.  A few.  He’s also pretty awesomely ribby—but Darkness is worse.  I have the radio turned up REALLY LOUD which goes a little way toward drowning out the incessant moaning.  I do frelling separate them for some hours during the day, usually taking the hellhounds back to the cottage and leaving Pav at the mews.  This doesn’t work as well as you might think.  There is less moaning, but it doesn’t stop altogether, and there is a lot of pacing and anguish.  She’ll be kidnapped by aliens, their agonised looks declare.  She’ll run off with a mongrel.†  And I feel like a bigamist, trying to satisfy two families.  And failing, of course.

I usually have a voice lesson on Mondays.  Ordinarily both voice lessons or the prospect of a voice lesson cheers me up but I feel that this week is a good week for Nadia not to have been teaching.  In the discouraging annals of Things That Squash My Voice Down Flat the present circumstances rank rather high.  Peter and I decided to have an excursion, this Monday afternoon without a voice lesson, but since neither of us is feeling exactly lively and enthusiastic†† we kept thinking smaller and smaller and . . . smaller. . . .

We went to the library.  Or what used to be the big regional library and is now the Random Media Centre full of random media.†††  And a few books. ‡  And a rather nice café.‡‡  So we hit the cheezy SF&F section first and then I took a detour to the knitting shelf ‡‡‡ on our way to the café.  And then we sat and read like a couple of old married folks out on an excursion.§

Of course then I had to go home to the hellpack. . . .

* * *

* My hands now smell permanently of dog food no matter how much I wash them^.  This is kind of off-putting when you’re eating chocolate.

^ Ow.  Yes, I’ve thought of one-use gloves.  But force-feeding is a delicate operation and even latex gloves are clumsy.  I suppose if I thought I was going to be doing this the rest of my life I’d learn to use the gloves.  But I’m not going to be doing this the rest of my life.  Pav is going to come out of season any minute.  And hellhounds will revert to being ordinarily crappy eaters rather than pathologically crappy eaters.  SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.

** Yes.  Critters go to heaven too.  I say so.^

^ Although some of them may have quite a lot of repenting to do first.

*** But then Chaos never eats well.  He’s secretly convinced that he could live on air, if only I’d let him try it out properly.

† I don’t know if this is because Aroma of Bitch in Season hangs heavy on the air, despite frequent changes of hellterror bedding and mopping of crate and kitchen floor, or whether they’re just, you know, not stupid.  I have frequently noticed that dogs are not stupid at just the times when you wish they were.

†† Also there are these, you know, floods.  They do get in the way.  The uni campus on the outskirts of Zigguraton is impressively under water.

††† And men with beards.  HUGE beards.  Long thick massive losing-small-animals-your-iPhone-and-the-tickets-to-tonight’s-concert-in type beards.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many gigantic beards in a smallish area before—and they weren’t with each other for the Southern England Beard Festival either.  So what is it about beards and random media?  Not all geeks have face hair and only one of these guys really looked geeky.

‡ Snarl.  It’s a bit of a vicious circle.  Us book people are proportionately less likely to hang out at libraries the fewer books the new random media centres contain.  But libraries are morphed into random media centres because fewer people seem to be reading books—in hard copy anyway, she adds hastily.  Also . . . how many of us Book People suffer from Too High a Percentage of Disposable Income Is Spent on Books-itis, plus Life Is Short and the TBR Pile is Tall?  Although in my case what eventually killed off most of my go-to-the-library instinct is that the centralised Hampshire library computer system stank and I got tired of wasting my time.

‡‡ Not only did they have acceptable weedwash—I mean herb tea—THEY HAD SOMETHING I COULD EAT. ^

^  https://www.tyrrellscrisps.co.uk/vegetable/beetroot-parsnip-carrot-with-sea-salt

In case you’re wondering.

‡‡‡ The knitting half a dozen beat up old books quarter-shelf, speaking of snarl.  Knitting is popular and fashionable, you not-paying-attention random media people.  BUY MORE KNITTING BOOKS.

§ Okay, now here’s the philosophical debate.  I brought two of the knitting books home with me.  They’re both out of print.  One of them only has two patterns I’m interested in;  the other one has several, plus some useful-looking general how-to-design-your-own-version stuff.  Neither of these books appears on ravelry, and while the author of the book that appeals to me more has a lot of individual patterns from other books available for individual purchase, I don’t see any from this book.  I’ve wasted some time on google looking either for a used copy or for non-ravelry knitting sites where this author might also hang out.  Nada.

Now I’m a little touchy about copyright, since I myself earn my living thereby^—you can also insert a terse rant here on the subject of secondhand book sales kicking back nothing to living authors^^, so looking for a secondhand copy of the book I liked is just a kind of twitch, rather than any courtesy to the author.  But these books are OP and I’ve made a genuine attempt to find the patterns I’m interested in for sale somewhere.  Do I now brashly make photocopies?  Or not?  And if I do am I a bad person?  And if I don’t . . . why don’t I?  Presumably it’s legal, moral and non-fattening to knit something from a pattern from a library book?  Does it remain legal and moral as well as non-fattening only so long as you are doing it directly from the book?

I imagine the answer is that I don’t make copies, because the rights still belong to the author and there’s always a chance she’ll resell them somewhere—or hang them on ravelry or similar.  There’s also that feeling that instructions to make something are somehow different in kind to, say, fiction, but that’s probably illusory.  Creative rights are still creative rights.^^^

^ And so long as society still uses money, piracy is bad and evil and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s free or that you’re not making some creator of something’s life unfairly harder and punching them in the morale they need to maintain to go on creating stuff you want.

^^ Paperback exchange and ‘reading copies’ for a few dollars/pounds, no blame, no harm.  But the signed first editions that go for a lot of money?  That’s stealing.  Full stop.

^^^ Please note that I write the blog last thing anyway and at the moment I’m even more chronically short of sleep than usual.   But it does seem to me that on-line knitting sites, chiefly ravelry but there are others, are a game-changer about knitting patterns.  Maybe I write to the author(s) on ravelry and ask her/them if any of these patterns are going to be reissued in a new book or possibly hung on ravelry?