New collie

Today I went and collected the new foster dog. He doesn't have a name. He was picked up with no collar on, and is friendly with people and other animals.

He's very much an outside dog, though. He keeps trying to cock his leg in the house and he walked into the patio doors not long after he arrived. But I've had him up to the vet and he seems fine. He can hear and see and walk, all of which is a good start.

Now we just have to hope someone is missing him and that they want him back. He's asleep in the kitchen at the moment.

Edited next day to add: I know dogs can be very clingy when they first come to a new house, but man, this is one laid-back, person-focused dog. He has had a sniff around the other dogs and cats, decided that they're fine, and left it at that. He just wants to lie at the feet of whoever's around. Me or mrmonkey, he's not bothered.

Yesterday he wouldn't eat his food, but today I put some baked bean juice on it and he larruped it. Now he's asleep again. Sometimes older dogs really are the business.

Ha ha, rasher feet

It turns out, right, that if you're planning on catching a ferry at 2am on a Saturday and following that up with a 6.5 hour drive across and down a good chunk of England, then the very best thing you can do on the Thursday night is to go out and see some comedy, then go drinking till three in the morning. It is also important that you get no nap on the Friday at all, so that your driving ozzyssey across England is filled with the kind of unfitness to drive that they make road safety ads about.

Nevertheless, this is what we did.

Last Thursday we went to see Dara Ó Briain in Vicar St during his current round of gigs there. It's quite a while since we last saw him here (can it possibly be this long ago? This seems too long ago. I must have just not blogged the last time, surely) on his own, but we did see him in December at the Console gig, so we hadn't completely forgotten the fast talking (mrmonkey's American colleague found it difficult to understand him every now and again), the manic hand gestures (in fact, his show has become more physical, and is all the better for it. He's got a gift for a bit of physical comedy), and the audience interaction, which is sometimes disastrous but actually worked really well last week. In the audience were not one, but two people who had saved the lives of others. There was also a woman who had gone through a period of having slightly predictive dreams that foretold entirely inconsequential events, but she hadn't had one since the mid 1990s.

One of the things I really enjoy about Dara's gigs is the fact that I can relax, knowing that he's not going to pull out a load of material about fat chicks or how women be shoppin'. He's not going to take the piss out of the old ball and chain, (indeed, most of the stories involving his missus are highly complimentary) or even shite on about football (even though he loves it). Of course, I'm in a privileged position here. If I was a homeopath wearing a badge saying "Let Us Drive Out Blasphemy As St. Patrick Drove Out The Snakes" I might feel differently. But even then, Dara has a way of arguing against the action rather than the person. He does have a section where he talks about old midwives' tales, but even then, he's very clear that it's only the "don't let the surgeons get you, with their knives" part he has a problem with, not the "hey, let's get you squared away and get a healthy baby out of you" part.

Maybe I should feel left out for not being a gamer, but even his section on computer games, which has the potential to be alienating to non-gamers, is put together in a way that includes everyone, because he creates a lovely fiction around first-person shooters that opens the routine up to anyone who's watched films.

So, to recap. If you are into blasphemy laws, you fear modern medicine and women, you don't watch films or play computer games, and you want to hear a lot about football, I recommend you go elsewhere for your comedy. For anyone else, I recommend you get a hold of some tickets to see Dara if you can.

The Ozzysey

At the very beginning of the year, some people in England who know ComedyB because they have a comedy family member of their own contacted me because they'd seen Ozzie's windy day picture online. They wanted to give her a home.

They filled out the adoption form for our rescue and everyone agreed they seemed like a great home. If only they weren't in England, said everyone. We don't rehome directly to homes in England, said the rescue committee. If it doesn't work out, we have no way of getting the dog back. The people were very disappointed. I was very disappointed. Ozzie continued about her life, totally unaffected by all the fuss.

When she came to us in August last year, Ozzie was very ill, you see. Her condition turned out to be pancreatic insufficiency, not uncommon in dogs at all. It means her pancreas doesn't make the enzymes she needs to digest her food, so her food just passes through her, irritating her insides as it goes. Untreated, the condition eventually leads animals to starve to death. Luckily, it's very easy to treat. You just sprinkle enzyme powder on her food at mealtimes, feed her a high quality food, and leave it at that. In the months that we had her, she went from being 17kg down to 14.5kg at her lightest, and back up to 18.65kg again. She went from being a bag of bones who only just trundled along behind you when you walked to being a sleek, black powerhouse of energy with a high-gloss coat who never left a bird unchased, a dog ungreeted, a thing on the floor unchewed, or a lap empty.

Despite the fact that her condition is easy to treat, though, nobody wanted her. A few forms came in asking about her, because she was said to be good with both kids and cats, as well as other dogs. But every time we mentioned her condition, the enquiries stopped.

Still the family in England asked about her, admired her photos, and chatted back and forth with us about her. They didn't care that she had a condition, or that she would be expensive to feed, or that it would be expensive to get her to them. They just wanted her. We sent emails back and forth. They promised they would send her back if it didn't work out. They swore they would take care of her.

So last weekend, we brought her. Mrmonkey and I took her on the ferry to Holyhead and drove her down to where the family lives. We were prepared for the people to really take to her immediately, because she's that kind of dog. But even their number one dog, a three-year-old labrador called Maddy, wanted to be her pal instantly. She ran all around the house with her, licking her face jumping on her, and bringing her toys for Ozzie to play with.

Ozzie knew something was going on. She had been separated from our other dogs, shut into the car inside a scary loud box for some hours, driven for ages on a very long road by two very, very tired people, and finally had her bed and blankets left in someone else's kitchen for her. She was a bit clingy and she wasn't sure about this new dog.

Even still, despite some tears from me on parting from her, she only sat by the front foor for a short while after we left her behind with her new family. She then did the classic first-day-of-school maneuver and just bloody got on with it. Sat on laps, played with Maddy, ate the cheese she was offered, went for walks, and settled down to sleep.

So she will be very happy. A wee dog who was dumped in a box a year ago, and now she's in a perfect home with people who just love her.

Bye bye Ozzie. Happy life.

Two new dogs coming tomorrow.

Bobbykins

Here he is.

Bobby was surrendered to the rescue just before Christmas, his lovely home with his nice Eastern European owner pulled out from under him because of the recession. His owner had to go home and couldn't afford to take the dog with him. So Bobby went to a local foster, where he's been for the last two months.

We've been minding him over the weekend while his regular fosters are away. He's a complete sweetheart. Loves cuddles, comes when you call him, falls over a lot in a cute puppy way, and is happy to be around other dogs and around cats. Today a nice family from Mullingar came to view him. They loved him straight away. He just sat there and let all three kids hug and cuddle him at once, and actually seemed to enjoy it instead of just tolerating it. The family has been home-checked and found suitable, so Bobby will be going there at the end of the month.

Ozzie's due to leave us at the end of this week, and it'll be back to three dogs again. The sofa will seem so empty.

Battle of wills in Tesco

Last night I was picking up a few necessities in Tesco when I ran into the woman from this blog post. Remember her?

Well, we looked each other up and down very quickly, and of course had a judgemental look over each other's baskets to see what the other one was buying. I had milk and juice and toothpaste and eggs in mine: normal stuff. My arch nemesis, on the other hand, was clutching an enormous box of Thornton's chocolates, which she pressed more tightly to her as I passed.

From the way she looked at me, she knew that I knew that she was planning to scoff the entire box herself.

And so I win round two.

Jimmy Kimmel laying into Jay Leno

Now this is a presenter thinking on his feet. I can't believe Leno couldn't come up with a single riposte to any of Kimmel's remarks here.

I don't like that thing you like

British people seem to have gone a bit mad lately about television, especially the BBC, and what should or shouldn't be on it. People don't want to have to pay the salaries of Jonathan Ross or Frankie Boyle. They don't want subscription channels to get their precious sporting events. Even the comedian and New Statesman columnist Mark Watson, himself on the receiving end of "we shouldn't have to pay for this" complaints about his BBC 4 show We Need Answers, and a great fan of programming related to football (which I personally would rather nobody wanted to watch), would prefer it if there were fewer dance-related shows on the television and has (in jest, of course) asked for the number to be reduced.

I can't help thinking that everyone needs to calm down and stop wanting the stuff they don't like to be taken off the telly. Your telly is fine, believe me. You have no idea what it's like out there in other countries where they don't have the BBC. You really don't. Complaining about having to pay the license fee to pay the salaries of entertainers you don't like is a little like complaining about having to pay tax for a health service when you never get sick, or a school system when you don't have any children.

But it's easy for me to say, I don't pay for the BBC. Except I do, because I buy DVDs and I pay a Sky+ subscription which funds all those second-run channels that the BBC sells its shows into after they've run on the main channels. So I'm a customer as well. And I like dancing. And Jonathan Ross. Sometimes.

And, to add insult to injury, I, through my license fee, am required to pay the salary of this monstrosity. So you have nothing to moan about.

Roll on February

Okay, the first two weeks look like being a bit crap. Mrmonkey will be away, visiting the mothership and renewing his acquaintance with the endless ad breaks of U.S. television, and I will be here on my own.

But then will come the first gigs of spring, peeping out of the calendar like bright crocuses and acting like beacons to steer me through the rocky weeks of the mister's absence.

On February 14th we will be going to Vicar St. to see Midlake, one of our two favourite bands of the last ten years (yes, the Arcade Fire is the other one). To demonstrate how hotly I'm anticipating it, let me tell you that I am actually hoping they play tracks off their forthcoming album, because I could do with some new Midlake about the place.

Then, a mere four days later, we'll be going back to Vicar St. to see Dara Ó Briain. His gigs are a treat for people who (like me) love their comedy but get a bit fed up of the usual stand-up topics--women, eh? fat people, eh? chavs, eh? airlines, eh? Big Brother, eh?--and would like something just a little bit different and, yes, perhaps just a little bit nerdier. Reading the interview with Dara from yesterday's Irish Times (although the interview is a bit peculiarly written) whets the appetite, as does reminding myself of previous times we saw him in Vicar St.

All we need now is for the snow and ice to EFF OFF back up to the Arctic, and we can get on with getting through January and watching the crocuses come out.

Bored Slippy

Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe (yes, that is his name) has decreed that our schools will remain closed until next Thursday. This is partly because of burst pipes, knackered heating systems, and the fact that many of our schools are in prefabs, which you couldn't possibly expect salaried members of the teachers' union, sorry, the precious children to use in this weather. Also, nobody can get to school because the roads and paths are all too slidey. Buses can't run, and nobody can walk anywhere without being afraid that they're going to fall over.

In a not unrelated development, the senior civil servant who has been appointed as our Bad Weather Czar (whose name I currently cannot find on Google) was on the radio this morning defending the fact that the Republic of Ireland's National Roads Authority buys the same amount of grit every year as does Northern Ireland's roads authority, despite the fact that NI has a quarter the road mileage that we have. He said that the government's priority was to ensure that "primary national routes" were kept clear.

Well that's all well and good for the people who live on "primary national routes" (which is almost nobody, except the elves who live in IKEA), but what about the rest of us mugs who live in glass-road housing estates and at the ends of little boreens halfway up hills? We can all just go and shite, can we?

Everyone's bored with this now. The weather isn't even all that bad. It's just that even a tiny fall of snow can break a crappy infrastructure.

And everywhere is sold out of Yaktrax. This winter is stupid. Roll on spring. When I will be going to London and Stockholm, assuming the ice age hasn't begun. If it has, I'm going to Rio.

Easterly

It's very windy out and about here today. In this photo, Ozzie is not shaking or moving her head at all. That's the wind, that is.

Looks like the weather will turn icy again tomorrow, so it's time to order my Yak Trax so that at least the dogs don't pull me off my feet when we're walking.

Did you have a lovely Christmas? I did. I seem to have cornered the market in Burt's Bees lip salve, though, so if anyone needs any, do let me know. No exaggeration, I think I have ten sticks of it. I did also get a pile of Lush stuff from youngest Byrne, which included a fantastically bracing salt and vodka facial scrub. Almost as good as a long walk on a very windy day by the sea.

Oh, did you have best-laid plans, did you?

Well, now they have changed.

To get the new year off to a rollicking start (all the extra two seconds of it, or whatever it was we actually got today), Lulu gashed the pad of her paw on a piece of glass or something on the beach. Not the part of her paw she actually walks on, more the ankle bit. But she sliced that pad pretty good. So off to the vet on the frozen road we went, where she got sedated and stitched and bandaged.

She's fine, but she has to have two kinds of medication for several days, and the medication might make her sick. And she has to come in on Christmas Eve to have her dressing changed and a new bandage put on. So it means she won't be going to kennels with the others tomorrow. I feel bad for poor Ozzie that her very best playmate won't be around to do kennels with her over the next week, but in another way I feel like Lulu's time has come. After all, she did have to spend two weeks in kennels, alone, when we went to Derbyshire in June. Now she gets to hang out at the parents' house with us in comfort over Christmas Day and Stephenses Day while the others are all in kennels, freezing their asses off.

In other news, two of my photos were chosen for the vets' calendar this year. And Blakey is the only cat on the calendar.

SUCK IT, OTHER PET OWNERS.

Happy new year

Today is the winter solstice. Which means that tomorrow is the new year, astronomically speaking. And astronomically speaking is good enough for me.

While out walking the dogs today--I saw the sun come up at about 8.45 and was out again when it got dark at about 16.30--I had that feeling you get when you are at the very bottom, or the very middle, of a very long tunnel. You feel stifled, and then you feel that lift as the carriage or the car starts to move out of the tunnel and you find yourself leaning forwards in the hope it'll get you out faster.

Not that I'm particularly going anywhere. Next year might just be the same as this one. For me, that's pretty much okay. (Your experience might be different, in which case I wish radical change for you.) Although I do wish I could have stayed in abstracting. I miss spending my work days finding out what was going on in the world.

Anyway, when I get up on the dunes with the dogs tomorrow morning, there will be that delicious, childish, primeval holding of my breath while I discover whether the sun is going to struggle up over the horizon or not. I don't know what we'll do if it doesn't. Go back to bed and wait to see what happens next, I suppose.

Good thing Mrmonkey isn't going to work tomorrow. We can wait and see together.

Is nice system, but please, where is heat?

We recently spent over €4,000 on a new heating system for our house. It's a very clever system that adjusts itself in line with the temperature outside and can be set to heat just your water or just your radiators and no water, whichever you prefer. However, it turns out that you can't just turn it ON when it's cold out. You have to fiddle with the settings to reprogramme its start and stop times. There's no "boost" setting that turns the heat on for an hour and then turns it off again.

There is NO BLOODY ON button that just turns the effing heat ON.

So stupid. See, that's what happens when you don't ask anyone for feedback before you start production on something.

Let's focus group this mother out

As I believe they say in the publishing trade.

I've decided to actually try to produce a workable second draft of my book. If you read any of it, I would like you to tell me what you thought of it, if that's not too much trouble. One thing you did like and one thing you didn't like will be sufficient. Also, if you didn't finish it, when did you stop reading and why? And if you did finish it, did you like it all the way to the end or did you think it got rubbish somewhere along the way but you finished it anyway because you're bloody minded like that?

I've already decided on some of the broader changes I'm going to make and some of the character relationships I'm going to rework (mainly the two lead characters, who I like better as semi-robotic loners who've found their niche in life as zombie killers than as nice, regular people who fall in love with other people ever), but it would be nice not to make the same mistakes twice.

So, if you can be bothered, please comment. I realise there's nothing in it for you except that book-group feeling, but you would be helping me with my project. Thanks.

The End of Innistown

So, Google Docs doesn't allow me to upload the whole novel in one go. Stupid, huh?

Here is a link to the first part of the novel.

And here is a link to the second part of the novel.

I don't know if this will work. If it doesn't work, I am sorry.

Usual Disclaimer: Please remember that this is a first draft that was written in 30 days.

Personally I think it lacks the charm of my previous nanowrimo novel, which I greatly enjoyed writing and still think of very fondly. But it's done now and that's zombies officially laid to rest. So to speak.

Accentmonkey, just how sad are you?

Here's how sad I am. I finally found a website where I can buy a proper deck-scrub broom, so I can wash my kitchen floor properly instead of just sweeping and mopping it.

And I am excited about this, because I have been looking for one for months.

And that is the story of how sad I am.

I won!

Look, I did NanoWriMo and I won!

I don't like this year's novel as much as I like the one I wrote a few years ago, but it was still fun to do it.

In April I'm going to do Script Frenzy. I am resolved.

So now I have some extra time on my hands. I really should do something useful with it. Yes. Something useful. I will get right on that, Taoiseach. I certainly won't, for example, spend my time propping up the bar in my local pub shiteing on about football and getting free tickets for stuff. No, because that would be wasting my time. Wasting it. See?

Best laid plans, eh?

I had big plans tonight. Oh yes. I was going to go into Dublin and meet people in the pub, something I haven't done for months. Honestly, months. My own animals are all packed off to kennels, I am going to Glasgow tomorrow, and I have a full day's work ahead of me.

Then I got a text about an older dog someone found in our estate. The woman who found it picked it up off the road outside the estate yesterday, and she can't keep it because it cries a lot and doesn't sleep. It's kind of deaf, and it's kind of partially sighted, and it can't walk properly because its back legs are wonky.

So I was asked would I take it for a while, and I said I could keep it until tomorrow. So he's here now. He has a fitful wander around every now and then, and he's obviously extremely confused about where he is, and probably a bit distressed about this change in his situation, but he's quiet enough. He really likes to be in physical contact with a person, though. He had a nice nap with me on the sofa earlier, stretched out beside me. So now I won't be going out, and I've to go to the vet later and see how he is and what we can do with him. He'll need to go to a reasonably quiet foster home for about a week, where there's someone at home at all day to mind him.

It would be great if he had just wandered from somewhere and we found his owner. It would be just great. I'm not holding out a lot of hope, though.

UPDATE!

Owners found!

His name is Max and he is 18. He lives in the village, and usually when he goes out the back for a pee, they attach him to a line so he can't wander off (he has had four strokes). But the line wasn't securely attached this time and he wandered off. He was only wandering for a few minutes when he was picked up, though. Poor old guy. Still, at least they'll be more careful in future.

Jane the cat

After only a year of living with us, Jane died. She was sick for a long time. Months, really. It turned out that she was FIV+ and possibly had been for ever? Who knows. Estimates about the prevalance of FIV in outdoor and feral cats vary wildly, and there's every chance that she picked it up during the years she basically lived as an outside cat.

In any case, I now have to decide whether or not to get my other cats tested for FIV. On the one hand, it's expensive to get them tested, and at least two of my cats really, really hate going to the vet or being put in their boxes or anything like that. On the other hand, if we have it in the house we need to know. We can't, in good conscience, take any more cats in to live here if we have FIV in the house. FIV in itself is not that contagious if there's no fighting or sexing or open wounds around the place, so the cat most at risk of catching it is Linus, because he goes outside, and that's the only place where fighting might happen.

I don't want to have to stop Linus from going outside. The whinging alone would be too much to bear.

Although I miss Jane, I don't miss how ill she was in recent months, and the constant visits to the vet, the upset of her being ill all the time, and the cleaning up after her. And Blakey does fill that sitting-on-me-even-when-it's-not-really-convenient-to-have-a-cat-sit-on-me niche that Jane used to occupy so well. Blakey has even taken it a stage further and will crawl up the sleeve of the Slanket and attack my armpits while I'm trying to type.

So cute. So inconvenient.

Poor Jane. I'm sorry there wasn't anything we could do, and I'm sorry we didn't know that sooner, or there might have been more chicken and less grumping at you in your end times.

Psst, want a pedigree cat?

Despite my five cats, I think of myself as primarily a dog person. This is because I think of myself as being largely sloppy, sprawly, mucky, and willing to eat just about anything if it's served in a bowl and someone makes yum yum noises while they pass it over.

However, the nice lady in Laois from whom we adopted Lorelai aka Rory aka Smidger Fee aka The Smidge contacted me yesterday to say that she has a posh breed cat who is looking for a nice indoor home, and she thought of me. I was simultaneously aghast at the idea of me as some kind of crazy cat collector person who fawns over her beautiful long-haired tortoiseshell kitty and would love to have a house full of long-haired tortoiseshell kitties, and highly flattered that when a valuable cat comes into someone's possession, they think of me as an ideal home for it.

(She probably would not think this if she heard me telling Jane last night that she better make her mind up to get well or die soon, because I'm not spending any more money bringing her to the vet or any more time and energy cleaning up her puke off the floor every time she eats.)

Anyway, six cats is a bridge too far, so I reluctantly turned down her Norwegian forest cat, but said I would keep an eye out for a good home. So if you have a good indoor home to offer a really beautiful cat, let me know and I'll pass your details along. If I think you're good enough.

By the way, the cat in the picture is just some random Norwegian forest cat, just so you can get an idea of what they look like. It's not the one on offer.

(Obviously I will continue to look after Jane. Come on, like.)