Black Doggerel

urgggh. i am so very tired.

tried to go shopping. we were halfway down woodbury avenue and I ran into ella18 we were standing there talking when someone came along with a Rottweiler, on the other side of the road.

Spike: KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

Rottweiler: Huh? WTF?

the thing is, I did get him under control. it involved holding his collar and physically blocking his view of the other dog and growling NO in his ear and it was all a bit dramatic but it was working, and if the other guy had just kept walking and gone on past the whole thing would have been over in twenty seconds.

but no. he stops. he stands there, inside spike's zone, rooted to the spot. i have spike being quiet but he's not happy. i can't move forward because i'd have to move closer. i don't want to go back because I'M FUCKING TRYING TO GO SHOPPING.

the guy keeps standing there. as far as i could tell the Rottie wasn't upset at all; I couldn't really look and it was dark anyway but it didn't make any noise. i have no idea why the guy couldn't just walk past us. did he think I wouldn't be able to hold Spike? did he think the Rottie might go for us and he wouldn't be able to hold it? I have no idea. neither seems very likely.

anyway, seventy-two hours or so pass, with me standing there like an idiot suppressing my hysterical collie, Rottweiler Guy standing there like a lemon with his thumb up his arse, and ella18 helpfully standing so as to help block Spike's view of the Rottie (thank you darling), and a huge wave of exhaustion and futility broke in my brain. If I didn't make the first move clearly we were all going to die of old age where we stood, so I stood up and walked back home. I guess I can live without shopping another day. I'm too fucking tired to carry any shit home anyway.

Squish gets today's award (a piece of Cumberland sausage) for keeping a cool head under fire. He did let out a bark or two when Spike first lost it, but he's not dog-aggressive, he's just a loyal subordinate who follows the Captain's lead. He shut up as soon as I told Spike NO and stood there quite calmly through the whole stupid debacle. thank the gods for Squish.

Cassie has taken to darting out of the front door whenever I come back home with the dogs. she can't go anywhere except the hallway, but still. i think she's coming in season again, she's very noisy today. I'm phoning the vet about her spay tomorrow. I wanted to wait till the kittens were all gone because they're still nursing occasionally and I don't want them mauling and wrestling her while she's healing but Hamish-Blade is getting too big for comfort. He's not four months old yet but he's the same size as Cassie and his balls have dropped - he's probably still too young to get anyone pregnant but better safe than sorry, no?

one of the cats just knocked a huge pile of books and stuff off the dog crate. i'm so not in the mood for this shit today.

*sigh* Remember my idiot neighbours with the continually-straying unfixed Staffie-mix puppything, the four Jack Russells, and not enough brains to use leashes on the main road?

http://lizblackdog.livejournal.com/232185.html#cutid1

http://lizblackdog.livejournal.com/241422.html

http://lizblackdog.livejournal.com/265376.html

I walked past their house today, and a couple of the kids were playing in the front garden. I called out from a distance to make sure none of the dogs were loose, and the kid said: "Oh, we don't have the dogs any more, Mum got rid of them."

"Why?" I asked.

"She's got a new job and doesn't have time to look after them any more"

I honestly don't know what to think. The dogs might very well be better off because she was a shitty pet owner; but it's so unutterably depressing to hear the words "got rid of" in connection with a living, feeling creature.

Part of me wants to wonder what she did with them; most of me would be happier not knowing.

More good news: my downstairs neighbour's Jack Russell Terrier is at home and recovering well, altghough he tells me she'll be on cage rest and having to be carried out to pee for some weeks yet. YAYYYY!

in other news... my pets just made me puke, and if I write the details down I might puke again. Let's just say that sympathetic pukers probably shouldn't own dogs that puke more often than they sneeze, or evil cats with inquiring minds and indiscriminate appetites.

urgh.

Three squirrels, one cat, one Collie cross, one GSD, one big Pit-style Staff and one Jack Russell, all in the same four hundred yards of road? That has to be some sort of record, and I'm not even counting the outdoor Rotties; Murphy's law dictated that all this had to happen as close to their house as we ever get and they were even more hysterically noisy than Spike. My shoulder is wrenched, Spike's brains are leaking out of his ears and poor Squish may be traumatised for life.

I can usually divert Spike from bellowing abuse at other dogs by calming signals, dancing and perhaps a round of leash-tug but it was all too much this time. Call me a bad owner if you like, but I took hold of his scruff and growled ENOUGH! into his ear instead. That worked though.

A very very scary thing happened to me when I tried to log on earlier!!

Luckily LiveJournal Support fixed it very fast... time to hyperventilate and weep a bit but not much else. I still have no idea what might have happened to make them suspect me of being a bot. Was it something I did? Was I hacked? Is there a bot with an IP address almost the same as mine causing trouble? I'm none the wiser. But I am back in so I don't much care.


Not good news about my neighbour's Jack Russell. She has a cracked pelvis and at the moment is showing symptoms of nerve damage which may mean she'll completely lose bladder control. They're waiting for a few days to find out whether it's actual nerve damage or just swelling blocking the nerve; he says if she loses the use of her bladder he'll euthanise. Still praying here.

Prayer/good wishes/good thoughts request: for my downstairs neighbour's younger Jack Russell Terrier. She's the black and white excitable one who makes the unearthly screeching sound whenever she lays eyes on Spike (who would love to be her friend, if only she didn't passionately want to kill him). She was hit by a car this morning - she was offleash in a fenced area, but there turned out to be a hole in the fence and she got onto the road. I'm told it was a glancing blow and neighbour believes she will probably be all right, but she may have internal injuries. She's still at the vet's under observation.

Second but not least: Joey, a neglected kitten rescued by the wonderful naamah_darling. She suggested I wait to link until she had pictures of him, but I am incurably impatient and besides, he needs good thoughts now. I watch my healthy bouncy kittens wall-of-deathing round the room, trashing my possessions, scarring my legs and tormenting my dogs and my heart breaks for that poor baby. Read about Joey here and here.

There will be a happy entry about my own family later, with meatballs, but for now my spoiled, uninjured animals want you to concentrate on the less lucky ones.

Met up with Spike's buddy Chico and the shih-tzu crew this morning - fun fun fun! Spike doesn't have many dog friends but Chico's a special case. You'd know why if you saw him - head and tail held high in an arrogant arch, walks with a confident swagger, master of all he surveys. Squish plays with Chico's packmates but doesn't go near Chico - he and Spike are the Alpha Male Club, and although there's not a single testicle between the lot of them you can get dizzy from the virtual testosterone in the air.

Thankfully, no-one felt the need for an actual pissing contest this time.


About half an hour after we got back there was a kitten bouncing round the floor and there seemed to be something missing - there wasn't a collie locked onto it. I checked the hallway - no collie. Spike was having one of his cat-in-a-dog-suit moments and he'd decided to play hide and seek with me.

He's a bit too big to carry it off successfully, but I actually had a minute of WTF??? before I spotted him.

( This is not the collie you are looking for. )

Conversations I'll Never Have (More's The Pity) Number 76398633662 (or thereabouts.)

Good afternoon, Mr Cantankerous Arsey Neighbour With The Bike.

That's a lovely-looking German Shepherd puppy you suddenly have there.

No, that barking Norwegian Ridgeback impression Spike is doing is not dog language for "Oh, let's make friends with the cute puppy!" It's Spike language for "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!".

Yes, I can quite see how you could confuse the two, because I already know you're that stupid.

I know you're that stupid because when I abruptly changed direction (TO AVOID YOU, IDIOT!) and walked Spike back two hundred yards the way we'd come instead of carrying on towards home, you took it into your head to follow us with the damn puppy.

You were at the junction. You could have stood still, or you had a choice of three different directions you could have walked away from us. I had a choice of either walking further and further in the direction I already hadn't wanted to go in, or walking down Barrow Road where the neighbour with the two unsocialised dog-aggressive outdoor Rottweilers (and that's another rant in the making all by itself) was out in his garden making barking noises at them and winding them up. In the end I decided the least annoying/dangerous/noisy option was to head for home and try and get Spike past you as quickly as possible. It was noisy. It wasn't pretty. But at least it was over fairly quickly.

Don't fucking follow me with that damn dog again, you fucking slack-jawed grinning cretin! Thanks to the incredibly well-trained and forbearing dog down the road (I LOVE that dog's owner) I had just about got Spike to the point where he can be in sight of a German Shepherd without losing his shit entirely. You really helped me a lot with that. Not.

Oh, and pick up your dog's crap, wankstain. Yes, I saw you.

Please die,

Liz and Spike.

*draws breath*

I really need a Spike "fuck off and die" icon, damn it. *makes hopeful face at cottonmanifesto*

...in other news, while I was writing this, Cassie looked intently out of the window and barked. I knew she could make some weird noises, but this? Took the fucking biscuit. Cats are weird.

Came back from this morning's dog walk to find Downstairs Neighbour Couple washing Yellow-Dog Dingo Buster with washing-up bowls out in front of the building. Mr DNC had been distracted by a phone call from work while walking him and Buster had seized the moment to find some nice sticky fox crap. They were having trouble rinsing him off so I tied mine to the bins and held him while buckets of warm water were poured over him. Am now soaked and covered in yellow dog hair to go with the black and white dog hair and the cat hair in every colour of the spectrum. Buster is an absolute little sweetheart with his pricky ears and black eyeliner.

( Here he is, clean and damp and sorry for himself )

Came back in, and Shona climbed up the computer and slept snuggled in my lap while I uploaded these, so I took a few of her doing that and added one in to show you. She is so my favourite kitten. Cassie's also a computer lapcat but none of the other kittens would do that.

( Kittens playing with my only store-bought cat toy, plus an Elda portrait and Shona the lapcatten )

Synchronised leg-cocking is common enough for Spike and Squish, but today's version was more amusing than usual - instead of arranging themselves lengthways nose to tail, they were side by side, peeing on a post that I was standing the other side of. This meant that Spike peed on Squish and Squish peed on my feet. Lovely.

They also made friends with a nice strawberry-blonde lady who complimented their shiny coats and was impressed by Spike's tree-climbing, and infuriated the two poor Rottweilers that a guy down the road keeps outdoors. That's not exactly hard, though; those Rotts make a HUGE NOISE and fling themselves against the gate barking and snarling and growling every time anyone walks within about 200 yards of their house.

Spike, being Spike, barks back, and the one or two times I've walked past the house were frankly terrifying. I'm not one to be scared of big dogs just because they're big dogs, but big guardy frustrated dogs that my arsehole dog is winding up so that they're trying to bash their gate down to get at us? FUCKING scary.

I can't believe he doesn't get shitloads of complaints from his neighbours. Poor Rotties.