Black Doggerel

( In which I whine about the weather some more. Includes brief chatlog extract. )

So, yeah. Not dead. Still reading my f-list, still looking at your photos, still love you. Just too fucking hot and grouchy to do anything about it.

Two things - firstly, what the fuck's the weather playing at? I spend the entire summer gleeful because it rained and I didn't keel over with heat delirium even once - and now, when it's supposed to be fucking AUTUMN, I'm unable to take the dogs for a short walk without having to dive into a cold bath and feed Spike ice cubes as soon as I come home. And I'm scared to take him for runs in the park. I did the other day and I thought he was going to collapse on the way home.

I blame cottonmanifesto. Take this fucking God-awful weather with you when you go home!

Secondly, my Mum has an AIM screenname and she's been taught how to use it. Next stop, Livejournal. Be afraid, be very afraid!

Gnarr. Bloody Spike broke his harness again, or rather, the previous repair finally gave up the ghost. And that's when I was really, really glad I'd bought Squish the same harness, because Spike really can't go any distance on a flat collar without hurting himself; and being Spike, he doesn't give a flying fuck about hurting himself.

Thank heavens for good little spotted dogs that don't pull on the leash. I love both my dogs.

Also? TOO HOT TO LIVE. I was a lot happier when it wouldn't stop raining. *grumble*

Obviously, floods and destruction are not a good thing. Obviously, I wish that part of it weren's happening. Equally, I hate the fact that we're getting more than our share while other places are suffering with drought. I'd fix that if I could.

But still, this weather suits me down to the ground. I normally spend summer miserably dipping myself in cold water, unable to move without turning bright red and flopping over with heat exhaustion and desperately wishing I could peel off my skin as well as my clothes. Not this year. I can walk the dogs in daylight without dying! I love rain!

The only drawback from where I'm sitting is the huge slug and snail population explosion. I do my best not to tread on them, I really do; I dislike killing things I don't want to eat and I find the sensation under my feet nauseating and horrifying. But when it's dark and there are so damn many, it's impossible to miss them all. *shudder*

Listen: T'ain't No Sin - Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs. My usual summer theme song.

Reasons why I hate summer that have nothing to do with bitching about excess heat.

1. I can't wear my coat. This means I have to carry poo bags, lumps of sausage and rubber balls in the pockets of my trackie bottoms (Colonials: that's British for sweat pants). My coat has zippered Spike-proof pockets to keep balls in. My trackie bottoms don't. Today he pickpocketed the ball while I was busy leashing Squish, so we had the fun of walking to the park with him in I HAS A BALL mode. Spike has to have low-friction soft rubber balls because he's already worn a quarter-inch off his canines from tennis ball abrasion; so there's the added fun of him dropping the fucking thing every ten yards and having to lunge after it like a Great White after a surfboard, jerking me and Squish along behind him like forgotten fishing tackle.

The other day he attempted to pick my pocket on the way home from the park, caught his muzzle in the pocket, and dragged my trackie bottoms plus underpants down to my knees on Woodbury Avenue. That was even more amusing.

2. Squirrel season. My street is lined with huge mature oak trees and every damn squirrel for miles around arrives here in spring when the leafbuds become edible, and stays till the acorns are all eaten. First they spend a while doing happy squirrel mating chases all over the place; then they make more squirrels, and right about now is when all the stupid new young squirrels are learning what dogs are by dashing right in front of mine. If I had terriers we'd have killed many by now - as it is, they've just nearly killed me with the yanking and the barking and the 'splodey.

3. Fox season. They've been here since about February when they started fucking noisily in the dead of night and setting the dogs off. Now they're all in hunting overdrive for their newborn or almost-born cubs and they're every-fucking-where. It's rare for me to walk dogs after dark without bumping into one, and the other night there was a heavily pregnant vixen hunting moles on the lawn right underneath Spike's lookout window. They excite the dogs more than squirrels and cats put together and garnished with sausage. Every hair on Spike's back stands on end, he hurls himself at the window and barks like a ship of the line's full broadside. Squish is possibly even more disturbing; he is a hunting dog by nature and foxes make him bay. Unfortunately he bays soprano, and the noise that comes out of him sounds like a pig being tortured. The two of them going off at once has to be heard to be believed.

So yeah. Roll on winter please.

Arrgh. Fucking Spring. It's now verging on being too hot to wear my leather jacket to take the dogs to the park, which means I'll shortly have nowhere convenient to keep poo bags, toys, treats, spare leash, keys and tuggy. It's also getting too hot for Spike to exercise in comfort and safety during the day, which means either getting up very early or staying up very late to take him out to play ball. I was just working my sleep pattern back round to something a bit more convenient for interacting with the rest of society, too; but I think it's time to go back to being nocturnal.

It's also time to upload my bitching-about-warm-weather icons, and make my yearly request to my friends list - please, please, if you love me, or even like me just a little, don't make comments along the lines of "I don't know what you're complaining about! You don't know what heat is! Why, over here where I live the asphalt is boiling, the birds are laying ready-fried eggs and my cans of Coke explode if I don't keep them packed in dry ice!" I have friends in Florida, Australia, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, California and Texas - I KNOW all those places are hotter than it is here. That doesn't make it magically not too hot for me. It just makes me want to stab people.

In return, I'll try and keep the whining to a minimum. I'll even make a "bitching about the heat" filter if you want me to; but I'm not going to be able to keep completely silent. I hate it so fucking much.

( Dog pics. May include cat. )

can I say again that this heat is killing me? Or something is. My legs ache, my head aches, my brain couldn't think its way out of a wet paper bag and a seven-minute walk to the grocery store feels like climbing fucking Everest - only without the snow. Oh, and my fucking ELBOW is playing up again.

got dragged over to sister T's to visit mum and niecething and have a Family Conference last night. Mum is looking immeasurably better. That ghastly swelling (ascites) has vanished, her colour's back to normal, she's starting to have more energy.

Family conference was about Grimmauld Place. Mum's friend Nigel had a key cut and went there with a prospective cleaning lady. Cleaning lady took one look and refused to have anything to do with it.

When Mum told me about this on the phone she was expecting me to go over there and deal with it myself before she'd go near the place again. Sister T said much the same thing, and added that a. I'm not entitled to whine about feeling crappy because I am not raising an OMGBABY, and b. she's liable to strangle Mum before much longer so I have to CLEAN NOW IMMEDIATELY THIS MINUTE.

Mum firmly believes that the place was a gleaming Better Homes showpiece before I moved in there and turned it into a pigsty, by the way. Never mind the contents of five other households that she's crammed in there, never mind the ten long years of not cleaning before I moved in, and the year of not cleaning and forgetting to empty the litterbox after I moved out - it's all my fault, my mess and mine only. Because of course, Mum doesn't shit, pee, cook, eat, spill things or get dirty, and her cat doesn't shit, pee, eat or shed hair. *rolleyes*

Thankfully, when the whole family got together on it, sanity prevailed - that, and they know damn well I won't clean the place single-handed. The plan is that when sister T can drive again in a week or so, she's going to drive Mum and I there and we're going to tackle it together. It's still going to be a ghastly grind of a job, but at least I'm no longer expected to tackle it alone from the ground up when I'm not even up to the walk over there at the moment. Huge relief.

even though I was driven there and back last night, the whole thing still knocked the stuffing out of me - or perhaps there wasn't any stuffing to knock in the first place, I dunno. All I've had the energy to do today is lie on the couch watching BSG and some desultory message board posting.

Highlight of my day: watching Squish and Cassie hunt flies. Squish is the more spectacular hunter with his giant balletic leaps, flying ears and clopping jaws, but Cassie is just as dedicated and far more efficient. Between the two of them, the odd fly that wanders in through the mostly-shut windows has a life expectancy of approximately four minutes. If it's lucky.

Not only that, but she eats the ones she kills. Oh how I love living with predators!

P.S. Yes, I am using the same soundtrack two days running. I can't stop playing this particular song at the moment. Will upload it for anyone interested. Love it love it love it love it.

Solution to spending the daylight hours heat-wasted and the night not sleeping: wake up at 5am. It's the only way to make it possible to exercise the dogs properly (even Squish is suffering with the heat) and it gives me a great excuse to fall asleep in the afternoons. Which I'm doing anyway because my brain utterly shuts down during the worst of the heat.

Roll on autumn.

( More kitten pics from yesterday - in which cats do amusing things in and on common household objects. )


As soon as I've had my second cup of coffee I'm getting a pocketful of Swedish meatballs, three of the small soft footballs I got free from Sainsbury's (buy five products with a "Yay Summer" sticker on and they give you free stuff! Very cool!) and I am going to let my Squisher run loose. WISH ME LUCK PLZ.

Blogathon is drawing near! Thanks to the time difference, I will not have to start by waking up early in the morning which is a great blessing. Staying up all night isn't likely to be a big problem, since the heat keeps me too frelled during the day to sleep at night anyway.

You may sponsor me here if you feel so inclined. I am very grateful to those who already have.

I've got to make an entry every thirty minutes for 24 hours - that's a lot of spam and my spamming muscles are out of practise. So I'd like some suggestions from you lot. If you've sponsored me, I will use your suggestion whatever it is (I'm going to regret this). If you haven't, I may use it or not depending on inspiration, coffee intake and a host of other unpredictable factors, but I'll do my best to use everything people want to see.


[Poll #774741]

...it's still too hot. *bitch whine moan grumble grouch*

Edit: *looks at poll results* Jim, you are an EVIL BUGGER! I've spent thirty years trying to forget the hell on earth that was formal education.

But I said I would do it and I will.

Can I just say that having your face very close to the top of a dog's head when he suddenly, vigorously shakes his ears is like being whacked in the eyes by MacFeegles with small furry floggers?

Thankfully the dog with the habit of doing this when I put his harness on is the one with the pointy velvet ears and not the long slappy ones. Still stings though.

it's too hot to post anything sensible, and my brain feels like the butter hiding in the kitchen, that I discovered today I'd forgotten to return to the fridge last time I used it several weeks ago. I am going to return to lounging on the couch watching last season's Stargates now. I've temporarily run out of House and ER.