bunn

Rosie Roo is wobbly on her long legs and has a bit of a head tilt. The vet thinks she's had a vestibular incident (a bit like a stroke for dogs, only not really because apparently it doesn't have the same brain symptoms as strokes in humans).  The vet prescribed antibiotics, an anti-nausea jab, and careful supervision to prevent her falling over. It's lucky that I bought some more floor rugs recently to offer the ancient dog improved grip.

Rather to my astonishment, she did eat the first dose of antibiotics, wrapped in tuna, but she's eaten very little else today. It's tricky, as she's not really supposed to have anything high in fat (for her iffy pancreas) or in phosphorus (for her failing liver). This cuts down on tasty things to tempt her appetite, but perhaps tuna is acceptable?

I hope she will be hungrier tomorrow.  She is at least 15, probably 16 or older, and she's been doing pretty well up to now. 

I finished writing Dáin's Saga, which took me over the million words on Ao3!  Then I wrote another short thing about an elderly Gimli meeting Celebrimbor. I couldn't think of a good title for it so plumped for Gifts and Guilts, which does the job, more or less. 

Am still struggling slightly with the flu aftermath.  I was hoping to be able to go for a swim in the sea this week. Maybe it will happen, if the last of the sore throat and coughing finally packs itself off.  The sky was so blue this evening, and the sea so green. 

(plus: her two clueless sidekicks...)

This is basically a giant photodump, but I wanted to put some photos from our holiday on here, and not having written it up as I went along, I'm cutting my losses in order to make a post of some kind!

Here are Rosie & Pp outside the pub we stayed at in Yorkshire.  It's a long way from Cornwall to Inverness.  We were not inclined to drive all the way in one day, and Rosie certainly wasn't: when she saw that I wanted her to get back into the car next morning, she made quite a determined effort to go back into the pub...


But!  We arrived on the boat, and it was less difficult to get her into the cabin than I had feared. It was a large and very comfortble boat, with lots of room for dog and humans.  We had two spare bedrooms for our stuff! It was a bit chilly at night, but fortunately I had brought a jumper & two blankets for Rosie, and the human bedding was more than adequate.
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I had intended to spend some of this weekend doing a long walk with Rosie, but the weather was terribly gloomy and the Sarcastic Saluki not terribly enthusiastic.

So once I had packed All The Things and posted them, we trundled over to meet my mother.  We'd arranged to meet in a Dartmoor car-park, and I admit that if I had not been able to see that she had clearly driven through the MASSIVE muddy puddles and in and out of the potholes to park already, I might have quailed.

As it was, if a woman in her eighties driving a VW Polo could get in, so could I in my Volvo, I reasoned (thinking about it, I'm not sure this was true.  The Volvo is a lot heavier.  It was entirely possible that I might have plunged to a watery doom.  But as it happened, I didn't. )

Anyway, the carpark was splendidly empty apart from us, and so were the woods, and since our short stroll was enclosed on one side by a river and on the other by a cliff, I let Rosie off the lead to scoot about after squirrels, and she was very good.  My mother insisted we should follow her through hedge and briar, and I was slightly concerned that she (my Mum, not Rosie Roo) was going to fall off a wet log in the rain and break something but she didnt'.  Then we went off to the cafe and had coffee and avocado toast with poached eggs (apart from Rosie, who had a sausage).

Then I came home via Lidl, looked at the rain, decided not to do any gardening and instead wrote:

No Glasse of England
Fëanor and Nerdanel make a visit to modern Warwick, the town that inspired the poem ‘Kortirion Among the Trees’. The title is from the agreement for "John Prudde of Westminster glasier, 23 Junii 25 H. 6, covenanteth &c. to glase all the windows in the new chapell in Warwick, with Glasse beyond the Seas, and with no Glasse of England'.

I didn't know about this till I looked it up almost at the end of writing to find out who was responsible for the glass at St Mary's church in Warwick, and was much delighted to find that wording. 

I also discovered, while looking that up, a gentleman named Steve Clare, who wrote this book. I'm now wondering if he's a long-lost relative, since we share a surname, and my paternal grandfather came from a family who were glass-painters in central London. 

Rosie Roo, expressing her surprise that the tulips which came from a bag labelled 'Yellow Tulips' have come up out a clear flame-red.

I was just reading about Edward Thorndike's puzzle boxes - an experiment where he put a cat or dog into a box that had some sort of release lever to let it out, and waited to see if the cat or dog would work out whether/how to press the lever.

I now desperately want to put, say, 100 human beings into puzzle boxes, and see how long it takes each of THEM to work out that pushing a lever in a darkened room opens the door. Perhaps my view of humanity is pessimistic, but based on many of the support phonecalls I get, not only are most human beings incapable of empirically working out the solution to a problem, but they are also a species absolutely beset with cargo cult beliefs about the things that appeared to work but in the real world cannot possibly have done so...

I'm fairly sure that the people on my LJ friendslist can indeed reason their way out of a paper bag, but to be honest, I'm not sure you lot are entirely representative.

Both Az and Brythen were expert puzzle-solvers of the canine variety. Az could open doors, turn keys,and undo tent-zips, and it's a delight to see Brythen realise that he's on the wrong side of a fence and work out at speed how to navigate through a series of gates and gaps to the right side of it (when he decides to do so, and OK, sometimes he decides not to :-D ) . He can open a dog-crate from the inside, too. But These are Not Typical Dogs.

One day I may manage again to do a proper update with words and brain in it and stuff. But in the meanwhile here are dogs snuggling. ( Read more... )

I was very much haunted by the ghosts of old dogs this morning, but not in a bad way.  Rosie and Brythen love their lie-ins, so mornings are mostly rather quiet now -  but while I was getting up, I kept thinking that Az and Mollydog were doing their usual joyful morning-dancing, just out of sight and not quite in earshot.

( one last photo... )

The rescue that both Mollydog and Brythen came from,  Greyhound Rescue West of England, wanted to do a video for the end of the year, and I volunteered to help pull it together and sort out the captions and things.  It's just happy ever afters really.   You may recognise the cover gentleman. :-)

( Nuts! )

In other news, Az seems (she says, very tentatively) to be once again staging a slow and wobbly recovery.  Getting him to eat is still quite a palaver, but the nighttime terrors seem to have stopped, and he's generally seeming more alert. So, thanks for all the crossed fingers!  I am trying to be very, very careful not to let him overdo things.

Things are looking less bright for poor Perl.  On Friday she seemed quite cheery and almost her normal brash shouty Liverpudlian self.  She even ate a reasonable amount.  But over the weekend she has been very quiet, and I've had no luck at all getting food into her, not even sardines or chicken stew (thinking on, I wonder if I should try her classic snack of burnt oven chips in ketchup?  Maybe not...  She is still drinking, but she seems very, very tired.

However, even now, she is a force to be reckoned with...( Read more... )