bunn

I feel I've done a bunch of things and already forgotten many of them, so here's a disordered list of things before they fall out of my head entirely

Went to the opening of a new tiny games cafe in town. A nice space and lovely people, I hope they make a success of it, there are SO many empty shops. The name 'Stormborn Games' along with the red lightning on black is a bold branding choice, but perhaps Warhammer teens will consider it pleasingly edgy.

Went for a swim in the glorious sunshine off our little beach- the first this year with no gloves. Thought that was a mistake to start with, but my hands adjusted OK though I'm pretty sure the water can't have been more than 8 degrees, it makes a huge difference to have no wind and the sun shining. Bit weird for April in Wales, but I'm resolved to enjoy it.

Still struggling with very annoying eczema. It started with a bunch of horsefly bites last year, and just will. not. quit. Currently covering myself practically hourly in oat based lotions after another run of steroids and trying very hard not to scratch. I did take several months off swimming, thinking that was making it worse, or at least an infection risk - but if anything the cold salty water seems to make my skin happier, so I might as well enjoy the swims.

Theo Hound finished his scentwork course on Saturday morning.
He is pretty good at finding the things we've been working on finding (we started with Kong dog toys, and worked from whole toys, to finding chunks of Kong in a magnetic tin, to tiny slivers of Kong in a vial.) I am less skilled at directing and rewarding him than he is at finding things.

There were only two dogs left at the end of the course (mystified by dropping out of a course you've paid for up front, which conflicts with ALL my instincts, but hey.) The other dog that stuck it to the end was Bertie the cockerpoo. They spent a reasonably amount of the last two sessions play-chasing, wrestling and growling loudly, and both very much enjoying it.

Went down to visit my mother in Devon, where we visited Rosemoor RHS garden to see the spring flowers (mostly seas of daffodils but also a mysterious, beautiful pale blue fluffy squill for which we could find no ID, and therefore suspect someone at Rosemoor has decided is Undesirable), and went to Wembury beach, where the sun shone and we had a delightful picnic. The steps down to the beach were steeper and more irregular than I remembered, but Mum made it down them - fortunately there is a level walk back up from the beach into the village, so we did that rather than try to clamber back up the steps then I left her by the road admiring the view while I walked back to collect the car. Saw my first Peacock butterfly of the year on the way.

I have more or less decided that adopting more dogs when I'm travelling so regularly to Devon wouldn't be the wisest move. Theo is great in the car, can be left for a few hours, and can go pretty much anywhere - pubs, cafes, motorway services, around Pudding my Mum's cat - but it's not reasonable to expect that from another rescue dog, at least not immediately. I am still in a number of dog rescue Facebook groups, so I keep seeing so many hopeful appeals for home for delightful dogs: the pandemic adoption wave is over, and homes are once again hard to find. But you can't adopt ALL the dogs...

None the less, I keep looking mournfully at the local greyhound rescues. I would love to have another ex-racer around and I think Theo would enjoy the company too. Maybe in the autumn...

I'm reading my way through the Laundry Files books by Charles Stross - British technospy fiction spiced with horrifying tentacular Things From The Beyond. They are pacy, fun and don't take themselves seriously. I'm surprised that I'm enjoying reading so many words in present tense: normally I have a definite preference for past tense for novels. But here it works. Had never previously come across the phrase 'hairy eyeball' and don't like it. :-D

Walked along the coast path from Tenby to Waterwynch Bay : up past the hotels and grand apartment blocks of The Croft, a name that echoes a farm that must have vanished over two hundred years ago from the magnificent Victorianness of the current road, which quickly dwindles to a narrow footpath, much beset with storm-fallen foliage.

After twenty minutes or so I reached a path that led to the sea, and randomly followed it to Waterwynch Bay, a beautiful stretch of yellow sand overlooked by a single monstrous holiday home.

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My Sunday drive down to Devon went very smoothly. Empty, dark and rainy roads. Theo slept happily all the way, having had a good run on a wet beach before we set off.

On Monday, we went and had a rummage in the Luckett woods, where I had cause to remember just how many foxes and deer there are in these woods, something that my memory had previously managed to optimistically dull.

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We adopted Rosie in December 2013. She was a stray from a pound, and she went through several homes and bounced back to her foster home a couple times while she was in rescue. I offered to foster her, but she fitted in so well with Az and Brythen and the cats that I quickly decided to adopt her.

She has been gradually slowing down for years, but this weekend, her legs began to go and she was starting to have difficulty breathing. It was clearly time to say goodbye. She was always terrified by trips to the vet, so I asked for a home visit, which I think was the right call: it was easier on her, and all of us.

She was always Pp's favorite of all the dogs we've ever owned or fostered. We called her the weird alien cat, because she never behaved much like a dog, and went through life wide-eyed and baffled by so many things. Not squirrels though. She definitely knew about squirrels.

She was always a bit baffled if we met Pp out in his car when we were walking. She didn't recognise him at all if she could only see the top of him: clearly the vital thing for recognition were his legs and feet.

I'll always remember the holiday we had with Rosie on the Caledonian Canal. She found the boat so very scary at first, but adapted to it wonderfully, and soon was enjoying sitting up on top in her dog bed, being admired and snapped by tourists passing by. She went to Essex to see Maldon, and for a lovely sunny holiday on the Fal, to Helford where she found the otters fascinating, but was scared of the sealions, and on many many Tamar Valley explorations.

I have lost track of how many times I swore I would own no more salukis due to Rosie Roo, but right now I would adopt her and do it all over again if I could.

When she was young and lovely running through the woods in spring.

She was terribly thin at the end, but she still managed to wobble down to the beach on Saturday and almost all the way back.

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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.

Bit tough to eat so we took it back to its spawning-ground at Asda.

I had to climb over the rocks to reach it, and I did wonder if it would come out of the mud, but it did, and the wheels still turned though it was rather seaweedy. I suspect someone decided it would be fun to push (or ride?) it down the slipway when the tide was a bit higher.

Theo wasn't all that impressed with it, but I am very proud of him waiting dutifully for me while I extricated it.

My birthday, as is usual, was cold and damp. Pp had his first gout attack in over a year, poor bloke. Under the circumstances, we kept the walk short.
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- Rosie had been doing really well for such an old dog - in fact, so well, that I began to wonder if I should get her teeth cleaned at the vet and booked an appointment to discuss it.

Rather ambitiously, I suggested that we do a short flat mile-long walk at Tafarn Sinc, which looks like this, and is named for the Wonder of Zinc:

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On Sunday, I took Theo out on a social walk organised by a local greyhound rescue. I wouldn't normally have taken him along, since he's a Greek Harehound and very definitely not a sighthound, but Julie, who runs the course he'd been attending and also organised the walk, suggested that we give it a go.

I wasn't entirely sure how he would react to encountering a huge bunch of greyhounds and lurchers. I thought he might be a bit wary, and was prepared to hang back a bit and take it slowly.

He LOVED it. Even though it was a grey old misty day (so no photos, too mirky for that). He was all over the place wagging like mad, sniffing all the dogs (well, apart from the single Afghan, which surprised him a bit), having a little bounce with some of them. He was SUCH a happy hound.

Conclusion: Theo is a scenthound, but having been raised by a sighthound, he considers sighthounds to be His People.

I didn't take Rosie, because she can really only handle very gentle bimbles now, and also she hates other sighthounds and believes she should be the only one. And she also hates rain, and has decided she will only go out if it's sunny. So many opinions!

We seem to have cleared the last of the Shop orders before Christmas OK, and I've made some progress on a new way of tracking stock that I hope will free up some time next year! And I made a Christmas card, as usual, featuring the Pigfaced Packing Orcs.

And today I went swimming, despite the gloom and wind, in a little sheltered bay where the water wasn't *that* cold, really, a mere nine degrees of so.

If I don't manage another update this month, I wish you all well and I am still reading your posts even if I don't always manage to come up with a comment. Also, apologies to anyone who saw this when I was fighting the editor and it was doing weird stuff. I'm still not entirely used to Dreamwidth.

Yesterday, we were packing orders and Rosie would not shut up. She went upstairs and yodelled, she came downstairs and yodelled.

I gave her a sausage.

I moved a bed into the packing room so she could sit there: no.

More yodelling.

Eventually when we had tried everything with considerable interruption to the packing and were wondering if she was getting really senile and didn't know what she wanted....

One of us said 'where is Theo?'

And THEO HAD ESCAPED THE GARDEN. She was trying to tell us!

Anyway we then ran around madly trying to find where Theo had gone, and found him on the doorstep looking apologetic.

Theo had itchy ears again today, which seems to be a recurring issue with him. He does have rather long floppy ears, which makes it harder for the ears to stay well-ventilated, apparently.

He's now got to the point where the vet will not touch his ears unless he's sedated. I've never had a vet-reactive dog before, and although I've tried working with him, it's difficult to get anywhere when, essentially, the vet IS going to do nasty things, and that's kind of the point.

So now we have a bottle of eardrops and I'm going to try to administer them myself for the next ten days. So far, we have managed to give him two doses with the aid of liver paste and chicken. The ears seem less irritated already, so fingers crossed.

This year my Mum announced firmly that she would really prefer to spend Christmas at home with her cat Pudding and no other company, so after we had popped down to visit for a couple of days beforehand then came back to Wales. It was very nice and relaxing and the quick visit to Devon was handy for going to the Cheese Shop in Tavistock to buy Christmas Cheese.

We had a nice lunch at the Bearslake Inn before we went home. I think my mother enjoyed it:

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The dogs were quite insistent that they could not possibly go anywhere or do anything due to their extreme levels of Woe, but must remain on their princess-and-the-pea layers of comfy beds. They basically stayed in bed apart from brief pee breaks for an entire day yesterday, and most of today too. I was really quite worried about them yesterday, but not quite worried enough to call on the emergency vet on New Years Day and they are much brighter today. Theo has had a little outing to the beach, and Rosie managed to run up the stairs this afternoon.

So, since there were no walks needed yesterday, I planted some rose bushes that I have had heeled in waiting for me to get around to them, and mulched the roses I planted last year with well rotted manure. The new roses are GHISLAINE DE FÉLIGONDE musk roses. They grow to a theoretical height of 12 feet, so should help to clad the wire fences I erected in a great hurry when we moved here and I urgently needed dog containment solutions. In a perfect world I would replace them with 6 foot fences, but I'm not sure I can endure further infestations of builders at the moment. We had enough of them in 2022.

Today I went and did a new thing: I went swimming in the sea in the winter! I had been swimming with a local sea-swimming group a few times in the summer (I am not brave enough to swim in the sea alone) but November and December were terribly busy and I fell out of the habit. But today someone I met in the summer asked if I would like to go along, and I thought 'WHY NOT' so I did.

It was terribly cold - not too bad on the legs or body, but my hands took one look at the temperature and burst into frozen pain. I've now ordered a pair of neoprene gloves. They will be handy for kayaking, even if I don't make a regular thing of sea-swimming in the cold.

I must admit I thought I had left the frost behind us, now that we live right at sea level with lots of sun, but no, the frost has come and made things very slippy though there's no snow here yet it's cold enough that snow would settle. We walked up over the golf course to the fort today, and stuck to the grass because the tarmac paths were lethal! Theo is a nudist, but Rosie was togged up in coats and jumper. I had thought of leaving her behind today, since I am worried she might slip. But she was having none of it. The road was gritted, so I decided the risk was not too great, and in fact she didn't slip at all. She did decide she was going to mooch off about her own affairs and split the party though so I had to stick her hastily back on the lead because I needed to keep my eyes open for incoming dogs in that area, since it's a fairly busy walking spot.

The time has come for photos of dogs! Today we went to Stackpole woods and practiced Theo Standing On Things. I was so pleased with him Standing on these wooden mushrooms that I photographed him twice.

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So the dogs would be nice and tired for Firework Night, I took them to Freshwater West beach today. The tide was down, so there was a LOT of beach.

Which dog cannot be trusted off the lead on the beach even though she is 13?

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Last week, Theo was castrated. I had thought of letting him stay entire for a while longer — the thinking now seems to be that neutering male dogs is better done a little later in life. Unfortunately, this plan did not take into account the presence of Tessie the Tart.

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It was probably a bit rash to venture to a sandy beach in August, but this one has a lot of dunes,and not that much car parking, so most of the tourists were down at one end by the water. I parked up the hill (too far for convenient carrying of surfboards and picnics), wandered down and picked dewberries while Theo hared about and Rosie mooched gently.

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That feeling when you've removed 9999 rusty flat-head screws (because of course they are flat-head, so harder to get a grip on) and you prod the thing that should now be easy to remove and realise glumly that it must be either nailed or glued. Probably both.

*shakes fist*

Still, Theo is being very encouraging by watching wide-eyed and occasionally wagging sympathetically when I tell him how difficult it all is.

After some days of fabulous weather, today we have rain and sweeping gusts of wind stirring Milford Haven into small foamy crests. A good day for being indoors, at least!

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Page generated Jun. 20th, 2025 03:58 am

Entries tagged with dogs

Another Walrus-post (of many things)

A December Day in Tenby

Trip to Devon

Rosie Roo

Apple-blossom in the dunes

Old wobbly dog, written things, me

Caught a whopper

A birthday!

A Dogpost

Walking with Greyhounds, swimming in the rain again

Little Timmy is Down the Well

Theo's Ears

2022 DONE.

Frosty mornings & writings.

Photos of dogs

We went to the beach

Theo the Small Gentleman

Dogs, Beach, etc

Theo

Urgh

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May 2025

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