Dear God, Why?!

The family dogs have been happily living in a new dog run since the end of last year.

They get to spend most of their time in the dog run because of their unfortunate love for pulling things off the washing line (primarily Apocalypse Pup) and their unfortunate enthusiasm for killing blue tongue lizards (primarily the Labrador of Doom).

The thing about the dog run is that is has a few gum trees in it.
It has a few dips and bumps and strange topographical features.

This means that when Mum has gone in to the run* she has only been able to tidy the parts of it that she can get to safely.

So for Mother's Day this year I decided that my good deed for the day was to tidy up the dog run.

Oh.

My.

Lord.

...

You guys.

So.

Much.

Poop.

There were three key areas which I was calling The Elephants Graveyards of Poop.

The dogs had of course chosen to locate these pooptopias in the weirdest parts of the enclosure.
Places my mother would not be game to fight her way through to.
Behind the various clumps of trees or near the little drop off.

I picked up somewhere around 10 to 20 kg of poop**.

Three reinforced garbage bags and some very unlucky disposable gloves sacrificed their lives to the cause.

I also found several toys that the kids from the house behind us had lost over the course of the last 5 months, the remains of what must have been the more delicious of the toys that the kids from the house behind us had lost over the course of the last 5 months, a stash of bricks from a building project that probably took place about 20 years ago, and the treated pine palings from our old pool fence which was taken out about 15 years ago at the same time as the old pool***.

The palings were the most startling thing to find, they were piled up under a drift of eucalyptus leaves so thick that given a few centuries archaeologists would be identifying them as a specific historical strata that could tell us a lot about the local culture.

I also had to spend a bit of time with a shovel digging out the area behind the gate because there had been some sediment creep and it had become impossible to open the gate further than about 70 to 100 cm**** wide in recent months.
Now there is a nice flat area to swing the gate open over which hopefully won't give the dogs 'diggy' ideas.

So at the end of the process I had thrown out:

• more poop than I have ever wanted to see or handle in my entire life
• old bones that had been hidden but which were no longer safe or delicious
• bits of dead toys and scraps of material
• palings from the old pool fence which we can't burn because arsenic!

I had also tidied up and put away:

• a bunch of kindling that had been thoughtfully dropped by the eucalyptus trees
• actual chunks of good quality firewood that I expect my brother had forgotten he had chainsawed up out of larger bits of eucalyptus tree
• old palings from our wooden perimeter fence which wasn't treated pine so we can burn it
• a huuuuge pile of leaves

By the end of the afternoon I was sweaty, dusty and being followed around by two very interested dogs who thought the whole situation was very strange but hey if I wanted to collect their poop and put it in a bag who were they to protest?

Of course, this was just the beginning.

Next weekend I have to go back in there to burn the  metric butt-tonne of leaves, have another rake around and make sure we don't have any more archeological layers of extra items hidden in there.

And the gum trees are trying to increase their numbers which will only lead to danger and sadness so there will be a sapling massacre which will then have to be turned into more firewood and stacked up neatly with the rest of it.

Then, smoky, dirty and exhausted, I'll probably take the dogs for a walk.
Because I am a masochist apparently.



*Which doesn't happen as often as it could because the dogs get really extra excited about this kind of thing.
There is Five Minutes Of Frantic Bouncing when you let them into the main yard, try get them ready for a walk or join them in the run. No matter how we try and train them out of it, their excitement will not be tamed!
**That's 22 to 44 lbs of poop, for you Imperial scum!
***The pool was an above ground construction which was murdered by a tree from the yard behind us. The tree's roots grew up under the pool and pierced the pool lining and the whole thing went the hell remarkably quickly.
****27 to 39 inches or 2.3 to 3.3 feet, whichever makes more sense to you guys.

Farewell Sweetheart

Yesterday we had to say goodbye to my beautiful cat Pickles.

He was 14 years old, he'd had a good long life and he'd just gotten to a point where an age-related health issue went from making him a bit weak and wobbly to seriously impacting on his quality of life.

It was really hard to let him go but it would have been selfish and wrong of us not to give him that peace.

It's going to take a long time for me to get used to the fact he isn't here any more, he's been with me for exactly half of my life and was such a wonderful companion and friend and such a nutter.

He would perch on your shoulder like a parrot and happily sit there all day whilst you walked around doing other things.
If you bent over to put something down or pick something up he would scoot down to lie in the small of your back whilst you were hunched over and would refuse to get off when you tried to stand up again.

He would chase a torch light across the floor and up walls all evening if you let him, only stopping to regain his balance and shoot you a dirty look when he remembered that you were in charge of the maddeningly erratic moving spot.

He would scramble up ladders and loudly proclaim dominion over all he could see from up there. When he scrambled up onto clothes horses he didn't have time to proclaim dominion as he was busy trying to spread his weight out so the whole thing wouldn't tip over.

He would let you hug him like a teddy bear when you were feeling down and the moment you were feeling better he would wash your nose until you let him go so he could reclaim his feline dignity.

He had the loudest purr I have ever heard and he would lie on your chest purring so hard that if you breathed in at the right time it felt like he was purring right into your heart.

If you couldn't find him it was a good bet that he had somehow wormed his way into the linen closet and was industriously shedding hair all over everything during a luxurious nap. No matter how you tried to secure the closet door he managed to wiggle it open, his skills as a door opener applying equally to sliding doors and clasp doors. He had a good try at turn-handle doors but eventually after years of danging from doorknobs by his front paws, he conceded defeat.

If you gave him a cardboard box he would be happy for months. He'd jump on top of it. Fall off it. Roll past it. Scoot around inside it. Disembowel it. Attack people and other pets from within it. And eventually when you took it away because it was falling apart, he would sit where it had been and stare at you until you found him another one.

Goodbye Pickles, I'll miss you.

1998 - 2011

Throwing Out My Alarm Clock

A while ago *coff three months ago* my alarm clock stopped working.

This caused a minor problem because when I don't need to get out of bed in order to turn my alarm off, I don't tend to get out of bed.

Which means getting out of bed late, skipping breakfast and flinging myself half-dressed out of the door in a panic to get to work on time.

So I pro-actively got right on that.

Last week.

But I really shouldn't have bothered.

Because the cats have come up with a new game.

A game called 'let's knock everything off the bottom shelf of Ricochet's bookcase'.

They like to play it at 5:30am in the morning and then wrestle on the resultant pile of books.

I'm not used to being awake at that hour.

And chasing a pair of furry bastards off a stack of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and assorted murder mysteries isn't my idea of a gentle awakening.

So I surrendered the bottom shelf, redistributed the books, and settled back to enjoy a restful night's sleep punctuated at a seemly hour by the trilling of my new alarm clock.

Except the early morning wrassling has relocated itself to the foot of my bed.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this.

One. Cats are the annoying, energetic, morning people of the animal world. You know, joggers.

Two. Procrastination is nature's way of telling you not to bother spending money on things that you'll never get around to using anyway.

So I might as well throw out the alarm clock.

I'll get right on that.

Eventually.

Assimilation Complete

I resisted I really did.

When my landlord's niece left her skitty cat and its kitten with him in March because she couldn't keep them any more I remained calm and dignified.

When they wouldn't let any other humans but me anywhere near them I was only patting them to help them get used to people so they would move into my landlord's flat out of the cold.

When I dosed them with flea gel and worming paste it was only because nobody likes having fleas or worms.

When I started applying white zinc cream to their ears and noses every morning so they wouldn't get white kitty skin cancer it was only because I had this white zinc I wasn't using.

When they started sleeping inside my flat every night since June it was only because they somehow got inside and it seemed cruel to kick them out when they were asleep on my bed.

When I finally asked my landlord if I could keep them this week it was only because I was in denial and have been pretending I haven't technically been owned by them all year.

So, yeah, now I own two cats.

And am either really good at rationalising or really bad at reality.

Technological Technicality

Thursday evening we got a call from a local vet.
Not ours.
They said they had our dog which had been found wandering the streets and could we come and get it.

This triggered a confused freak out.
Our goofy-assed labrador has never even tried to get out of the backyard let alone wander all the way across town and hadn't she been in the backyard half an hour ago before people left the house?

We asked if she was OK.
The vet said 'She?'
It wasn't our goofy-assed labrador.
It was our twitchy maltese shih tzu who we had found another home for three years before when it became evident that living in a yard that had dogs in the three yards that bordered our own was eventually going to drive him delirious and possibly break his bark-box.

This may sound lazy and like poor pet ownership, I know it's possible to reduce barking behaviour in dogs with proper and consistent training but we didn't really have the chance.
My brother and I were in Europe at the time.
My sister was in the last half of Year 12 and was at school all day and the library every evening.
My father was away all week for work.
My mother had just had foot surgery and had to keep her foot elevated at all times.
One of our neighbours had started pushing threatening letters into our letterbox, had filed complaints with the council about the barking and a few other imaginary infractions (the barking we'll cop to, he did do that, but all the rest of it was bull taffy), and according to the council employee who came around to explain the situation to us we had two weeks to reduce his barking or we would be fined by the council and the neighbour concerned would take us to court.
This lovely neighbour never actually signed any of their letters or confronted us face-to-face or let us know what their name was*.

So we found twitchy maltese shih tzu another home a bit further out of town with a young family on a larger property who had another dog to keep him company.
We visited him to make sure he was happy and being treated well, which he was.
And then at some point after that... we managed to completely lose all of the other family's contact details.
We couldn't even remember their name or the name of the suburb/town they lived in.
It was all useful fragments along the lines of 'I think they were about this far from us' and 'their name might have started with this letter... or maybe that one'.

But all these years later the twitchy maltese shih tzu still had our contact information on his microchip.
So the vet contacted us.
And when they told us that we could either pick him up or they would send him to the RSPCA we picked him up.
We didn't want to risk him being put down by accident or if his other family didn't find him and the RSPCA couldn't re-home him.
So three years after we'd last seen him we brought the twitchy maltese shih tzu home again.
We still had his little jacket and one of his collars.

Being a list-making, panicking weirdo I wrote up a 'found notice' for the local newspaper, typed up posters for the area he was found, started estimating the likelihood of finding his new family and researching obedience classes for if we couldn't find them and had to readjust him to our still dog-filled neighbourhood.

On Friday we tried to check with the RSPCA whether anybody had called up looking for a maltese shih tzu.
At first the person we spoke to thought we were looking for one and explained whilst they didn't have any in at the moment there was a lovely little terrier who was looking for a home.
We explained we already had a maltese shih tzu who used to be ours but wasn't any more and we thought that maybe somebody might have been looking for him...
They got confused and asked if we were trying to surrender him for adoption.
We said we weren't and started telling the story about the microchip.
We got passed to somebody else who actually got what we were talking about.
But nobody had called for him.

I reminded twitchy maltese shih tzu of the existence of 'sit' and 'stay'.
Goofy-assed labrador got a little excited and decided that twitchy maltese shih tzu was a spy sent to steal her food and started trying to ignore her 'sit' and 'stay' commands and bolted her food so quickly that she almost swallowed her tongue.
I reminded goofy-assed labrador of the existence of 'sit' and 'stay'.
She obeyed and then bolted her dog treat, giving twitchy maltese shih tzu a suspcious squinty look.
I started planning taking both of them to obedience classes and the logisitcs of parallel training and walking two dogs at once.
Twitchy maltese shih tzu was now nine years old so I also started compiling a list of things to run past the vet and any nutritional requirements he might have as an older dog.

Saturday morning we tried calling the RSPCA again, asked whether anybody was looking for a twitchy maltese shih tzu and they were!
Half an hour later twitchy maltese shih tzu's new family was in our yard making a huge fuss of the little nutter who was going completely mental with joy.
Turns out he'd managed to climb a new bit of lattice fencing they'd put in (and were now going to take straight out again) and gone for a trot across town.

So happy ending for everyone!
Twitchy maltese shih tzu went home to his new family who spoil him absolutely rotten.
New family was reunited with their little dog.
We filled out a 'change of information' form for the microchip and wrote down new family's details in about seven places around the house just in case.
Goofy-assed labrador stopped inhaling her food**.
I threw out my accumulated spreadsheets and badly calculated estimates.
And as far as we can tell the jerky neighbour must be one of the ones who have moved out in the intervening years because for the few nights twitchy maltese shih tzu was back and proclaiming this excitedly to all and sundry we received exactly zero threatening letters.

So that's what happened to me this week.
Sure, I could probably have summed this up in about a paragraph... but where would be the fun in that?

The moral of this story?
Um... Microchips work and you should always remember to fill out change of details forms when getting or re-homing a dog and not just take the other party's word for it that they'll remember to do so.

Also labradors are apparently a little paranoid, who knew.



*In another cranky resentful note: As soon as we'd found twitchy maltese shih tzu another home and our yard was silent it became apparent that our neighbourhood was full of yapping dogs and it might not have been our dog that had been bothering the jerky neighbour in the first place as soon the sweet little old lady down the road started receiving threatening notes in her letterbox too.
**She's still going to those obedience classes though