Category: July 2013

Dogs · July 2013 · My Family and Other Animals · Photogenius

I Wrote This Lovely Post About My Dogs Then One of Them Refused to Acknowledge My Existence and Made Me Late

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(It was all academic though, because I fucked up times and should have been there four-and-a-half hours earlier.)

I spent half an hour last week working on my CV, which is… interesting. I get that we have to sell ourselves and everything, but it’s hard to explain that my favourite hobby – sitting with Fred and Adonis and falling asleep – is a qualification worthy of employment.

Speaking of Adonis: the last I mentioned of him was that he was very ill and being given palliative care. Those of you well-versed in the art of counting may have noticed that his “six months to live” ended, er, a month ago. This is because he now has a ‘normal’ life expectancy for a dog of his size and upbringing: around three more years. He is on a special diet and has been on a cocktail of drugs since December, but as long as we give him his medication and never, ever feed him anything containing protein, he will be able to enjoy his nice little life…

…Which basically means that he sleeps a lot, chases and barks at everything that moves, gets Fred into trouble at least once a day and enjoys numerous cuddles with virtually every human who comes in the house. This is him the other day:

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Fred is also well. He’s got arthritis in his hips and legs and he’s sore quite a bit, but he still leaps about playing catch, like a puppy, and exploring the far-flung parts of the field, like a puppy. He’s always been pretty laid back and he’s recently taken to asking – via paw-waving and grumbling – for his favourite blanket to be placed on his favourite spot on the sofa so he can hang out with whoever’s watching telly. He won’t sit unless the blanket’s been smoothed out and someone’s patted it (to check for blanket monsters perhaps… or maybe he’s actually asking permission?!) so he’s actually becoming a bit of an old-man dog. Quite refined in his tastes, apart from that day he ate Donnie’s tablets and had to get his stomach pumped, or this morning when he chewed a biro, or the other day when he herded me toward the stairs so I’d take them both out.

Fred

Whatever. They are my friends and I’m glad we found each other.

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Complaints · DISCUSS. · Fuckin' Idiots · Funny · Internet · July 2013 · Pure Insanity · THE WORLD *head in hands*

Question of the Week: Have You Ever Met a Militant Homosexual?

FrancescaLeave a comment

It’s heterosexual awareness month, and the question on everyone’s lips is:

“Have you ever met a militant homosexual? If so, leave a comment detailing your experience to help other victims of heterophobia come to terms with their traumatic experiences! If you feel that straight people have been discriminated against for too long, then put these posters up in and around your school or workplace!

Are you experiencing symptoms of homosexuality? Then just Google ‘homosexual cures’ and find yourself a nice 1990s-style website explaining how to rid yourself of these urges which you yourself have caused but can be cured if you part with quite a bit of cash!”

From HeteroAwarenessMonth.weebly.com
From HeteroAwarenessMonth.weebly.com
From TheNewCivilRightsMovement.com

Books · COFFEE · Food · July 2013 · Photogenius · School *choke*

Occasional Tea and Rarely-Spotted Cake

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Lately I’ve been having a bit of a problem with starting posts and not finishing them so I’ve made a cup of tea to help with the old creative juices. I’ve consumed more today than I usually do in a month (tea is for socialising and coffee is for work; I have at least one coffee at least six days a week) although I was drinking it in a Politics lesson under the guise of working… Although to be honest, Friday Week A last period has always been a bit of a guise, especially when we did voting systems and had to count.

Today was a tea and cake lesson, because it is correct, when one reads a newspaper, to drink tea – especially if one is in a class with twenty other people and international relations needs to be taught. It was also my teacher’s last ever lesson in my school because it’s more fun/intellectually stimulating for him to finish his PhD and work in Malaysia instead of sitting in a classroom in deepest Essex explaining the history of the Liberal Democrats to seventeen-year-olds. Can’t think why. So instead of discussing international relations we gave him presents. Ah, summer.

This hot drink thing really is conducive to work… When I said tea is for socialising, I temporarily ignored my reasonably frequent coffee shop stops with Ellen and/or Isobel when we huddle in a corner of Costa and discuss everyone we’ve ever met in great detail. I do think, however, that if there were a tea shop in our high street we’d go to that instead. Actually there is a tea shop and I’ve been there once. Well, Ellen doesn’t like hot drinks anyway; maybe we should spread our custom around a bit.

Eeyore in Costa

There’s actually a great building just off the main shops that part of me wants to buy, do up and convert into a bookshop and tea and coffee place. I think it’d specialise in second-hand books, and there would be a ‘bring a book, take a book’ system for people with cash flow problems (which is everyone). The teas and coffees would also be suitable for those with special dietary needs (which isn’t everyone but I flipping miss eating those almond biscuits you sometimes get on your saucer). There would maybe be a space for art shows and one for people to just sit and read for as long as they want as long as they purchase a beverage.

I think I may have just invented the library.

COFFEE · Holidays · Indifferent Ignorance · Internet · July 2013 · My Family and Other Animals · School *choke*

The Tentative Return of Rambling Posts

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I must say, I’ve quite missed Sunday blogging. There’s nothing like sitting amongst Saturday’s mess with a mug of coffee and half-hatched weekend plans, writing nonsense and posting it on the Internet for your friends to read. Although it’s been a while since I’ve sat amongst Wednesday’s mess and written to you all, actually, or Monday’s mess, or Friday’s… I’m not even sure when to start a new paragraph, if I’m honest.

Let’s do it now and start another straight away for kicks.

It’s been a while since I’ve been properly focussed on Indifferent Ignorance, and she’s starting to feel like the spare room in our house that my brother just moved out of in favour of better lights and warmer radiators. Not that her lights were faulty – and I like to think she’s always been cosy – but she’s feeling as though she has that unique spare-room quality of dusty door frames, dead flies on the windowsills and stuff that never quite got sorted out. It’s probably my own fault; partway through what was proving to be a crap year I thought “let’s give her a facial and buy some customisation tools from WP”, not realising that I was fast losing my money, my time and my will to do anything except play with Fred and Donnie. So as I lost motivation, she lost her once-frequent updates and here we are four months later with my first post in a fortnight and a serious need to open an Internet window.

Now, though, things are slowing down. I only have two pieces of homework to do (and a shitload of extra-curricular and/or exam-based admin, but we’ll take that slowly) and when we go out later to celebrate Ellen’s birthday I won’t be stewing over my Psychology coursework in a corner, because that was last weekend at a different birthday celebration. By the last academic year’s standards, I’m basically on holiday. Which I actually will be soon!

I’ve been concentrating on a lot of different things lately, from school to physiotherapy to my lack of post-school plans to trying to find some sort of job that doesn’t involve retail or administration (hint: there are none) because it was sitting and typing and pressing cash machine-like screens that made me need physio in the first place… I’ve been getting so frantic that writing that sentence actually made my heart rate increase. And if I’ve learnt one thing this year it’s that short-term stress is good but long-term stress is bad. I’ve also learnt that Islamic fundamentalism was started by an Egyptian teacher who went to the US and basically pulled a Holden Caulfield, but I think that’s an anti-racism rant for another day.

I just went downstairs to take a photograph of Sprout for this post, but he’s looking very much like my mum got a bit overenthusiastic when she was watering the plants so I think it’ll wait until he is restored to his former glory. I should also make a start on clearing Saturday’s mess, which is nearing the ‘health and safety issue’ end of the untidy spectrum. So, hopefully there will not be another two weeks between posts – I’ve had two or three in my head or in draft form for a while that I just need to write, goddamn it – but the weather’s been so pretty that they might have to wait for me to get bored of sunshine.

In which case nothing I do on the Internet has any hope of being worked upon.