I should know better

I have long had a problem with an overflowing field drain that crosses the driveway, and was having a river flowing past my front door, with lots of red silt as an interesting memento, left in drifts when the water subsided.

Dido`s Grand Canyon

At last it is being fixed.   What was a small inadequate culvert has been dug out into a drain as big as a small roadway.   It would take Noah`s flood to trouble it.

Last night the old ones went out for their last run.   They came back quickly - and old Dido was wet and covered in mud.   It wasn`t raining, and at sixteen she is not too adventurous.   I was  puzzled.   Then a friend suggested the obvious.

"She fell in it."

The poor old girl had wandered up to the gate in the dark, as she does, only to find the equivalent of the Grand Canyon  had suddenly opened up across her usual route.  Fortunately she wasn`t hurt.

Meanwhile Sonja is a lot better.   She is devouring Tesco Value Sausage Rolls.  I wonder what is in them.  Tesco beefburgers are one third horse, we have just discovered,  but these are on an even lower nutritional level.  Roadkill Rolls?   Rat?   Sonja doesn`t care, and chomps on .

As an invalid she feels entitled to the best bed, and doesn`t care how she gets it.   She removes Shelby from the softest bed by simply standing and staring him down - he gets more and more uneasy and eventually runs away.

But last night she found little Marcus sound asleep in the best bed.   She studied the problem.   Clearly she concluded that he was a nonentity, and slowly climbed into the bed and sat on top of him.   Poor Marcus, a small lad, awoke to find that the sky had fallen - on him.  Sonja is a big girl.  She settled her furry ample bulk on him, like a hen with chicks.   Marcus had no desire to be hatched.  Muffled squeaks and heaving, and at last he struggled out, looking distinctly flattened and very offended....after all Red Sonja is one of his romantic conquests.

But that was a long time ago.

Now he only represents a small inconvenient  obstacle to sleep.

I suppose quite a few husbands are eventually demoted to that level.

Absent for a while with yet another chest infection - the usual rush to an emergency appointment and the usual antibiotics and steroids.   (I am still managing to keep it from the practice that I get a steroid high, and it means 5 days of  my brain feeling great, even if the rest of me is crumbling away and falling to pieces.

Red Sonja, aka Red Sofa "More pills please!"

Red Sonja (aka Red Sofa) decided to come out in sympathy.   After a few days of just standing about looking miserable,  she began to squirt spectacularly.   Now our Sonja has a record of finding small dead - very, very dead (indeed the deader the better) - creatures and consuming them with relish.   I was very suspicious.   I remembered the epic of Sonja and the Squirrel - it was extremely dead, she refused to give it up, and the result was horizontal diarrhoea for days (while the look on her face said "It was worth it!")

This didn`t clear, and so we had a visit to the vet.   She had a going-to-vet bath.   Alas, one of the effects of spaying a Papillon can be drastic coat texture change.   When you wash the ample Sonja, the result looks like an explosion in a cotton wool factory.  

I took this fluffy fat apparition to the surgery and after blood tests and 3 injections we came home with pills, which, to Sonja`s delight are administered in chicken liver pate. She gazes longingly at the pill bottles.    And she is being tempted with cat food.   The old girl (now fourteen) is living high these days.

Life is quiet for Belle and Cupcake, Sonja`s grandchildren.   They should have been at a big show yesterday,  but the weather said no, so they are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

They don`t care.

And after looking at the show results, neither do I.

Next stop Crufts.

Gracie has gone.  

No, not departed this life.   She has been earmarked for a new home for some time.   And at last I found one - a very charming elderly gentleman who had lost his Papillon in an accident and found, as many do, that he couldn`t live without one.

Gracie

We took Gracie and he mother over, and the little one was very charming and only had one accident on the rug,   Solitaire just looked worried.   These days, car excursions usually mean the vet, or (even worse) a visit to a male dog.   This was clearly not the vet, and she looked around anxiously for the latest Papillon Romeo .

Well, Gracie was an instant hit, and all was settled.   We left her being cuddled in her new owner`s arms, with a look on her face that I have seen on Papillon bitches before:  "I see I have inherited a house and a servant.   Well, it is no more than my due."

When we got home, Solitaire seemed a little bereft, but half of a fish supper soon reconciled her to the loss.   And after all she still has Cupcake and Belle.

They have no plans to leave.