Nothing from the vets yet.  If I haven’t heard from them by tomorrow afternoon I’ll go round and do the Haggard and Hysterical Hellgoddess* at them, just to make sure (a) they haven’t forgotten to tell me because they’re having a busy day and (b) if they haven’t heard from the lab maybe they should do a modicum of checking up.  They could say that their client is a haggard and hysterical hellgoddess** and they’d be grateful to have something to tell her.  That noise in the background, they could say, is the client under discussion gnawing holes in the clinic’s window frames.

Hellhounds have eaten four and three-quarters meals in a row—NOT WITHOUT EFFORT FROM YOURS TRULY—and there was a certain falling-off from Chaos on the subject of dinner, but I am hoping this is just a blip and not the return of a recent much-feared trend.  Crap production is not finest kind either—not that they ever produce finest-kind but what’s happening now is a trifle ominous. . . .  I really hope there are lab results tomorrow and that they are, while probably guaranteed non-definitive, at least suggestive.

Hellterror seems as normal—although ‘normal’ applied to a bullie is a bit of a non sequitur—aside from the continued manifestation of hellhound-type un-finest-kind crap.  I’m telling myself that this is, in its perverse way, a good thing.  It proves there’s something wrong that we can seek till we find.

And I’m basically so tired I could die.  I did finally get some sleep last night, but not enough—‘enough’ at this point would probably be into triple figures—and we didn’t have lunch till teatime*** partly because I let myself lie down for a moment† after breakfast and someone stole two hours like picking my pocket.

Not that the day has been a day anyone would want more of than they could help.  It’s the 23^rd of May in the south of England and we’re having sleet and hail.  Okay, you can get hail any time†† but SLEET?  Sleet on the 23^rd of May in the south of England is rude.

I have indeed spent most of the day playing stupid word games on Astarte.  This is all Rima’s fault.  Everybody is cooler than I am so I tend to ask visitors what they’re reading/doing/watching/playing.  She has an iPad too††† so I didn’t even have the minor protection of noncompatibility.  She got me started on Moxie, which I’m not too bad at‡, and What’s My Word? which I’m terrible at, and I discovered Word Abacus for myself which I’m reasonably good at except for the fact that it keeps frelling crashing.  This is less annoying than it might be since it tends to crash at about the point that I’m thinking that I’m tired of being dragged up through the levels just because I have a reasonably good vocabulary and keep failing to fail.  YAAY.  I’VE JUST CRASHED.  I GET TO START OVER.  I am so not a games player.  But the constant pop-up windows asking if I want to SHARE WITH MY FRIENDS make me nuts.  NO.  I’M TIRED AND STRESSED AND BRAIN DEAD AND WASTING TIME.  THE LAST THING I WANT TO DO IS WASTE MY FRIENDS’ TIME TOO.

But the thing that really freaks me out is that Abacus says Hi hellgoddess! every time I open it up again.  Where did it pick hellgoddess up from?  I sure didn’t invite it to share that particular joke.  I do use ‘hellgoddess’ when some blasted impertinent site‡‡ wants a user name other than my email address and I actually am planning on hanging around long enough that it’s not an unreasonable request. ‡‡‡  But some frelling games company?  Arrrgh.  The permeability of the loose information out there in internet land seriously squicks me out.

* * *

* with optional thunderbolts.  Hunderbolts.  Hmmm.  I think I like hunderbolts.  That would be what a hellgoddess hurls.

** with hunderbolts

*** We literally fell through the door at the mews as Peter was making himself a cuppa, the ginger biscuits already out on the table.

† Note to self:  when very tired, don’t get dressed in the bedroom.  Where the bed is.

†† As any gardener who has ever opened their private garden to the public the day after a major hailstorm will have no trouble remembering forever.  You’re scheduled in the Yellow Book^, it’s not like you can say, tra la la, I’ve changed my mind.  Delphiniums?  What delphiniums?  Roses put up with being thrashed better than most so we had some garden left.  It’s still horrible.

^ http://www.ngs.org.uk/  There are plenty of other private-garden-openings for charity, but this is the big famous organization.  We used to open at the old house.

††† Although her cover for hers is orange.  With mine in blistering pink on the same table it was kind of War of the Kindergarten Colours.  Anybody out there with a lime-green cover for their iPad?  Come play with us.

‡ Also I like it when it says twaddle which is a trifle counterproductive since this costs you thirty points.

‡‡ I was trying to buy cheap fleece blankets on line tonight—during breaks from Word Abacus—because with three hellcritters I find I run out of bedding as soon as there is any extra strain on the system—a hellterror bitch in heat, say.^  This frelling site wanted my birth date ‘for added security’.  What the bleep does that mean?  They lost that sale.  Now I need an alternative source of cheap fleece blankets for critter bedding.

^ Ref Diane in MN’s comment on the forum, you have Great Danes.  I’m not expecting to need to put pants on something that weighs less than thirty pounds and presumably has appropriately teeny ooze-producing female parts.  Ask me next autumn or thereabouts when she comes in season again.  At the moment I couldn’t keep pants on her if I wanted to:  she’d chew them off.  She’s still in a collar rather than a harness because she still doesn’t sit particularly still for having same put on, and I therefore leave it on all day (it comes off after the last brief night hurtle).  She can’t reach the collar.  She’d chew the body band of a harness off with great dispatch.  Which is another reason—aside from her present interesting condition—that I’m not pursuing my experiments in having her clipped into the seatbelt next to the hellhound box in Wolfgang.

‡‡‡ Ravelry, for example, as some of you know.  Also the Rowan yarn site.  This for some reason amuses me.  Probably because Rowan is so earnestly fashionable.  Did I tell you that my Big Wool arrived, for my heart jumper?  It is very pretty.  And the yarn is deliciously soft.  If any of you are considering a similar purchase.

And to add to the joy of nations* Pav has done a u-turn and decided to finish being on heat after all.  And is dripping thick gooey blood all over the landscape. ** What a good thing she stays in the kitchen at the cottage—on the lino.  And for the moment there is No Rioting at the mews.  For more than merely the sake of the carpets.  Rioting might create excitement.  At the moment while hellhounds are VERY VERY INDEED VERY interested in her rear end, they’ve always been far too interested in her rear end and this interest doesn’t seem to have mutated into anything alarming.  Yet.  There has been no singing in the small hours*** and no manifestations of Mr Hyde from either of my Dr Jekylls.  Nor are Pav and I being followed around town by drooling swains . . . yet.†

The good news is . . . hellhounds have eaten three meals in a row.††  This is a first in some time.†††  Last two days there has been some really epic melting down by the hellgoddess—not that it does any good.‡  It’s still not like three meals in a row means we’re headed back up out of the pit of despond and self-starvation again—the reason this bout has been so appalling is because every time they look they are coming out of it they slide back in again—but I will take what I can get.

The bad news is that I had (maybe) four hours of sleep last night, mainly due to Night Horrors‡‡ but also because Pav took exception to the herd of rhinoceroses trotting up the cul de sac at about seven a.m.‡‡‡ and barked her frelling little head off.  SHUT. UP.  I COULD USE A NICE FURRY HEARTHRUG YOU KNOW.  For someone with ME my adrenals can sure spike it out there, given the (unfortunate) chance.

So . . . we’re waiting for the first lot of lab results.  I took several unpleasant little bags and bottles to the clinic on Monday and ranted at length to one of the two senior vets.  Who listened.§  I was told they should hear something by the end of this week, but I’m resigned to the almost certain fact that this is only the beginning.  After all, we did all this six years ago with the hellhounds.

. . . I was planning to answer some of the comments on the Bad News thread plus respond to some suggestions I’ve had by email but I am so tired I’m not sure how many sentences I have left in me tonight.  Water, which several of you have mentioned:  I’m putting us back on bottled water, although water was about the first thing I thought of six years ago, and bottled water didn’t make any difference then§§, although if it’s a parasite that’s closing the door after the horse has hit the high road.  It still gives me a faint spurious sense that I’m doing something.  Electro/environmental sensitivity:  I’ve thought of that too because I’ve wondered for thirteen years now what relationship that may have with the mutable beast that is ME.§§§  I’m hoping this is something they can see under a microscope.

The vet said they’d test for ‘everything’.  I’m compiling a list and will measure his ‘everything’ with mine after we get these first results.  And then I’ll try to decide what to do next.  I agree that we’re probably looking at specialist diagnosticians here but . . .

. . . I’ll think about it tomorrow.

* * *

* This is one of Peter’s phrases.  As, he says, is the one about you can’t call yourself a gardener unless you like to weed.  I certainly remember first hearing that more or less the moment I moved over here—I’ve told you that his first official fiancé’s gift to me was a pair of secateurs, haven’t I?—and by extension then from Peter.  But I hadn’t realised it originated with Peter.

I spent nearly three hours today weeding.  Yes.  It was good.  Except for the standing on the plants you’re trying to save and the being clawed to pieces by your roses.  As Peter also says, Roses don’t know who their friends are.

** Ah, nature.  What a dratblasted dinglebrained system.  This comes of creating a world in six days instead of taking your time in the planning stages and thinking things through carefully.

*** Except by me.

† Right now is when I REALLY REALLY REALLY don’t want to meet up with Toxic Purulence Dog.  We last saw him the day before Pav started dripping.  Eeep.

†† Pav has eaten a small airplane hangar and a Honda Civic.

††† See this grey hair?

‡ If I threw thunderbolts like Zeus, this entire town would look like the surface of the moon.

‡‡ The kind where if you shut your eyes everybody dies.  Ordinarily I sleep very badly in daylight and it’s a nuisance it gets light so early this time of year but lately I don’t think about turning my reading light off till the sun has taken over outdoors and is leaking through the curtains.^

^ Or the curtain-equivalents, as the case may be, as it is in my bedroom.

‡‡‡ This would be approximately an hour after I got to sleep in the first place.

§ More than one of my animal-oriented friends don’t like my vets, and it’s perfectly true they’ve got some stuff spectacularly wrong.  But they have virtues.  One of them is demonstrated here:  they listen.  There’s no nonsense about they’re the experts and they know best and stop complicating matters by trying to tell them about your individual knowledge about your individual critter^.   They’re also always available.  Their emergency out of office hours phone answering system WORKS as I have way too much occasion to know.  Rowan of the previous generation was accident prone, but her accidents only happened out of office hours and on weekends.  And when you come to the end of the line and need to have someone put down—they come to you so your critter can die at home.  And if this needs to happen on a Sunday afternoon, that’s okay too.

^ My loathing of most standard doctors is leaking through here

§§ I filter our drinking water at the cottage although it’s just one of the basic little charcoal dealies, and it wouldn’t protect us from anything serious.  It’s doing something, because I like the taste better than what comes raw out of the tap.  Peter doesn’t filter the water at the mews but he’s the only one of the five of us who does not have intestinal strangenesses.

§§§ I was nearly the last person I knew to go over to wifi, because I worried about all that extra signal washing around.  But when everyone in your neighbourhood has wifi you’re swimming in the stuff anyway, so you might as well join the fun.

Bluebells, like everything else this cold nasty year, are late.**  I’ve been out stomping through the critical bit of countryside several times in the last three weeks or so and about ten days ago I thought, okay, next week is touchdown or lift-off or whatever.  Of bluebells.  And then various things intervened and I thought, if I miss the bluebells this year I am going to be CRANKY.  Not to mention the small passionate sub-coterie of bluebell-adoring blog readers who would never forgive me.

And then I thought, wait!  Rima is coming!  I will MAKE HER WALK THROUGH A BLUEBELL WOOD WITH ME!  It’s the sort of thing you should do with your American visitors, if they come at the right time of year.

So today we walked through a bluebell wood.  Or two.  And it was great, except for my camera battery going dead on me.  It started flashing red about two-thirds of the way through our walk so I was agonising over every frelling shot, waiting for it to go BYE BYE.  SPLAT.  HAHAHAHAHAHA.  –ARRRRGH.  However Rima took a lot of photos too, and will send them to me when she gets home.  RIGHT, RIMA?***  So if I missed anything fabulous I’ll post Rima’s version later.****

And a few random sheep. Bluebell wood #1 is to the right and over the crest of the hill.

I love that gleaming blue in the distance, telling you that what you want is right here, waiting for you.

Yep. Right here. Mmmmm.

And the occasional white one. There are occasional pink ones too but I didn’t see any this year. (Except in town which doesn’t count.)

Sigh. I love bluebells. AND they smell good.

WordPress, the ever delightful, first time I hit ‘insert photo’, responded Hi, we’re not uploading that photo BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Have I mentioned RECENTLY how much I hate WordPress?? Let’s see what it does this time . . . pressing button NOW . . .

::pressing the button really FAST this time::

And if anyone is so churlish as to check the numbers on these photos and observe that they’re going backwards, that’s because we parked Wolfgang in a funny spot and came to Bluebell Wood #1 SECOND.

They really are magical. If you’ve seen a bluebell wood, you know that magic exists in this world.

Another random sheep photo. As Rima said, it’s a magical gate through the hedgerow into another world . . . Sheepworld! Or it’s an alternate door through the hedge . . . won’t Linadel be surprised that it’s all SHEEP! Oh that Rima. I keep letting her come back because she’s so funny. Ha ha ha ha ha.

* * *

I’d heard of Murano, the Venetian island where the famous glass is produced. I hadn’t, however, heard of Burano, renowned for its lace making. We spent a cloudy (but fortunately dry) few hours there photographing not the lace, but the wonderful brightly coloured houses and their reflections in the canals. Burano is about an hour away from Venice city centre by Vaporetto, the waterborne public transport equivalent of the London tube (subway) but with a much more confusing map!

Waterborne public transport route map – Vaporettos and water buses. Water taxis are small, sleek, and speedy – but very expensive.

Much of the lace on sale is imported and machine made. Real Burano lacemaking is still taught on the island, but only to a very limited extent.

Every which way we turned, there was another colourful scene begging to be photographed.

Reflections gave double the colour.

I WANT to live in a purple house!!

The faded and peeling colours were just as attractive, and full of character.

I wonder just how much longer some of these buildings will remain as attractive as they are, when they seem to be just falling into decrepitude.

More colour and charm.

Colour in the smallest details – I love the pink bucket, and the echo of the layers of pink paint on the peeling wall.

I love photographing people; wonderful to capture vignettes like this.

Or this young couple! Awww!

And this lovely 92 year old lady. She was inside at her window, smiling as we photographed her from outside. She made such a lovely image, with the painted shutters and brightly coloured plant on the window ledge.

She and her son then came to the door, and via the hesitant translation of one of our group who could speak a little Italian, he asked if we could send him some photos of his mother! Of course!

 * Last of the series!  Waaaaaah!  –ed.

Life is an ugly pond-scum rat-assed bastard and then you die.

This not-eating spell with the hellhounds has been grinding on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and they’re moving into serious weight-loss and loss of condition territory.  You can see there’s something wrong, especially if you know them from a good patch.  Darkness is as bad as I’ve ever seen him.  He had another double-ended geysering fit last night, during which he dragged me across half Hampshire;  today he had what I call ‘colic’ and what it means is that his guts howl like rabid hyenas and he won’t eat.

Usually we cycle through these spells and come out again without too much damage except to my sanity.  Not this time.

Okay, here’s the promised bad news:  Pavlova is going the same way.  Oh, she eats.  But . . .

She’s been having irregularly squishy crap for several weeks.  I’ve tentatively put it down to the hormone storms of first heat.  But it’s worrying.  And I’m a little oversensitive on the subject of critter digestion after almost seven years of the hellhounds.

Then about a week ago she produced a gigantic mucousy thing . . . followed a few hours later with the Yellow Geysers.  Noooooooo . . .

I took her to the vet.  The vet said ‘colitis’—which is one of those fancy no-help non-diagnosis words, it just means inflammation of the lower gut.  We knew that.  He gave us some stuff—including some stronger or different or more comprehensive probiotics, in case this was a result of the antibiotics she’d been on for the skin infection on her forehead after the Malign Encounter in the Churchyard.

We went home.*  Her output has been better this week, but not that much better.  This has made me unhappy.  Meanwhile there are the hellhounds.  My stress level could fuel the energy grid of Hampshire, and possibly the entire south of England.

This morning, while she is still on what the vet gave us for ‘colitis’, she produced a gigantic mucousy thing . . . followed a few hours later with the Yellow Geysers.

The Yellow Geysers, which is exactly what the hellhounds have.  Have had for almost seven years.   It’s not just the runs, it’s a specific form of the runs.

I am so going to the vets again tomorrow.   This changes the entire game, you know?  If the totally-non-related, different-frelling-breed Pavlova is going down with the same damn thing that has haunted hellhounds and me for seven years.  Whatever it is.  Doesn’t it almost have to be parasites?**  But WHAT parasites?  Hellhounds were exhaustively tested for everything known to veterinary science—when they were first geysering.  As my bank balance still remembers.

Meanwhile . . . you’ll forgive me if I don’t burble on tonight.  I’m not feeling very burbly anyway, and immediate circumstances include that I got four hours of sleep last night.  Er.  ‘Night.’  Starting about 6:40 this morning. . . .

* * *

* I can’t starve her or she eats her bedding.^  She gets a little rice boiled to mush in chicken stock after an acute attack.  This week she’s been on chicken as well as chicken stock and rice.

^ She’s in my lap+ as I write this.++  She’s trying to eat the left mid-thigh of my jeans which I appear to have spilled something INTERESTING on.+++

+  It’s okay.  Hellhounds had a sofa earlier.

++ One-handed typing oh joy.  What price voice recognition software that actually, you know, recognises, rather than expressing its unique creativity?

+++ No, she’s gone to sleep with her nose on the wet spot she’s been licking.  Maybe it will give her tasty dreams.

** Unless I’m the vector.^  Toxic hellgoddess.  Yellow Geyser Mary.   I also don’t see any escape from the articulated lorry-load of GUILT when—that’s when—we finally find out what this is.

^ And in case anyone is trying to think of a tactful way of making an inquiry of a personal nature . . . I was diagnosed with IBS over thirty years ago, before anyone had frelling heard of it, including me.  And Digestive Issues are dead common with people with ME.  If this is a trans-species parasite I wouldn’t have a clue.  I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me.

SEVENTY NINE

I trudged up the steps and met Mike scampering down.  I wasn’t sure I approved of a man who might have already turned forty who still scampered.  He grinned at me, misreading my expression.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll have you back in New Iceland in plenty of time.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of, I didn’t say because I was out of breath—less from the climb than from borrowing trouble.  Borrowing trouble is very tiring, trouble being such a nimble and protean beast.  Through the pounding in my head I couldn’t remember how long my lease was for:  was it month to month, or had I agreed to three months—six—a year?  What would constitute a valid reason for breaking my lease?  A madwoman in the attic?  Swamp water on the floor and tentacle marks on the walls?  If I left where would I go?  With too many book boxes and a tall black dog?

I left the kibble on the top of a pile of those book boxes and walked through the parlour to dump my plastic bags at the foot of the stairs.  I was going to have to face the upstairs soon.  I groped for a light switch and (miraculously) found one.  The hall jumped into existence.  I hadn’t noticed, yesterday with Hayley, that the stair risers had leaves and little round flowers like Tudor roses carved on them.  Gelasio’s penthouse hadn’t had any Tudor roses.  It hadn’t had any stairs either, except the ones to the roof garden, which either were or were pretending to be white marble.  I had tried not to pay attention when some minor domestic arrangement cost more than I earned in a year.

I stared up.  I was going to have to go upstairs and face down those beds some time soon.  But not now.  I turned the light off again.  Coming back through I paused to look out through the big parlour windows.  I had always loved that long low golden afternoon light, when the weather and work deadlines cooperated.  The light was especially lush today—or maybe I was just acclimating to the jungle.  What was out there?  Could be anything.  Cold lakes.  Burgundy velvet and golden hounds.  Big black men riding big black horses.  My memory lingered on that one.  The man rode so beautifully I might have thought he was a centaur—it was as likely as anything else that had been happening right then—except I didn’t think centaurs usually had their human bodies growing out of the middle of their backs.  But it wouldn’t have to be cosmic horror and deinonychus in my gone-to-wild garden.  There might even be more rose-bushes, tangled up in their tougher neighbours for some protection against the elements.  A girl can dream.

I sighed, and turned again to face the parlour, and more boxes than I was sure had been in the van in the first place.  That was another good reason to stay here:  once I got the books out of their boxes I did not want to have to load them back in again.  Bookshelves.  Oh help.  My lease undoubtedly denied me permission to screw things into the walls, free-standing bookcases cost, and those kit things were sagging in the middle before you finished loading the last shelf.  And at almost-forty years old I refused to go the cement-blocks-and-planks, poverty-stricken student route.  Refused.  Refused. Well, maybe if I used attractive vintage bricks. . . .

I went through the kitchen on my way to the front door.  Anything to delay carrying any more boxes.  I wondered again about the weird jaggedy row of something at the very back of the van.  Maybe my trophy dragon’s jawbone had got left on the last row of boxes.  Ha ha.  One of the magicians Flowerhair had worked for had had a dragon’s jawbone as a staff.  It had not been a happy collaboration.

Sid was stretched out in front of Caedmon looking utterly comfortable and at ease.  After the winter she had just had I couldn’t begrudge her.  I even stifled uttering the threat to find panniers that would fit her.  (Although it was an interesting thought.  I might consult Susanna.  My mother usually had a Ghastly or two who would pull a tiny cart, which was a big hit at kids’ birthday parties in our neighborhood.)

The van was rocking slightly as I reluctantly descended the stairs, refusing to admit to myself that it wasn’t box avoidance that was troubling me, it was facing that the unloading stage was over with . . . and I would shortly be forced on to the next stage.   Mike emerged from the back of the van, carrying something.  What?  I didn’t have anything that looked like that.  My eyes were involuntarily drawn to my rose-bush in her pot, attempting all by herself to be a rose-hedge lining the driveway to Rose Manor.

Mike set what he was carrying down beside her, and climbed back into the van.  I got to the bottom of the stairs and was standing beside my rose-bush and her companion by the time Mike stepped gingerly down from the back of the van, carrying . . .

. . . a third rose-bush, which he set beside the first two.

I thought I’d ordered a swift and nostepinne.  But two days went by and there was no reply to my email.  Whimper.  Here you are trying to support local/indie talent and not order from frelling amazon and THEY DON’T ANSWER.

They answered.  Today.  There was a spam bin involved.  WELL OF COURSE THERE WAS A SPAM BIN INVOLVED.  THIS IS WHAT SPAM BINS DO, IS EAT GOOD MAIL AND LET THE TOXIC GARBAGE THROUGH.*

I now have a swift and nostepinne coming.  But the indie talent are still a business, drat them, and they’re not sending them out till MONDAY.  Monday is three days away.  And then it still has to get here.

Fie.**

I spent a good deal of the afternoon in the garden again, working off Lack of Swift.***  There’s a rather unfortunate Spending Time in the Garden Syndrome however.  You’re not a big bedding plant person—you’ve already let the labour-intensive thing get out of control by having too many roses, you don’t need bedding plants too—you’re a mental case of course, gardeners are, but you have no illusions about ‘tidy’ or ‘design’.  Stuff goes in where there’s room† and the weeds are really healthy because the one thing you are usually pretty good about is feeding.  So you look at the labyrinthine wilderness out there and you think, all I really need is a few good days.

The garden at the cottage is tiny.  All I need is a few not-freezing, not-raining afternoons—!

Wrong.  The more you do the more you see.  And the more you see the more you DESPAIR.  Having got most of the urgent stuff potted up or potted on††, the most hostile of the roses tied ferociously back††† and (semi) pruned as necessary, I was reduced to WEEDING today.  I actually like weeding‡ but when the forest of ground elder closes over your head and the enchanters’ nightshade twines up your ankles and pulls you down—and enchanters’ nightshade grows fast enough to do this, if you stay somewhere too long, levering up wild poppies or creeping buttercup or those black-leaved pansies that look so cute and innocent and have long almost-invisible roots reaching to China or possibly Mars—AAAAAAAUGH.  I’d rather be winding hanks of yarn.

What’s the weather this weekend?  I should probably hoover the floor indoors before my friend arrives on Monday.  Just don’t let me notice how much else I should be doing. . . .

* * *

* Griselda is in Pago Pago and all her money has been stolen and would I please transfer the entire contents of my bank account to the Evil Scam Holding Syndicate so she can get a glass of water?^  But . . . but . . . I had a cup of tea with her yesterday afternoon and she didn’t say anything about Pago Pago.  There must be some mistake. . . .

^ Which is about what the entire contents of my bank account would be worth.  Tourist traps are expensive.

** NOW.  NOW.  I WANT THEM NOW.  —You know I’m expecting a mere eight-months’-old puppy to calm down and stop being a manic git.   Clearly we were made for each other.^

^ Hellhounds open one eye.  Possibly one eye each.  Does whatever this thing is run?  Can we chase it?  —I think a swift on end given a push downhill might canter a bit.

*** Stop laughing.  Hmmph.

† And sometimes when there isn’t.  That’s where the tiered effect comes in handy.

†† Although it’s been a bad season for mail-order errors.  The usual response of big on-line gardening sites is ‘keep it and we’ll send you the right one.’  Or ones.  I didn’t actually want four hundred and twelve osteospermums or nine hundred and sixty apple blossom geraniums, some of which actually are apple blossom geraniums, and which are all going like thunder and will need somewhere to put their roots down soon.  I was poised to send the sellers photos of their errors as evidence but they must have a certain percentage of goofs built into the system.  Do they keep track of who protests?  Do they put tick marks against your name?   Or merely fry in oil the staff responsible for the blip that caused Hampshire to be carpeted in non-apple-blossom geraniums?

And of course, like every other year, I am waiting breathlessly to see how many of my dahlia cuttings grow up to be what I ordered.  I go on ordering them because they’re so much cheaper than tubers—and the awful truth is that I rarely have a cutting failure, while my tubers rather too often decide that the accommodations don’t suit them, they were looking for something a little more up market, with designer chocolate on the pillow and free wifi.  But cuttings are wildly unreliable in their own fabulous way.  Up to about a quarter of the frellers are anything but what you ordered.  It does make you wonder, speaking of staff, what the staff are, you know, smoking.

††† That faint unfriendly humming noise you hear, like a nest of wasps in a bad mood, is the sound of various whippy-stemmed roses with known violent tendencies gnawing through their restraints.^

^ I am still sad I didn’t get around to buying the ‘some days it’s not worth gnawing through the restraints’ t shirt before they inexplicably cut it.  There are still cheap knock offs available—and one of these days when it’s not worth gnawing through the restraints I will probably buy one—but this one was a QUALITY t shirt.

‡ There’s a quote out there somewhere that I am failing to google into confirmation, that says something like ‘No one is a gardener who doesn’t like weeding’ which is just a specific-object version of one of the quotes on the blog’s quote thingy:  ‘The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.’  Yep.  You don’t like rewriting, don’t be a writer.  Anthony Trollope may have got away with turning in his beautiful copperplate handwritten first drafts to his publisher, but you and I won’t.  Aside from the beautiful copperplate part.

The very last thing I do every night is put Pav out for a final pee*.  When this happens EVEN LATER THAN USUAL because, say, I’ve been reading something and HAD TO KNOW HOW IT ENDED**, it may no longer be awfully dark outdoors by the time we get out there for this ritual moment.   Hey, it’s barely a month to the longest day, it gets light really really REALLY early, okay?  So it was like twilight out there this morning, and I was standing there in my nightgown ready to fend the little varmint*** off the rose bushes and my peripheral vision was caught by movement where no movement should be. . . .

There was a big fat mouse lowering the bird-seed level in the feeder by a rate of knots.  ARRRRRRRGH.†

This is my fabulous squirrel proof bird feeder, you know?  The one with the integral cage that only little birds can get through.  Little birds and the occasional frelling mouse—who was soon going to be too frelling bulgy to get out again.  I picked up a stake that didn’t happen to be propping anything important and gave the feeder a move-or-die whack.  Mouse leaped out into the shadows—Geronimoooooooooo!—and disappeared.††

The real ratbag about this is that I’ve pretty much decided that the birds don’t like this feeder.  I have lots of birds in the garden, and the suet block in the other feeder is eaten down pretty reliably.  Er.  By birds:  I see them doing it.  This one—nope.  I assume they don’t like the cage.

Sigh.

So today, which was a lovely day†††, I spent a good bit of in the garden. ‡ And one of the things I did was tie the clematis and the rose-bush that are the likeliest mouse-access-providing culprits away from the seed feeder.

And my little apple tree is blossoming like CRAZY! YAAAAAAAAAAY! I won’t actually stop worrying about what wall-building may have done to its roots till it’s had this year’s crop of apples and blossomed again next year . . . but so far so good.

* * *

* Hellhounds scorn such wimpery.  Pav is extremely continent^ but she’s also always delighted to be allowed to burst out of her crate and attack something.  If the price for this indulgence is that she stop attacking things^^ long enough to have a pee, she will do that with reasonable grace.

^ Barring the standard canine disasters.  My latest trial is that she’s decided that sheep crap is a delicacy.  ARRRRRRRRGH.  Even if I hold her upside down and shake, the stuff is kind of friable, you know?  It doesn’t all hold together neatly and pop out in a nice cohesive lump.

^^ Dirty laundry, nightgown hems+, feet, towels hanging on the Aga rail, etc.  If she’s desperate, dog toys.

+ She has, relatively recently, discovered the joys of rocket-launching her solid little furry self upward inside the circle of hem of the nightgown you’re wearing YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

** I’ll tell you all about it.  Some day.

*** With the little glistening varminty eyes

† Speaking of ARRRRRRRRGH.  ARRRRRRRRRGH.

†† Pav was sure she’d missed something.  I’m glad to say the mouse leaped into the shadows on the far side of the little courtyard fence.  I don’t like mice, but I didn’t in the least want my hellterror catching one.^  Or diving through a rose-bush to try.

^ Either she’d eat it—and its unknown but guaranteed undesirable parasites—or she’d just mangle it a little.  They scream, you know.  Like bunnies.  Bunnies scream.  Dog owners need to know how to kill things.  Whimper.

††† After we got down to a NEAR FROST last night.  One of my pathetic and ridiculous excuses for staying up reading was so that I could keep an eye on the frelling thermometer.  The temperature had turned around and was going up again by the time I turned the light off.  I get to do this again tonight.  Or not, of course.

‡ Have I told you I have two lots of American visitors coming next week?  I have maybe half a dozen overnight-staying, pond-crossing visitors in an average year . . . and I have THREE of them NEXT WEEK?  WHAT?  One of them is an old friend, and if the house(s) is a tip and the garden(s) is a jungle, eh, she’s seen it all before.  The other one—and her husband—I’m a little afraid of.  Sigh.  But nothing is going to turn me into a magnificent housekeeper, a sublime gardener and a superlative hostess in the next ten days, so we’ll just have to muddle along somehow.

You know how ‘the news’ isn’t ‘the news’ but ‘the BAD news’?

Every now and then something slips by the radar—it’s newsworthy and it’s not bad.  It may even be good.

I love this.  Virginia tobacco farmers, floundering in the dropping demand for tobacco, are planting chickpeas instead.  Because hummus is booming.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323798104578453174022015956.html

YAAAAAAAAAY.  GO HEALTHY EATING THAT IS HEALTHY WITHOUT MAKING A BIG SCOWLY FACE DEAL OUT OF IT.*

I of course have been eating hummus for decades.  I’d’ve said all us old original-Moosewood-Cookbook** hippies and freaks and navy-blue-suit wearing secret counterculturists ate hummus.***

But I do want to draw your attention to hummus chocolate cake.  I’ve got a recipe for it myself somewhere but I couldn’t find it and I had to go bell ringing†.  There are several of them out there in internetland†† but they seem nearly identical and epicurious is usually pretty reliable:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/FLOURLESS-CHOCOLATE-HUMMUS-CAKE-50146823

This looks like mine—the four eggs and two teaspoons of vanilla are right.  I may use more cocoa.  It’s a safe bet that I usually use more cocoa.  But the cake is lovely.  Really.  It’s chiefly the tahini that gives what you think of as the hummus flavour to, um, hummus.  Hummus chocolate cake is just very, very dense and moist and filling and scrummy and excellent.  It’s also dairy and gluten free and doesn’t taste like a lot of the contents of those grim ‘without’ shelves at the supermarket.†††  You can even fool yourself that it’s good for you.

* * *

* I am also going to risk being heinously politically incorrect and say that given America’s^ relations with the Middle East I can’t help but feel that enthusiastically adopting even a mere humble foodstuff can’t hurt.  They’re people like us, you know?  They eat.  And eating together is usually bonding too.

^ And most of the western first world’s

** Which is out of print.  The new one is all low fat.  Feh.  http://www.amazon.com/Moosewood-Cookbook-Katzens-Classic-Cooking/dp/1580081304/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368656400&sr=8-1&keywords=moosewood+cookbook

I’ve got so many physical issues it’s not frelling funny.  My intolerances are intolerant of my other intolerances.  But one thing this body has always got right is its cholesterol levels—even back in my heavy dairy, if-it-stands-still-long-enough-put-butter-on-it days, I had low Bad Cholesterol and high Good Cholesterol.^  So everyone moaning about Katzen’s high-fat recipes I was like, What?^^  I remember reading an interview with Katzen I think around the time that the new revised not-so-much-fat edition came out, saying (as my flaky memory recalls it) that she was a little embarrassed at the way she’d trowelled on the dairy and the oil and so on but that she’d been publishing a vegetarian cookbook at a time when vegetarian food was perceived as feeble and weedy and listless and she wanted to present it as able to duke it out with steak and chops.  And it does, unless you have the kind of politically incorrect metabolism that DEMANDS MEAT, which mine does.  Oops.  But I don’t have to have it every day.  And my original MOOSEWOOD and ENCHANTED BROCCOLI FOREST cookbooks have a lot of pages stuck together and a lot of notes in the margins.

^ I must have told you this story:  when I first had ME, and my NHS doctor had grandly declared that she didn’t believe in ME—thanks ever so, lady—I went briefly to a private doc recommended by another ME sufferer.  He had, he said, found himself making a speciality of it simply because he saw so much of it.  I couldn’t afford him for long but he got me started taking care of myself and was very encouraging even when I told him I had to pack as much in as possible in as few appointments as possible.  One of the things he did was have my blood tested for seven single-spaced pages of stuff.   The ‘normal’ ranges for most things are wide enough you have to be a doctor to find any of the readings suggestive, but anything that counted officially as abnormal was marked by a big band of colour, like a giant highlighter.  My cholesterol levels were highlighted.  NOOOOOOOO.  CHOLESTEROL IS THE THING I DO RIGHT.  No, no, said the doctor.  The lab doesn’t differentiate between good abnormal and bad abnormal.  Your bad cholesterol is abnormally low, and your good cholesterol is abnormally high.

Oh.  ::Beams::  Pity about the ME though . . .

^^ I also have another of my crunchy-granola, geeky health-nutter fringe rants about the fact that fat is good for you.  The super-low-fat thing is BAD.  And margarine is not fat, okay?  Margarine is evil.  Greasy evil.  What they do to it to make it solid is far worse than butter ever was or could be unless you injected it with curare or something first.+

+ I think one of the fashions for eggs as good for you is current too.  Yawn.  Yes.  They’re good for you even when they’re out of fashion, unless you’re allergic to them.  I eat a lot of eggs.

*** My hummus is actually not Katzen’s.  I was indeed faintly superior and ho-hum^ when Moosewood came out.  It wasn’t going to have anything to teach me and what’s with the twee hand lettering?  I think one of my long-ironed-hair, tie-dyed-skirt-wearing friends gave me a copy^^ and when I still had more than twelve calories a day available I was a sucker for a good cookbook.

^ I have never claimed to be a nice person, and I was worse when I was younger

^^ Tie-dye took a long time to go away.  AND IT CAME BACK.  AAAAAAAAUGH.  Barring a pink tie-dye t shirt that a friend and her kids made me a few years ago+ that I am very fond of, I have the same feeling about tie-dye that I do about bell bottoms.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  And don’t come near me with shag carpeting or Austin Powers either.

+ It’s colour proof and everything.  You can put it through the washing machine.  They make home-hand-dyeing colour a lot better than they used to.

† I RANG THREE TIMES TONIGHT.  YAAAAAAAY.  It was almost like being a real person.

†† Along with a lot of suggestions for straight hummus-chocolate mousse-like-substance or frosting or cookies which I will leave you to discover for yourselves although if you’re asking me all those involving things like Nutella are impure.

††† Personally I think chocolate-covered rice cakes are a sin against nature.