Bring me sunshine

When we moved here in August, we anticipated problems with rabbits. And we were right - though our current problem isn't one we envisaged; Dog has succeeded in catching them. And when she catches them, she regards them as lunch. Or dinner. Or both.

When she caught her first one, we didn't have the heart to take it from her because it seemed such a miracle. A year ago, she had a stroke, then four months ago she was diagnosed with a ruptured ligament in her knee and partial blindness and deafness. So when she stumbled over the rabbit crouching in a furrow beside a field of emerging barley, we could only watch in amazement as she set off in hot pursuit.

The rabbit tried to double back when it reached the middle of the field, so Dog managed to grab it. But the rabbit set off again, with Dog still in pursuit. This went on for a couple of minutes, with both of them getting slower and slower as though their clockwork mechanisms were winding down. When Dog caught it, she stood there so shattered we thought we'd have to carry her home. But when we approached her (or her rabbit) she rallied and set off home ahead of us at a determined trot. By the time we got home, she had half eaten it.

But that wasn't enough. She then managed to catch a second one. And ate that too. Then lay comatose, happily burping (and worse) for 24 nearly hours, because her belly was so full. Yet, she still wanted to have her dog biscuit dinner and our left-overs, so clearly a full stomach isn't a message to dogs to stop eating.

So now we have a dilemma. Do we let her wander off and hunt and eat to her heart's content? On the one hand, this would help keep the rabbit population down. On the other hand, our central heating bill would go up as we would be forced to live with the doors and windows permanently open. Or do we confine her to barracks and live out the rest of her life on a dreary, but unsmelly, diet of dog biscuits, whilst the bunnies continue to play havoc with the garden.

Oh, decisions, decisions

Two people. One house.

One downstairs, working with his laptop; the other upstairs, playing on her computer.

Both disturbed by the radio being suddenly switched on and loud news flooding the house;

Both slammed doors to respective rooms with irritated sighs and mutterings about their spouse's deafness;

Both lose it and rush out of room, colliding on stairs, to accuse the other of being 'bleeding deaf';

Both deny listening to the radio;

Both peer cautiously into bedroom and behold radio alarm belting out the news!

And the weird thing is ... it is set to operate as an alarm only, not a radio.

Gulp ... not The Creatures Who Live In The Loft up to new tricks?

I remember when I was a kid that time mattered. Really mattered.

"Hurry up and eat your dinner" meant "Time you cleared off to bed"

Which meant stretching out time to infinite proportions. Bet none of you could have beaten me in the challenge to delay dinner by dissecting peas with Heart Consultant precision, so that they could be eaten an eighth at a time.

Anyway, this morning I had to resort to such time-stretching tactics again. Despite entreaties to 'hurry or you'll be late' I manage to delay coming downstairs until my tea was just the right temperature and the OH had finished his toast and was thus free to make mine.

Because this morning was check-up day and I was full of worry about flossed teeth and what to wear for a physio appointment.

First the dentist, where despite my worries and memories of the volume of sweets I had eaten recently, the magic words 'no problems and see you in six months' saw me in and out of the door in ten minutes flat.

Then the physio to find out what the problem is with my left knee and the right-hand side of my back - and instead of being told it was age and I couldn't expect much else, I heard the magic words "we can repair you" and "my, aren't you flexible".

And so I'm home, celebrating with a Chelsea Bun and coffee, and the only worry I now still have is whether I was wearing the right sort of pants.

... but tornadoes do. And the rain in Spain falls mainly on the Isle of Wight. At least, I think I'm still on the Isle of Wight. I could be mistaken and be on a trans-Atlantic liner battling through the waves instead, such is the ferocity of the sheets of rain lashing the window. No. Thought not. Definitely still on the Isle of Wight. Not a cocktail waiter in sight and the sea has merged with the grey sky.

Anyway, just the thing to get me in the mood to make a draught excluder for the back door, I thought, flushed with the success of a hop pillow that may or may not do its job.

But I want a dog, not a snake. And I can't find a pattern. So I've drawn one. And it looks like a rabbit's head stuck on a snake's body with a shark's fin on its back. And it's cross-eyed.

I keep telling myself to get a life - it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as it excludes the draught.

But it does .... so there goes my afternoon.

I can't seem to find the clicky tabs that lead you to The Buzz, Featured Blogs, Latest Posts and Something Else That I've Forgotten (I Think).

Is it me/my computer?

Or have they been given a terminal squirt of virtual fly spray?

When I was a kid, my mate and I were convinced that the old couple at the end of the road were spies (we were addicted to Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five Books) or nosy neighbours (we had indiscreet parents). The sole grounds for our suspicions (other than their kindly (but to us, sinister) greetings and enquiries about our well-being and activities) was that they had a pair of binoculars by their backdoor.

We often saw these binoculars because they also had a bowl of sweets for the children who held them in such low esteem, and we were quick to think of ingenious ways to knock on the door in the hope of getting a sweet.

Now I realise that I am A Nosy Neighbour myself.

For I have a pair of binoculars by my desk. And I whip them out at the slightest movement, despite the lack of neighbours in my line of vision. And thus I have been rewarded today by a gang of partridges scuttling across the field; and a brown blob on a telephone wire that miraculously turned into a buzzard doing a clever trapeze act in the gale.

But should anyone think of lobbing a ball into the garden and knocking on the door - don't bother. I've eaten the last Fizzy Fish.

A month or so ago, a friend told me that she had picked some wild hops, dried them and made a pillow with them as a cure for insomnia.

So being unable to resist being a copycat, I did the same. Mainly because I just loved the garlands or bines. But I couldn't leave them festooned across the potting bench forever, so I got my sewing box out. Here it is, ready for bed.

I'll let you know how ...... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

For the last couple of months, I've been spending a couple of evenings per week in the arms of another man; cuddling up on a sofa, kissing noisily and having regular confrontations with his ex-girlfriend.

It's been two months of dizzying excitement; intense emotional highs when the course of love ran smooth and we envisaged a life of luxury together on the proceeds of his world-famous works of art. Of course there were occasional lows - how could there not be when you are skulking around in the dark - when we've argued and I threw things at him, only to miss and hit someone else. And uncomfortable moments when my father disapproved and said so plainly. And the even more nerve-wracking occasion when my husband was observing us.

Now it's all over. I've put my wedding ring back on and am trying to re-adjust to my old life.

But I long for the next time; the adrenaline rush is completely addictive.

I haven't been sleeping well this past week - excitement, adrenaline, fear, nerves cos of the play wot I am soon to be in, whatever. But each night, at precisely 4 am, I have been woken by the patter of tiny feet in the loft above.

Mice, I thought, that first night. We'd found an empty mousetrap up there when we moved in.

Fat mice, I thought, the second night. Heavy-footed, cobbled shoed, strutting mice.

Eh? What the hell?, I thought, the third night. Because whatever was up there kept dropping something that sounded like a coin on the floorboards....
and the loft is empty of personal effects.

So what is it? Mice with piggy banks, rats with (can't bear to think of that), squirrels with nuts?

I'm too scared to open the hatch and stick my head in to look.

I spent a considerable amount of time tonight trying to find a song on itunes. I heard it - a 'blast from the past' - whilst in a pub with the OH last week and it had been on my mind ever since. I found it, and was downloading just as the OH got in from work. (Rather irritatingly, he knew the name of it as soon as I hummed the tune, so why he couldn't have read my mind and put me out of my misery days ago I just don't know)

But it made me think about songs that are so intertwined with a moment in my past that I am instantly transported back to another time and place. Like hearing Denis by Blondie, when I was a lonely au pair in France and totally gratified that I could understand the verse that was in French; my first night in a uni hall of residence, lying in bed and hearing 'Lovely Day' by Bill Withers drifting across the night; Jamming with Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Crystal Palace Bowl in 1980, the air heavy a thick cloud of smoke from pot; Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd, when I met the love of my life, and later, Wise Men by James Blunt, blasting out in cafes when I spent hours researching family history in London. And many more.

On my Nano, but clearer still in my head and heart.