29 November 2018 (Thursday) - Before the Late Shift


Every morning as my lap-top boots up it shows a picture from somewhere round the world. The current picture looked rather familiar… it was from Butchart Gardens in Canada. I’ve been there. Looking at the place on-line it looks beautiful; I can remember it being rather tedious. Isn’t that negative of me… but ornamental gardens often are tedious. After five minutes of looking at flowers you really have seen it all.
Mind you I went there with the scouts. Much of my memories of scouting are of utter tedium; shepherding a dozen ungrateful brats around places where they didn’t want to be tended to suck the fun out of everything. I packed up being a scout leader when I realised it was *supposed* to be fun. Looking back I think I’d been doing it wrong for some time before I finally knocked it on the head.

I had a little snigger when I looked at Facebook this morning. I saw an advert for “Montgomery Scott Blended Scotch Whisky”. From my days in active Trekkie-ing I just know that no end of people are going to hand over a small fortune for something they would never otherwise buy if it didn’t have a Star Trek logo on it. I can remember being at the “Star Trek Experience” in Bournemouth over twenty years ago when a pencil set (like you’d see in the pound store) was up for sale for forty quid purely because someone had printed “Star Trek” on it. People were buying them.
I wish I’d had that idea first.
Other than that there wasn’t a lot kicking off on Facebook for once.
My in-box was equally uninspiring. Amazon had sent me emails suggesting I buy that which I had already bought. NHS jobs suggested I apply for jobs I didn’t really want. LinkedIn had sent me a load of gibberish written in a foreign language (I don’t speak “management”).
I gave up and took the dogs for a walk. We got half way round the park before the rain hit. We came home again.

I spent five minutes loading rubbish into the car, then settled the dogs and drove off. I had a few chores to do on the way to work. First of all to the vet's where my piss boiled somewhat. Fudge and Treacle are due for their flea treatments. I thought we had loads of the stuff in the cupboard; we'd run out. I phoned the vet yesterday evening to arrange to collect some this morning only to be told I didn't have to arrange anything in advance; I could just turn up in the morning. So I turned up and explained why I was there and I waited and waited. Getting the flea treatments took an age. I asked if things might have been better had I phoned last night to say I was coming; the nice lady on reception said that would have been for the best, and perhaps I might do that next time. I thought about mentioning that I had actually done just that, but sometimes it is best not to stir these things more than they need to be.

I then took a car load of rubbish to the tip. Most of it went into the right skips, but I had a broken decanter that was too big for the hole in the glass recycling skip. I asked the nice man where I should stick it. Surprisingly he didn't give the obvious answer, but said it goes in the glass recycling. I explained patiently that it was too big for the hole. Consternation was achieved all round as all the tip operatives huddled together trying to decide what to do when something is too big for the hole. After five minutes they put the knacked decanter on to a shelf next to an old clock and said I should leave it with them.
I did so.

I then went to Longacres garden centre (Bybrook Barn to most people). Yesterday during our run-in with the dog warden she'd said that she was pleased to see that Fudge had his address and our name on a tag on his collar. She completely missed the fact  that he hadn't. Fudge and Treacle had tags with my phone number (and nothing else) and Pogo had nothing at all. I thought I'd better get that sorted before we have another ding-dong with her (it can only be a matter of time...)
The pet tag gizmo at the vets had gone west, but the one at Bybrook Barn was working. The nice lady behind the counter (who operates it) wouldn't take my instructions for the tags verbally; she insisted that I wrote down what I wanted to appear on them. And having written down my name, address, post code and phone number I then had to spell each one out to her as she couldn't read my writing.
Eventually I handed over thirty quid (ten quid per tag) to find she'd spelt "Beaver" (as in Beaver Road) wrong on each tag...

Pausing only briefly to fail to locate a geocache in Barming I went in to work where the canteen was doing a rather good lasagne. It was really tasty and filling. I'm sure it is in no way connected with the fact that I was farting all afternoon.

And can you believe it is now two years since we took on Treacle. Where has the time gone?

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