17 July 2013 (Wednesday) - Bathing the Dog

Last night I thought that "Furry Face ^TM" seemed rather quiet and subdued. This morning when I came downstairs he was in his basket. He didn’t get up to see me, but his tail quivered slightly. By his basket was a pile of sick, and the poor pup looked terrified. When he realised he wasn’t in trouble he perked up somewhat.

I don’t know much about the people who had "Furry Face ^TM" before the first fruit of my loin took him on. I am told they were good people. But I can’t help but wonder how he was toilet trained. Did they mistreat him?

I’ve only ever seen him have a “potty emergency” once and when it happened he hid from me. When Sid has stayed overnight with us and has tiddled and pooped, Fudge has been equally mortified. Why is he so frightened every time there are bodily fluid mishaps?

I scoffed my brekkie, put more washing on the line to dry, and seeing how "Furry Face ^TM" was a bit more lively I got out his lead to see if he’d like a walk. He went mad. So we went on a rather circuitous meander. Over the weekend I had some “Did Not Find” logs registered on some of the geocaches that I’ve hidden. I wanted to see if they were not found because the caches had gone, or if it was “operator error”. The first cache (in the general vicinity of the park) has actually gone. I’ll replace that when I get replacements via eBay. Now the cheapo-bargains shop doesn’t do magnetic key safes I have to spend double the money and wait for a week to get them.

There are those in the geocachical fraternity who look down on magnetic key-safes as caches. These same people also don’t bother looking for the caches I hide that involve a lot more effort to produce, so whatever I do is wrong. Bovvered?

We then went down to Park Farm where I had reports of another cache being missing. This one wasn’t missing at all. I felt it rather ironic that I have loads of spare plastic boxes to be used as caches but it’s not those ones that disappear. It’s always the ones that involve effort to replace that go walkabout.

As we walked home we came past some more of my caches that I had a look at (just to be sure). As we walked along the river I let Fudge off of his lead. He had a drink from the river, and then… O.M.G. (!) Regular readers of this drivel may recall that on occasion I have mentioned that my dog rolls in fox poo. Nothing previous has ever compared to what he did today. Fudge is normally a mostly black dog with shades of brown, tan, and the occasional flecks of white. When he had finished his rolling this morning he was a uniform iridescent olive green; glistening in the sunshine and stinking to high heaven. And if ever a dog was smiling, he was smiling as he ate what small parts of the fox poo he couldn’t smear over himself.

It is as well that he can swim – I threw him in the river.

We came home where FF had a bath. And another bath. I *think* I’ve shifted all of the dung. I had a quick spot of lunch and got the washing in from the line. As "Furry Face ^TM" curled up in the sunshine and slept I set the DVD machine going with a BattleStar Galactica extravaganza and ironed all that laundry I washed today, yesterday and last week. It only took three hours.

er indoors ^TM" came home and we put the lead onto the pup and we went for a walk. A geocaching walk of course. The Bethersden Pond Trail was a nice little walk, but as a series of geocaches it left a lot to be desired. Why on Earth put the things half a kilometre (or more) apart? The rules say the minimum distance is 161 metres, so where we found four there could have been fifteen or more.

My dog liked the Bethersden Pond Trail - he especially liked the "pond" part. When we came home I carried the smelly dripping dog through the house for another bath...