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17 August 2016 (Wednesday) - Another Late Shift

I got up at 2am to check on my little dog. He was fast asleep. He was still asleep when I came down at 7am (it seems that if I get up in the night I actually sleep longer in total). That tramidol pain killer does make him drowsy. But he needs to rest, so that is a good thing.

Over brekkie I had a look-see on-line. My email inbox had gone mental. My new series of geocaches in Challock had been published. But for every cache I got a notification that it had been published, a notification that the reviewer had published it, and a notification that there was a new geocache. That was three emails for each of twenty new caches when realistically I didn’t really need any. Mind you it’s good that they’ve gone live; it was quite a bit of effort to get them to that stage.
I also had an email about a job in Maidstone at a higher grade that I might apply for. Mind you the job was for “quality manager”; it would be a *lot* more work for not that much more money. And for all that I might whinge, I quite like my job at the moment. More money would be nice (definitely would be nice right now!), but currently I’m doing something that I can (mostly) do with a group of people I really like. I’ve been a manager before and in all honesty didn’t like it.
And I had a wry smile when I read something about Butchard Gardens. I doubt any of my loyal readers have heard of Butchard Gardens; it is a rather pretentious park in British Columbia. We took the scouts there for an afternoon when we were staying in Canada. In retrospect it was a waste of time and money. Apparently the staff there now expel visitors who they feel look “too posh”. I can remember the staff being right up their own backsides when we were there; at the time I wondered how they ever stayed in business bearing in mind the contempt they showed for their customers.

My plan for the early morning had been to generally fiddle about and hopefully the morning’s hustle and bustle would gently wake my little dog. It didn’t really. He slept through it all. After a while I chivvied him into the garden where he walked around for a bit then walked back in again. He walked straight past his brekkie and went to bed. I hand-fed him a couple of scraps of dog food, but he wasn’t very hungry. However we did trick him into eating more tablets having buried them into pieces of cheese.
Yesterday morning I was in tears over him (again). This morning I was a little more positive. The vet doesn’t want to see him till Friday; he is eating (if only a little). He is permanently spaced out, but that is the drugs, and he doesn’t seem to be in pain. I’ve just got to be patient.

Usually on the morning before a late shift I’d take my dog for a walk. But he is resting (whether he likes it or not) and so with a little time on my hands I watered my tree. A couple of months ago I thought I was rather flush and so spent out the best part of fifty quid re-potting that tree and making a feature of it. I then fed the fish, and couldn’t help but notice just how clear the pond water is becoming (having spent five hundred quid on a new filtration system).
If only I’d known...
I then started putting together the paperwork for the insurance claim for Fudge’s little episode. Currently the vet bill stands at over six hundred quid. I *really* hope they pay out.

And so to work. To add insult to injury as I started the car it told me a service was due. No matter what else goes west I cannot do without a car, so I’ve booked a service for next week.

I listened to the radio whilst I drove to work. There was an interesting article on the radio about how when (during the war) ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to allow the gates of his garden to be taken to have the iron used for war materials. There were questions asked in Parliament about this; a lot of the locals got rather upset about the issue. One MP actually suggested he should be allowed to keep his gates to keep out the irate locals; feeling was running so high.
Admittedly a rather obscure part of history, but it was the sort of thing that had they taught it in schools I might not have dropped history as a subject at the first chance I got. Looking back our history teacher was rather crap. I learned absolutely sod-all from years of sitting on my backside copying out texts books about the Seven Years War. (That was how history was taught at Hastings Grammar School - over the course of a year you'd copied the entire text book but learned nothing)

There was also an article about the use of tampons in China; I turned the radio off then.

Pausing only briefly to claim a geo-find in Boughton Aluph I then carried on to Chartham garden centre. I needed flocculant - again they had none. I could really do with some for the pond.
On leaving the place I noticed the coffee shop; I couldn't resist a cream scone and a cup of coffee; after all the stress of the last few days I thought I deserved it. And suitably replete I set off to work where I had another rather busy day. But (if nothing else) being busy meant the time passed quickly.

This evening my dog got up and had a tiddle of his own accord. Without being prompted. Result!!!

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