10 August 2024 (Saturday) - Dog Club, Late Shift

By the time I’d collected “er indoors TM and driven her mates home it was nearly one o’clock by the time I got to bed last night. I lay in bed and listened to the noise of the shop over the road having a delivery. It didn’t last that long really. The shop over the road often gets deliveries at silly times, and whatever perishable stuff is delivered then sits outside the shop until they open at eight o’clock and bring it in.
That shop’s bottled beer selection is second to none, but I don’t get milk from them.
“er indoors TM and the dogs came to bed just before four o’clock. To be fair it was a relatively quiet one for them, and the dogs soon settled taking up surprisingly little bed space.
 
Over brekkie I had my usual look at the Internet. Someone had taken offence on a posting on the Facebook “Upstairs Downstairs” group in which there was talk of a bible given by one character to another. Just mentioning a religious book was enough to give offence…
A friend had posted one of the standard anti-immigration rants on his Facebook page. I can understand why people get frustrated at the feeling that immigrants get so much, but completely closing the borders? When I was a manager in the NHS we advertised for staff. The same advert went out many times. Over the course of a year we didn't get a single applicant from anyone living in the UK. Not one. And there were articles on the radio about fruit rotting in the fields Local farmers had advertised for fruit pickers. No one from the UK applied. What can we do? Conscription?
I don't know the answer.
And I saw that our Munzee Clan had reached the first of our four monthly goals; I struggled with Wordle.
 
Being Saturday we set off to Dog Club. I wondered if we’d left a tad early; we got there to find four dogs (and their humans) waiting to get in. Dog Club went rather well. It was difficult to count as everyone was zooming about, but I’m reasonably confident that there were at least twenty-three dogs along today.
Dog Club is great; the new dogs turn up rather overawed by it all, and within minutes they’ve made new friends and are charging about with a bunch of buddies. Sadly we all made a point of getting away promptly this morning as someone had said they would come to the 9.40am session which is a time reserved for newbies and timid dogs… they didn’t show.
 
I spent a couple of minutes tallying up what I’d spent on my credit card. As I pulled the old receipts out of my wallet I found twenty quid I didn’t know I had. That was a result.
Leaving “er indoors TM asleep I set off to work. Having totally failed to guess the lyrics in Steve's "Guess the Lyrics" competition on the way to Dog Club, and on the way home having narrowed the Mystery Year down to 2010 give or take six years either way, I listened to Steve on the radio until the signal gave out on the approach to Leeds Castle.
As I drove up the "Operation Brock" bit of the so-called motorway I counted eighteen cars in the lane which is clearly signposted as being for HGVs only. There's always one or two cars in there, but I think that eighteen is the most I've ever counted.
 
I popped in to the Sainsbury's branch of Aylesford to get petrol. The chap in front of me at as I queued at the pumps was rather special. He would have been annoying if I was in a rush, but I wasn't. You've never seen anyone fart about quite like this bloke did when fuelling his car.
First of all he couldn't even get out of the car.
Then once he'd eventually fallen out (and nearly landed flat on his face) he went back to the driver's door and had a really good argument with whoever was in the passenger seat.
Then he couldn't find the filler cap where the fuel went into his car.
Then he couldn't decide whether to use the petrol or diesel hose.
And having decided he then stood in a rather stupid place from which he could almost (but not quite) reach the filler cap and leaned over the boot of his car rather than taking two steps round the side.
Then having finally got fuel into his car he had what looked like a full-on fist fight with the card payment machine.
I wish I'd videoed it.
 
I went in to work where I had a typical Saturday late shift. I wouldn't say it was "shit-the-bed" busy with dire emergency following dire emergency (as can sometimes happen), but today was just non-stop. The work quite literally did not stop. I had an endless stream of cases which really had to be dealt with today; ideally as soon as possible, if not sooner. I had a little look at the "finished" tray before I came home; I think I must have dealt with blood from over a hundred patients in my seven and a half hour shift. I got a cuppa shortly after six o'clock this evening by simply walking out and leaving everything for five minutes. Had I not done so, I wouldn't have got even those five minutes.
All very different to the first Saturday I ever did back in 1984 when I was on duty from mid-day to nine o'clock on Sunday morning and only had five blood samples in all that time.
 
As I worked a new geocache went live on which I could have got First to Find if it hadn’t been dark as I drove home

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