juliet

First up: this poem by Taylor Mali is seriously awesome, and this video of him performing it is even better.

Secondly: Pupdate! Sidney has now mostly got the hang of housetraining (i.e. she is now prepared to go in the square, which was FAR TOO SCARY for a while, & she will ask at least once to go out) except when on her own in the house. She has also got the hang of "opening the recycling boxes, dragging all the recycling out, and shredding it into tiny pieces". The recycling is now outside in the cupboard, although I am unsure what the long-term solution is.

Other things she is very good at include: demolishing a proper bone in sub-15 min; getting things out of a Kong in similarly short order; chasing the crows in the park. Yesterday PetPlanet delivered a squeaky stuffed sheep, which received a Two Paws Up result, and to date has remained both interesting and largely intact for nearly 24 hrs. Long may this continue.

She also jumped the fence around the lake in the park last week, in pursuit of a moorhen. And then, obviously, paid 0 attention to me calling her back. Happily she's still nervous of water, so she just stood on the bank doing her Alert Dog Is Alert pose, while I climbed the fence to hoist her back over. Then she belted off into the children's playground (which is No Dogs Allowed, though there were already two other dogs there which is why she went in), and I got a bit irritable. We are now avoiding that half of the park.

On the more positive side: she's getting v good at sit, down, "leave it", and we're working on stay. And right now she is having a nice snooze under the radiator next to me. Watching her hurtle round the park at speed is fabulous (and the walks are doubtless doing me good too).

In non-dog news: I spent the weekend mostly at the London Free School, which was awesome. I watched several films (was facilitating the movie space on Saturday), including Made In Secret (an anarcha-feminist porn collective! sort of) which I strongly recommend (watch the making-of in the DVD extras to get a different view of it). Sunday I went to one workshop on the experience & politics of the menstrual cycle (fascinating) and another one on feminist self-defence (massively empowering; the facilitator is probably going to do a series of sessions sometime soon, so let me know if you might be interested. Self-identified-women-only.).

Also chatted to many interesting people, helped carry a sofa+occupants through the house to resolve a debate about where the debrief session should take place, played Tag (it was really very cold in that building!), and facilitated the final debrief. It was the talking-to-interesting-people thing that was the best part; the weekend as a whole left me knackered but inspired. Hopefully there will be another one in a few months!

Clearing out browser tabs again...

• Sperm whales hunting squid!
• A Flash developer talking about why he reckons Flash can't work well on iPhone-type devices.
• Artificial Flight and other myths -- a reasoned explanation by Top Birds of why artificial flight would be impossible.
• A Lego robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube in under 12 seconds.
• Maths, neurons, & hallucinations.

Last night featured awesome CULINARY SCIENCE from marnameow & dogrando, in the form of a 12-course molecular gastronomy style dinner. Both food & company were excellent. I should do a proper writeup, but I am tired, so instead I will just mention the undoubted technical highlight: inside-out potato salad, which consisted of cubes of olive oil and chives (a potato-ish texture obtained by use of gellan), with potato foam, and a chive garnish. The blue cheese icecream was also pretty nifty.

Does anyone (pref in the London area) have an aging blanket or similar that they don't need any more? I have been observing Sidney's behaviour a) in my room, where the radiator is on, vs b) in the living-room, where the radiator is not on; and have come to the conclusion that she's cold in the living-room. Given that I usually have a blanket over my knees in the living-room, it seems fair enough that she might need one too (she's much thinner-furred than Finlay was). I'd rather reuse than buy a new one, & the only blankets we have right now are ones we actually use ourselves.

ION: no more cheapy rawhide chews until her stomach settles down again. Cleaning puddles of dogsh1t off the hall floor at 6am is not my favourite thing to do.

(I feel I should note for the record am actually doing things with myself other than minding the dog; not that you'd know it right now. I went climbing on Saturday with uon which was top fun. And have been doing lots of work this morning after marnameow kindly fed me coffee.

Sidney is settling in beautifully, bless her. Housetraining still a little erratic, but we're getting there. (For now, she is not allowed upstairs, where there is carpet.) She's basically very obliging/keen to Do The Right Thing, as & when she understands what the Right Thing is :) Her table manners are pretty good (i.e. she stands or sits and stares longingly at us, rather than sticking nose-under-elbow) although her human-eating-on-sofa manners aren't quite there yet (stands a bit too close for comfort!).

I let her off-lead in the park yesterday afternoon & this morning, on the grounds that a) she does know her name and her on-lead / in-house recall is good, & b) she was getting relaxed enough to start pelting off on the extending lead, & I was worrying that she might hurt herself when she ran out of lead. (If we want to use it much in future, we'll need to get a harness instead, I think; but being able to let her off-lead when she doesn't need to be on a short lead would be far preferable.) It went very well! Although there were a couple of occasions where calling her over for a treat was unsuccessful: just too focussed on whatever she was sniffing at to hear me. When I got her attention, she came back happily. Hurrah.

More importantly: she runs very, very fast, and she clearly loves just hooning around in circles, although it is EVEN BETTER if she has a thing to run after. She jumped straight over some poor dog this morning: pelted over to say hello & couldn't decelerate quite fast enough, so she bounced over him instead and screeched to a halt.

Sidney: Hi! Who are you? Hello hi hello!
Other dog: Um. Hi?
Sidney: Hello hello hi hello! Are you going to run? C'mon, come and run with me!
Other dog: Um. [looks a little worried]
Me: Hey, Sidney, I think he doesn't want to play.
Sidney: OH WELL fair enough [zooom off towards me]

I am bracing myself for the expected bad behaviour/boundary-pushing in a fortnight or so (lots of rescue dogs go through this once they've settled down a bit & stop being all "HELLO I AM LOVELY WELL-BEHAVED DOG PLEASE LET ME STAY!".

I have spent the week in Spain with dogrando, which has been very nice. If quite chilly & often damp. The sleeper train to Barcelona from Paris is terribly civilised, with a restaurant (albeit not vegan-friendly) & a bar. Barcelona itself has awesome Modernist stuff (all Gaudi all the time!) and a market where you can get exciting mushrooms for very small quantities of money. We also spent a day at Figueres visiting the Teatro-Museo Dali, which is absolutely awesome, especially if like me you are v fond of Dali. It lives up to the 'Teatro' part of the name with the humour & the attention to setting. I'd love to see some of the more famous Dali paintings in that context.

Then we caught another train down to Cordoba, which is very Moorish and has ludicrously narrow streets which are great for wandering round. Only had a couple of days there before a few hours in Madrid (cold, had lunch at awesome veggie restaurant) & train back to Paris last night.

(I may write more of this later; or I may not. It was all very lovely, anyway.)

The other event of the week was that I was made redundant on Monday, which was at least not a surprise. I am at least still a qualified cycling instructor, so if you (or ppl you know) want cycling-in-London-safely lessons feel free to get in touch for rates!

Totally failed to go to either of the parties I wanted to go to last weekend, due to my knee being out of action YET A-BLOODY-GAIN. It's a little better this week, and I am back doing the physio exercises from last time again, because they did actually *work* last time, albeit over a period of about a year. On the upside, geared bike is once again in action so I don't have to stomp up Hornsey Rise (twice) or Muswell Hill (once) on 72" gear again.

Did go down to Mum & Dad's for belated birthday lunch, which was lovely, both in terms of getting to hang out with family, & in terms of the fact that lunch contained two of my favourite things in the world, viz, roast potatoes, and blackberry-and-apple crumble. Which is a good thing for a birthday lunch :) Then came back to Bermondsey and there was home-made pizza.

This week I have mostly been trying to finish knitting my second pair of nice warm socks before I have to teach again & therefore need them to keep my toes warm; going back to the osteopath (not content with knee/hip breaking down, neck is now joining in*); and writing (assorted work articles are due soon, and I really ought to start pitching some other things).

Tonight: curry! Also keeping a surrepitious eye on Twitter for #appletablet news (why yes, I am something of a Mac fangirl, why do you ask?).

* I haven't been for 6 months, so we had to do the medical history thing all over again. I am getting a bit bored of reciting my medical history to people after the last few months. But it was kind of entertaining when we'd got through the "so why are you here?" part (nice simple upper back/neck, probably triggered by poor posture), & then I told her all the *other* stuff. "So... there's quite a lot going on there." Yes, yes, there is.

Dreamwidth has been having problems with people hassling them as a service (details, for obvious reasons, not released). PayPal, when contacting by the trolls, demanded that DW take down perfectly legal content. Instead of doing this, DW is sticking by their Guiding Principles & is in the process of switching merchant providers (not a trivial thing to do). Now, *this* is the sort of reaction I want to see from a journal service.

I've been crossposting (I love the automagic crossposter) for ages; at present I'm still hanging on for reading-page interoperability before I jump ship altogether, but I'll be letting my LJ paid account lapse soon. Partly because I like DW, and partly because the site is so much easier to use (& keeps getting better!).

I've got DW invites available if anyone wants to come over & try it out.

You are being shagged by a rare parrot.

ION: this week I have mostly been staying in, specifically staying in *bed*, because I can do writing-type work from there, it is warm, and it means not having to attempt not to fall over on the ice. Today, after putting on 3 layers, a fleecy skirt, a shawl, two pairs of socks, and fingerless mittens, I concluded that it might be time to put on the radiator.

My sinuses hurt. Ow, grumble, etc. Off to work meeting now which should be ... interesting.

Just returned from the emergency vet -- Finlay's been throwing up all day & we finally concluded that a) he wasn't going to stop of his own accord, & b) he was sufficiently miserable & dehydrated that we had to do something. He's being kept in there for IV fluids, blood tests, & general monitoring; *hopefully* we can collect him tomorrow but it may be all weekend. Most probable cause is a bad reaction to his painkillers (his hips have been giving him trouble so we've already been in the regular vet's twice this week).

They had to carry him out of the vet office (he was doing his Passive Resistance thing) & I bravely managed not to actually blub until he was out of sight. (He must think I've abandoned him! I did leave a T-shirt with him, at least.) Also he's been looking at me all day in a "please to be fixing this" way (& had his head on my knee in the taxi) so I feel like a terribly rubbish dog-person because I can't just make it better. Wah.

Anyway. Hopefully tomorrow he can come back home & we can crack on with working out what the problem with his legs is. *sigh*. Emergency vet is all the way over in Streatham, so it was all a bit *epic*.

In better news: splendid NYE party last night at marnameow & sbp's place. Lovely people, lovely food, lovely booze, & despite the increased security at Stalag Lockwood, you can still get up to the roof to see the fireworks over at the Eye.

(2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, blimey, I've been doing this for a while)

( 2009 in review )