A Feeble Hellgoddess Is Given Support from a Willing to Be Imposed Upon Mod
I’m still feeling fairly grotty* so I’m casting around for some nice hooks to hang rags, feathers and a few sequins on, and call them a blog post.
B_twin tweeted a link to this entry on her blog ( http://b-twin-1.livejournal.com/ ) yesterday, but I was busy having trouble focussing my eyes, and I didn’t notice it till today. I promptly wrote to ask if I could exploit her and she having graciously granted permission, I publish it in full here. Plus a few supernumerary pink footnotes.
Today, as I rushed to take a picture of an abandoned lamb to blog about, I had a thought – this is something I learned from Robin McKinley.**
Then I realised that there was more than one thing I had learned. So here is a little list. *g*
1. Be ready to find blog material in *anything* you do. ***
2. Vampires definitely do NOT sparkle and are not necessarily “cool” to hang out with.
3. An addiction to roses should be fertilised regularly. †
4. Authors are real people. *gasp* Who knew??!! ††
5. Ringing bells (change-ringing and handbells) is waaaaay too much fun. †††
6. I’m not alone in having critters rule my life.‡
7. An ending for a book can be really good – even when it’s not what I wanted. ‡‡
8. There is no such thing as Not-The-Right-Time for chocolate.* ‡‡‡
9. There is a normal way and a better way to make scrambled eggs.
10. I can make bread (the cinnamon rolls need some work though). §
* * *
* Okay. I probably knew this before. I am enabled very easily though. *g* ^
^ And footnotes are cool. §§
* * *
Okay. That was relatively painless. §§§ Now I can go to bed.#
* * *
* But better. Definitely better. Yaay.
Adrenaline is possibly curative. I tweeted about this when we got back from our morning hurtle, fingers still trembling and heart still thumping unnecessarily fast. One of the consolations of autumn, to help take your mind off the shortening hours of daylight, is the increase of stubble fields to run your hellhounds on. High summer and it can get really hard to find a big (enough) open space that has neither crops nor critters in it; but this time of year more and more ground is cleared off or out till you may feel almost spoilt for choice. Chaos in particular will also encourage me to notice that we are crossing a suitable field, and he was doing his invitation-to-the-dance along this one. And I had looked around first: I always look around carefully. I was literally reaching down to take their leads off . . . when I saw the deer. Two of them, tearing suddenly out of a perfectly good hedgerow—it was midday: I assume something must have put them up already—and very nearly across our path. Roe deer are nearly as common as pheasants around here . . . but pheasants fly.^ Roe are little, and as deer go, they don’t run all that fast. My guess is that my guys could catch a healthy adult with a head start. But the second one of these was only a half-grown fawn, and running almost under our noses.
And no, I don’t think Chaos had seen them first; he’s not a—ahem—complex thinker. He was asking me to let him off lead because he wanted to run around. I saw the deer first, and my hands closed convulsively on leads pretty much as hellhounds looked up and . . . turned into Pre-Raphaelite portraits of sighthounds locking on to prey. Unfortunately I did not have a hand free to take a photo. They can’t pull me over if I have them by the harness or short lead, and to do them credit, they didn’t try, although usually the worst thing I ever have to pull them off of is making little runs at perfectly safe sheep on the other side of the fence. (The hellhound sense of humour is perverse.) If we’re going through a field with critters I have them on short lead to begin with—and I don’t let them off lead near twilight, just in case there are deer about to emerge inconveniently from a hedgerow. But at midday! I’m only looking around for other dogs at midday!
^ Eventually. One of these days Darkness, who is bird-fixated, is going to nail one that’s too busy squawking to move it.
** Interesting. I would have said I rarely blog about abandoned lambs.^
^ But hey, how about a link to some abandoned baby sea lions: http://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/2010/09/orphaned-california-sea-lion-pups-find-a-home-at-brookfield-zoo.html#more
Thank you, Black Bear
*** Every now and then I think wistfully about all those innocent years when my first thought about everything was not, Can I get a blog post out of it?
† What? You have to feed yours?? I keep trying to put mine on a diet. No you can’t have a fourth piece of toast! No you can’t have an entire cherry pie! NO YOU CAN’T EAT A JAR OF GREEN & BLACK’S HOT CHOCOLATE MIX WITH A SPOON!
†† There are so many possible responses to this it’s hard to choose. Most of them are either (a) rude or (b) involve shameful begging that the secret not be let out.^ However I think I will choose (c), which is: Define real.^^
^ Yes, there are cobwebs in every corner of my house(s). Yes, there are piles of books on every surface in my house(s). Yes, I consider a full back-up supply of chocolate a requirement of life, not merely of happiness. Yes, I own too many pairs of All Stars.+ Yes, I have trouble getting up in the morning++, and yes, I waste too much time on Twitter. But you knew all that, right?
+ Nonsense. There is no such thing as too many pairs of All Stars.
++ ‘Morning’?
^^ See: ^
††† Mwa ha ha ha ha. I have to say that never in my wildest dreams did I consider, when I set out upon this frelling blog journey, that I would find that I was inspiring other people to take up this deranged hobb—fascinating vocation. The pity of it is that I can’t figure out how to translate that into book sales.
‡ HA HA HA HA HA HA HA ::gasp:: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
‡‡ Chances are it’s not what the author wanted either. It’s what the author was frelling given.
‡‡‡ What a terrifying thought—a not the right time for chocolate. Brrrr. You’re going to tell me the sun doesn’t orbit around the earth next. Or that you can’t find last week if you look hard enough.
§ Oh? Why? If you can make bread (and anyone can make bread) you can make cinnamon rolls.
§§ Please.
§§§ Thank you, B_Twin
# I really am better! And I’m going to be better yet tomorrow! (Please!)
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