It’s raining again.

Pav is, of course, still in season.

Darkness is driving me bonkers.

Three is not the charm.

Diane in MN

Darkness is seriously lovelorn. Aaaaaaaaand has stopped eating altogether.

Darkness is not unique in this. Lovelorn boys frequently stop eating, so they can concentrate on the only and most wonderful girl in the world that you’ve hidden away somewhere.

Yes, I’ve met anguished canine swains before now, but they were not my problem.  Also, NORMAL dogs NORMALLY eat, so if they hit a FOOD IS THE ENEMY patch they don’t go skeletal in forty-eight hours.

EMoon

. . . I cannot imagine much worse than a bitch in heat . . . and two male dogs inside the house in a spell of rain and flooding. So the sympathy, and the awe that you are still sane dealing with it.

I AM NOT STILL SANE [she screamed].  NOT.  Not only is Darkness not eating* but he’s started doing this little tremulous singing thing that makes me want to kill.  him.

Diane in MN

Sometimes they start calling for their beloved.

AAAAAUGH.  This noise doesn’t even sound like a dog.  It sounds more like something hiding in the whooshing pine trees while Kes hides under the covers in her friend’s Adirondack cabin.  Unfortunately I know that it is a dog.  A dog that desperately wants to be TURNED INTO A HEARTHRUG.  He also just whines, of course.  I hate whining dogs.

(Sometimes she calls back. ::shudder::)

Well, Pav has occasional tantrums, but I think that’s about being locked up more than usual rather than about a woman wailing for her demon lover.  So to, um, speak.  But she’s not pushing at the boundaries of canine articulation the way (*&^%$££”!!!!!! Darkness is**.  I’ve ordered the bitch pants, rather after the fact, but this is only the second week and while with the luck I haven’t been having much of lately things will start to calm down the third week, if the pants*** arrive promptly I’ll still give ’em a try.†  It’s not like I don’t think I could stop anything happening before it finished happening—sometimes the size differential is your friend††—but I would expect the pants to muffle the effect somewhat, including [graphic description omitted because this is a family-friendly blog†††].

Meanwhile . . . I said it was RAINING?  It’s hammering it down out there again now—as I know because I’ve just been ferrying [sic] my assortment of hellish creatures back to the cottage in it, because I have a few more management choices at the cottage.  Hellterror has a brief sprint outside as a final opportunity for eliminatory functions;  hellhounds expect a ten-minute to quarter-hour stroll around the churchyard.   We are going to die.

We actually had a few hours of that random and not-entirely-persuasive phenomenon, sunlight, again earlier.  I took Peter to the farmer’s market and the hellhounds and I went on into Mauncester for a city walk.  Golly.  Egmont Street, pretty much at the bottom of the river valley, is sandbagged:  everybody’s gates and doorjambs are barricaded.  The river’s exploded its banks and sprawled across the road;  people in wellies briskly step over the sandbags at the doors and go about their business.  The river footpath that has been officially closed for some time now—that I have reported previously people are walking on anyway, self and hellhounds included, and splashing through the places where the river has climbed up to play with us—is now genuinely closed:  the footpath is a frelling millrace, and I am not exaggerating:  white water rafting at your doorstep.  You can’t even get to the red dedicated-dog-crap bin;  you have to go on to the next one.

And, speaking of dog crap. . . . If I don’t post tomorrow it’s because we never got back from the churchyard tonight. . . . ‡

* * *

* We had a brief exciting moment at lunch when, the hellgoddess having stuffed the first two mouthfuls down each of them, Darkness ate the last two by himself.^  And  therefore Chaos refused his, because we can’t have two hellhounds eating at the same time.

^ A four-mouthful lunch.  Yes.  We’re pretty much on starvation rations because as previously observed there’s a LIMIT to the amount of force feeding I’m willing to do.  If B_twin were here this week she might think about it a little longer before she said she’d seen skinnier dogs.

** I’ve tried singing (*&^%$££”!!!!!! Daaaaaarkness but it’s a little . . . screechy.

*** I went for their best-selling black with pink spots.  You did click through on that link the other night, didn’t you?

†  And there’s always next time.^  Yes I’ve thought of stowing her up at Third House but by next time that option shouldn’t be available . . . and I don’t actually like leaving a dog all by herself for long, especially one who isn’t used to it—especially one, furthermore, who is already being stressed out by her hormones—dogs are pack animals and some of the other three or four of us are pretty much always around in Pav’s life.  Also she has a rather majestic bark for something that weighs thirty pounds and I don’t want her making any unfortunate impressions on Third House’s neighbours.

But I’m certainly going to have to come up with A Plan.  But not until after the current epic is over:  I have no brain.  I’m as strung out as frelling Darkness.^^

^ I know I look like a clueless wonder not to have expected something like this . . . but dogs and bitches vary.  Sighthounds are often just not very engaged, as I have said, with things of the flesh, and the hellhounds’ attitude toward food might have led me to false hopes.  And I know dog people who have both genders entire in the same household and hair does not turn white overnight and nobody sleeps in a dustbin .  Of my three Darkness is the problem.  Pav is such a trollop anyway I can’t see a lot of difference, and when she protests her incarceration she just sounds CRANKY.  Chaos is certainly interested, and I wouldn’t leave him and Pav alone together (!!!!!!!!!!) but he’s not ruining anyone’s life over it.  Darkness is.  Mine.

That would be the human in supposed charge.  A well-padded dustbin with a soundproofed lid.

^^ Although I’m a little curious about the mechanism in my case.  Is it just that the situation is MY PROBLEM?  Am I picking up their stress level?  Are the pheromones—and to my dull human nose Pav only smells a little more strongly like she always does —winding me up in an unconscious UH OH TROUBLE way?  I would have thought excited mammalian hormones might have a generalised effect.

which just by the way isn’t much like the standard dog smell.  Maybe bullies are a different species.#

# Known, however, unfortunately, to breed successfully with dogs.

†† Diane in MN

Mind you, she’d have to stand on the sofa.

Maybe not. Two minds with but a single thought can perform surprising feats of cooperation, alas.

True.  I’m sure there are dachshund/Mastiff crosses out there.  But one has also seen, for example, a pony stallion giving his all between the tall thoroughbred mare’s thighs, and not where it’s going to do the job.  The point is that there is a sofa here, and I don’t want my reprobates figuring it out.

††† Although I was very impressed at the woman who tweeted me that she and her eight year old had enjoyed the Oatmeal link I posted the other night.

‡ I know, tomorrow is KES night, but you can’t murder me if I’ve been washed away now can you?