New Year Day

Fergus here - Wee Jock has been a little too cock-a-hoop about being allowed a spot on the blog, so I've submitted my own essay for consideration. I spend more time supervising F than he does and can give you, dear audience, a more nuanced report.  Jock, on the other hand, just wants the Boss back all to himself, but it's never going to happen because even if F wasn't here THAT KID  is here all day every day during school holidays and weekends, and after school during term time.  He follows the Boss around like a shadow; especially when Mrs Boss was ill and had a few days in bed.

THAT KID torments me. I know he isn't being evil but he loves me too much and I have to put up with being squeezed and used for a pillow and dragged about. When I hear 'where Fergis?' in that strange singsong voice, I hide.

When she arrived here F used to leave the patio door of the guesthouse open when she went to sleep. On my early morning rounds, I discovered the open door and was so excited to tell her that I raced in, collar tags rattling, to let her know I'd be her best friend.....

......if she would let me sleep on her bed.

I got short shrift but it was worth a try. Fortune favours the bold.

(Collar tags - a bit like military id tags. K9s here are encouraged to have them. Some of my predecessors had little stamped metal plates riveted onto their collars but mine (and Jocks) hang at the front on a tiny shackle and they both rattle the same tune.  F has suggested we ought to have different sounds, for further identification purposes.)

Dog tags.  Note the cream furniture and compromise cover.

Where was I? Oh yeah, supervising.  F spends an hour or two at the end of the workshop day doing human food in the kitchen. Rightly or wrongly I get to try human food from time to time and have worked out that being in the kitchen increases my chances of scoring a few smackerels. I'm not fussy about what I get but not keen on chilies. (*) I sit and stare fixedly.  Some humans find it disconcerting. F seems impervious, so I lie in the middle of the floor. By the time she has wrapped up her food project I can usually count on something having come my way; stuff falls (chopped onions usually, not over keen on those), ends of carrots, apple cores... I can catch morsels in flight; a neat trick that entices humans to try me out, and I love carrots and apples.  On high days and holidays F cuts up a small carrot and shares the chunks out between me and Wee Jock while she sups a cider on the patio waiting for heat to do its thing to the food in the kitchen.

(*Some salad tongs pinged out of a bowl of Gado Gado one day sending an array of steamed and raw veg, sprouts, and peanut sauce flying about the patio. It was quckly hoovered up by two small orange k9s while F was exclaiming NOOOO, NOT THE CHILIES... The slices of chili were quickly spat out. Lesson learned.)

Now the real story to this report: On New Year's Day, like new years eve, it rained here and was dead calm, so the Boss decided to set alight the fire heap.  The fire heap is a big pile of tree prunings that get dropped of here by a local garden maintenance contractor. F had added some rubbishy crumbling old fibre board that she pulled out of her caravan, and the contents of rubbish bins from around the classrooms and workshops (paper, cardboard and fabric off-cuts) got turfed on top. 

The latest pile has a mountain of grass clippings on one side.  These quickly self-heat and turn into compost and will not burn.  They should have gone straight onto the compost heap. After an hour or three of intense burning, the main pile was pushed together by the Boss using a digger. Wee Jock, F and I had watched this, nearly smoked out of our skins, and were just heading for the house again when the Boss started yelling 'get the rat'.  

Said rat had apparently been making itself comfortable in the warm pile of fermenting grass clippings, safe and well insulated from the fire next door, but no longer safe when the Boss started driving about with the digger.

F was closest and was armed with a long heavy wooden staff, saved from the fire pile because it was big enough to be stored for winter fuel. She was too slow and it raced past her.

Wee Jock, a couple of yards further away, saw it next, but by the time he caught up with the action said rat had raced across the lane into long grass and disappeared into a pile of irrigation pipes.

Rat up a drainpipe.

I was several yards closer to home, and simply didn't bother. That pile of pipes has interested and tormented me in equal measures for years.

We can wait. The henhouse is getting moved again tomorrow. We'll get ratty, or another one of its clan/whanau.  No place around here for egg-thieves.