This place is Abbotsham, i dunno why I had forgotten that last night. Hmm, I dunno if the Abbot is a sham or if Abbot’s like ham. I don’t suppose it matters.

So after failing to get Eddie into the sea yesterday we thought we’d try again today. There’s a beachy town just along the coast called Westward Ho!, how can you resist a place called Westward Ho!? So we followed the sign posts along the public footpath which follows the contours of the coast. The first sign we came across pointing to Westward Ho! said 2 miles. Well thats not too long a walk now is it, especially with such pretty scenery. Thing is though, after about an hour and half of walking along the coast in Westward Ho!’s direction we came across another sign pointing there, this one said… well we’d been walking all that time so what would you expect? Half a mile left to go? probably even less actually, well this sign said 2 miles… still. So I figure that Westward Ho! is a magical place that is always 2 miles from where you are. Even if you live in say California, Westwood Ho! will be 2 miles from you. I reckon to actually reach the place you need a magic pendent which emanates a glorious glow in Ho!’s direction.

We decided to walk back, watch England make it to the quarter finals and then drive to this hooker town… which wouldn’t be surprising as it was an absolute dump lol. Yeah, great name but don’t bother going there.

This silly boy is called kevin and he hates to be hit on the head with celery. He’ll be honest, he’s quite shallow and that is just about his only peccadillo.

What a strange day, gone on holiday to Devon. Just about the only reason for this holiday is Eddie the PBGV with a big heart, because there’s plenty of countryside around here for him to walk, and he hasn’t seen the sea before! Aww. We’ve rented a cottage in the middle of nowhere, I can’t even remember what the village is called its so remote, and the road its on hasn’t even got a name. But its near Bideford, or some such place. I can’t link to it on google maps because i’m having to write this offline.

Eddie has been such a good boy! Including service station stops the trip down here took about 6 hours and he was totally patient and restful. Sure he was a little hot and bothered and showed the odd signs of stress but he never made a big fuss. Bless!

First thing we did when we got here was find a pub… of course. And OMG its the most darling pub ever! It’s called the Thatched Inn, and it really is thatched. Not pretend thatched, but proper and recently done by the looks. If I ever made a good pub guide I’d definitely include it. It’s dog friendly… as long as its a nice day. haha.

We found a public footpath beside a farm that took us to the coast, unfortunately although it did take us there the path down to the actual beach had kind of eroded away, leaving a quite hefty jump, which may be ok if you’re on your own but with a portly but short legged dog wasn’t very convenient and we headed back instead.

Internet issues. There’s no wifi signal to hop onto announced. The cottage has a phone socket, but it isn’t connected.. as in there’s no dial tone. Which leaves just GPRS, ouch. So, I lets see if this gets posted shall we.

Eddie’s had such a lovely day. Why I’ve just said that I don’t know because every day is lovely for Eddie, gosh I wish I was a wee dog. I gave him a nice long walk around the woods and he galloped around and chased random creatures, all of which out-writted him. He had a birthday cake, well, it was liver cake with a candle on top, I had to help him blow the candle out. I think he’s got a bit of a rich birthday food tummy ache now, he’s lounging around groaning a little to himself. But it’s a satisfied groan.

Installed Ubuntu 6.06 on parallels just a few moments ago. The new install mechanism is glorious. Essentially, when you pop the install cd in it actually boots into a live CD style scenario, you are taken straight to ubuntu’s desktop with a shortcut to the install program on the desktop. This is such a great idea because it means that if you get a little confused during the install, or maybe if you get a bit bored you can fire up firefox and have a tinker around the net. Or maybe load calculator and workout how much drive space to give it. So handy. Once the install was finished and i booted into ubuntu I pretty much got bored straight away lol. I suddenly remembered that it was only an early beta of 6.06 the last time I tried it so not a whole lot had changed, couldn’t even remember what the last proper version of ubuntu was like to compare it to. Ah well.

I don’t lead a tremendously eventful life and so many days neglect to blossom much blogging material. What I need is another regular no-brainer feature. Tuesdays I add a song to the podcast, and Fridays is delicious links day, so that leaves 5 days to come up with something to blog. I reckon though, if I could get that down to 4 it would be so so much easier and I wouldn’t be skipping any way near so many days. What could the new weekly feature be though? I’ve been trying to come up with something all day but alas nothing. Meme’s are no good because i’m too lazy and answering meme questions feels like such a chore to me. It’s like being back at school and having to do homework.

It’s Eddies first birhday tomorrow, aww. I’ve made him a card, unfortunately my epson printer is absolutely useless with certain dark shades and the blue sky just came out black. Stupid thing. Nay mind. Don’t look too closely at the mock-reflections, particularly the present, its totally fake looking and all screwed up. haha, well, i don’t think Eddie will notice. Also, i dunno why but it seems to be incredibly difficult to find a good picture of a bone online, that low res yellow thing was the best I could find!

The comments system has been kinda screwy on my site for, well since forever I think. I was messing on my site the other day and figured whilst I was at it I may as well have a look at the comment issues. The current problem is that it doesn’t seem to pick up on avatars anymore. I didn’t get very far with the investigations when I discovered that the openid-comments plugin had been screaming at me for attention. I’d never looked at the MT’s system activity log doodar. The following message appears many times, over and over…

Plugin error: /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-comment.pl Can’t locate object method “add_tag” via package “MT::Template::Context” at /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-

Cuts off there annoyingly. The method its looking for is in the file mt/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm which is all present and correct on the remote site, so I dunno what it’s farting on about. Also, when I was playing with the site I installed MT on my mac all set up the same as I have it remotely so that I can try things out nice and quickly. Transferred the MT DB from the remote site to mysql on my mac using MySQL Administrator so that its exactly the same site as it is online and it all works fine, including avatars. So that’s annoying too. I hope MT 3.3 is out soon, then I’ll completely gut the install on the website and set up it from scratch. Apart from the DB obviously.

Last week Eddie the PBGV with a big heart developed a mysterious limp, mysterious because no amount of prodding and poking of the leg seemed to cause him any discomfort, and yet he was limping weird. Also, he’d wake up fine but start to hobble a little by mid-afternoon, come the evening and he’d be limping wildly. So yesterday we took him to the vets, he too couldn’t find anything particularly wrong with him, but stated that these things come and go as they grow up. Canines sure are strange creatures, he gave us some anti-imflamitaries, charging a million euro for the privilege. Miraculously, today no limping in sight. I reckon Eddie was putting it on the whole time, threatening him with the vets making him wise up.

There was a pre-crufts show on TV the other day and there was a GBGV! It was adorable too! That stands for Grand Basset Griffon Vendeen, the slightly bigger version of the Petite BGV, which Eddie is. It whimpered most of the time it was on camera and sounded EXACTLY like Eddie does! So now we know, all that whimpering and whining, even when happy is part of the breed, not just Eddie being a nutcase. Haha aww.

PBGV’s, and GBGV’s are hounds, so be sure to watch Crufts this Friday as the hound category is judged. You may just catch one of Eddie’s relations. Well, I would check to see info on the dog’s entered this year to be sure, but the UK Kennel Club website sucks ass.

All this talk of dognapping has driven Eddie over the edge. We first noticed a change of behaviour on Tuesday, suddenly out of the blue he decided to risk the stairs for the very first time. Unfortunately he hasn’t the guts to attempt downwards, so every time he goes upstairs someone has to help him back down. It’s getting rather tiresome as he’s really milking this new found freedom, following everyone upstairs as if it’s the promise land. It also means now that nowhere is safe from his prying jaws.

To add to this craziness and for the first time since the first week he arrived here he spent the entire night crying and scratching at the kitchen door, seriously, all bleeding night and there was absolutely no reason for it. No gale howling, nothing. He seems a bit touchy today as well.

Oh god, and, earlier today he brought in something from outside, I grabbed it from his mouth thinking it was a big lump of dried mud. It wasn’t mud. I spent what must have been 10 minutes washing my hands and I still don’t feel clean. I don’t think i’m ever going to get over it. Gross. Repulsive. Ugh. Dogs…

I’m going to be moaning again today, i still feel like shite and it gets worse. Last night I was playing with Eddie and I had lay down on the floor so that eddie could trample on me (don’t ask why) and he did and he stuck his paw right on my left eye, I didn’t flinch away fast enough and it hurt like hell. I figured ah well, it’ll go off but I hasn’t and i awoke this morning with quite a pain in my eye and as the day has worn on it become increasing apparent that my left eye has gone a bit blurry and it has gone very photo-sensitive. So now i’m worried as hell that there’s some perminant damage. Fuck sake, it’s all I need.

Now for sudden change of tact. Cool! I just this second as I was moaning above recieved this email…

The replacement part for your iBook has arrived. If you want to bring the machine in at your convienence to the AppleStore Meadowhall.

Awesome! And now I don’t have to answer the phone too! Hmm, my tummy is making some damn strange sounds. Oh yeah, as part of Eddie’s training, every day we have to tie him up nearby whilst we get on with something quiet such as reading a book and all the whilst ignoring him. Fun eh? It’s so that he gets used to settling down when in company. To be honest Eddie is pretty good at settling down anyway, but i suppose we ought to do it. It’s homework, so i’m doing it right now, he has dozed off by my feet whilst i tap away on the iBook. I’m not sure whether or not i’m allowed to look at his sleeping cuteness, does looking count as interaction?

I’m not at all sure why i have done this, but here is the route of Eddie’s favourite walk.

The route on the left hand side going through the woods is kinda guessed and the whole thing takes about an hour and a half.

Did you ever believe I’d be trading such exclusive merchandise as cheap mints? Could this blog possibly fall even deeper into the realms of fantasy? Only time will tell.

I’m going to take my injured iBook to the vets tomorrow. I guess i’d better copy anything i might need off it tonight just incase it’s kept in for further observations, poor thing.

Best for last, guess what! Go on Guess! Gowaaaan, sheesh how hard is it to make a guess. No. Try harder! That’s right, i’m going to be an uncle! Uncle Mark! I haven’t yet decided on what kind of uncle I want to be. Funny Uncle? Or Scary Uncle? Or maybe just plain old Queer Uncle. I hope i’m not an uncle they hate to visit. That would suck. Oh yeah, if it’s a boy they’re calling it Benjamin! How cute is that! Same name as my favourite teddy bear They haven’t thought of any for a girl yet. OMG I can’t wait! Early days though so…

Despite not having a clue who over half the celeb BB lineup are, talk about no-ones. Barrymore and George Galloway make it for me. I admire Galloway greatly for his courage of conviction in the shallow world of politics, even if i don’t agree with some of his opinions. It will be fascinating to see what his character is like over an extended period. Barrymore, well i just can’t wait to see how he is after all this time, he needs an audience and he’s been starved for, well when was ‘the party’ that whecked his career, must be a few years ago now, and he’s the type of character that needs an audience, he almost broke down when the cheers started after leaving the car. Says it all.

Yesterday I went along to the first instalment of dog training, for the first we didn’t bring our dogs so I cannot report on Eddie shaming us, that’s for next week. It was kinda odd though, one of the ppl there I think I went to school with, and I was racking my brain the whole time trying to pin down extra who they were, i didn’t speak to them though and thankfully neither did she, it would have been soooo embarrassing. The woman who runs the class is a paauuush eccentric, as you would expect someone who runs a doggie training class to be, she smokes cigarettes with one of them silly holder things. haha. She’s amazing with puppies though, there was one token puppy, a gorgeous cocker and it did everything the woman wanted even though it had never seen her before. The cocker made me miss Barney so much. They have the most adorable puppies, spaniels don’t get that elongated schnozzle until they’re older so the puppies are all cute with little rounded heads. That’s a pic of Barney BTW, he now lives in Ireland, must be about 3 years old, don’t even know what he looks like anymore

As I’m sure i’ve mentioned before, the only reason we can have our own dog is because of a miracle dog shampoo which neutralises the irritants that would otherwise make my itch like crazy. I’m still undecided whether or not i’ll tag along to the next training session. I would absolutely love to, it would be such a laugh with all the untrained dogs causing havoc, but all them doggie irritants flying around would be hell for me. If only I could get all the owners to use our shampoo on them before they come. Probably a tad too much to ask.

With it being quite a mild day we took Eddie the PBGV with a big heart into the country for a wee constitutional. Some place called Little Longstone, near the start of the Monsal trail. Unfortunately the rest of country had also chosen today to visit this tiny village, took an age to find somewhere to park and eddie was starting to stress and pant, poor thing still isn’t too keen on cars. 2nd problem was that we couldn’t work out a way to get to the trail that didn’t involve hiking across muddy fields, once the muck was up to our knees we figured we’d best give up on the idea. So we did the obvious thing and set off for the lovely pub in the centre of the village, and we were walking up the lane with Eddie when we heard a large rumble, and some hysterical barking and I think I now know what it must be like to be hit by an enormous tidal wave, except rather than being composed of water; this was a tide of bloodhounds. The thousands came wooshing around the corner and I had to grab Eddie so he wasn’t washed away, all barking wildly they scraped past my legs almost knocking me over but barely noticed me as they were concentrating hard on their mission. Soon behind came the hunters all giggles and ahoys on horseback, shouting hi at me and Eddie. Does owning a Dog make us one of them?? Shudder. And why is it that I go all my life haven’t never seen a hunt taking place, and then do so as soon as it’s made illegal?

Do you like my portrait of Eddie? Haha, my illustrator skills are coming along a treat.