So I neively ride on into Christmas town casting aside all doubts that it will be my usual sucky accident laiden yule-tide hell. It started off so well, we went to my brothers who put on a great spread, his first time preparing a christmas dinner and it’s always entertaining watching my brother stressing in the kitchen whilst I generally get in the way. We spent most of the day drinking far too much, being merry whilst making fun of Eddie, who was SO well behaved! He surprised us all, such a good doggy Well mostly, first mistake of the day was leaving the turkey on the table when we left the dining room. Some time later Eddie sneaked off, we looked everywhere and found him under the dinning table with a huge chunk of the turkey, with bone, growling at us to keep away. He must have reached onto the table and bit it straight off so my brother was pissed swearing that in no way is he going to save the rest of the turkey now. Haha. Eddie takes the funniest photo’s, how mad does he look there! I don’t know how on earth the camera made his hair all stick up like that, and since when did Eddie have a big brown beard??? Sure, its getting a bit dirty looking from his saliva stains, but seriously, it looks no way near that brown in real life. Stupid camera.
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My hostypoos better do twice daily db backups or i’ll be hopping mad. This’ll teach me for going for the cheapest hosting service possible And why am i even writing this… I can’t post it?

I wrote that yesterday, expecting to continue it later on into a diatribe against the incompetence of hosting services. But then they fixed it and i lost interest. Bah, how boring is that? Quite scarily they sent an apology which seems to have been written just for me, as if it was only the DB for my site which had gone down, except i know for certain that it was everyone’s because their own knowledgebase pages had a db_connect error and a friend uses the same provider. So that’s rather odd.

We took Eddie to Chatsworth today, another lovely trek in Derbyshire with a grand house looking down on you. Only, we had a rather embarrassing hic-up, we got out the car with Eddie and were just about to affix his lead when we noticed there wasn’t anything to clip it to. Haha. That damn eddie had forgotten to put his collar on. It gets worse, we (”it’s twenty-one hours”…computer voice) improvised by fastening the lead around his neck rather like a choker. I swear we kept checking that it wasn’t strangling him like every 5 seconds, but he started whimpering now and again. Now, in our defence this is a dog that cried wolf. He whimpers all the damn time, including when he’s happy. If he hasn’t seen you in a few hours his whimpers like crazy. So we’re walking along, eddie whimpering in front and we’re thinking “aww so cute”, Eddies thinking “OMG why are you doing this to me i can’t breath!.” So when a while later he started foaming at the mouth he did seem a little in distress.

Yeah.

Yesterdays Family Guy killed me, it really did. I especially enjoyed the doom clip during the police squad doo dar. Even made me tempted to play quake 4, the feeling soon passed.

Please don’t laugh but i’m an everwood addict, some stupid texan put me onto it during the first season and i’ve been downloading it ever since and haven’t missed a single episode. I don’t even think the cowgirl still watches it. Now this is odd, ITV1 (the most popular commercial channel in the UK) is now showing everwood during the day, so I guess that means its only good enough as cheap daytime fare for housewives. They’re starting from the beginning and bizarrely have re-titled it “Our New Life in Everwood”, why?

Speaking of imported shows, I could have sworn I saw a trailer for Veronica Mars the other day, but I guess I dreamt it because there seems to be no mention of it anywhere. I think it was LivingTV (I could have sworn that used to be a womens lifestyle channel). Anyway, its such a neat show so I’m glad they’re showing it here now. I hope ppl give it a chance though, when i first checked it out I wasn’t too keen on the first few episodes and I probably wouldn’t have looked at it twice if it wasn’t for all the manic raving over it on blogs here there and everywhere.

I haven’t much to write today and i’ve had a few bevvies. Hmm, where does bevvies come from?

Another mixed bag entry for today.

I give telewest, the cable provider that services Sheffield quite a hard time, and it’s true they are a mixed bag. My current gripe is that they aren’t carrying ITV4 yet, and this is happening time and time again, they hold off carriage rights to get the best deal, and they think they call the bluff the channels but their bluff is always called and the channels launch on all platforms but for telewest. They even resort to such tricks as not renewing contracts and allowing whole channel packages to expire expecting the networks to perspire in anticipation of hitting a golden deal. It happened with MTV 2 years ago, all MTV channels (about 7 of them) went black on telewest because they couldn’t reach a deal, and even funnier was Nickelodeon, they couldn’t reach a deal last year and for a week running up to the channels going black they ran adverts on the nick channels telling kids to get their parents to ditch telewest and go with sky, and we all know how persuasive incessant kids can be. Anyway, i’m only saying this because a lot of people that i know who get their internet from adsl providers seem to have almost simultaneously run into problems. Bulldog famously have fouled up well and truely. And even plusnet, who were once the the pin up’s of good isp-man-ship have started a practice known as bandwidth shaping, where they give preference to port 80 above all else, so p2p advocates are discriminated against, even usenet speeds are now slow on plusnet. Whereas in terms of policy i’ve never been able to fault blueyonder (telewest’s isp), they run a quality usenet service with no limitations, they don’t berrate anyone who hogs bandwidth, in fact quite the opposite, if you complain to them about download speeds they show some genuine interest. They have had problems with email blacklisting however. So I guess in some ways they do act like cowboys and pretend that all their users are angels who do nothing wrong. But in that respect I like to think of them as loveable rogues.

Eddie’s first firework season hasn’t past stress free I’m afraid. It was very unfortunate in fact. 2 Days ago whist I was playing with our beloved puppy in the garden a neighbour decided to let off a few bangers (it was still freaking daylight!) and eddie jumped like never before and ran inside to cower. I ended up holding him in my arms stretched out on the sofa for over 2 hours whilst he shook The poor bean! Then, apparently the day of guy fawkes my parents took the wee soul for a walk in the park (I was busy wrestling with the windows installer) some eejit decided the afternoon , whilst dog walkers were merrily passing by, would be a great time to test some rockets with his impressionable son by his side. Giggling away in the daylight he let these loud fireworks off… Illegally might I add, in a public place with poor pooches walking past. Apparently there were yelps and barking going off all around and my Dad went up to have a word with him, he ignored him and let some more fireworks off. Then the police were mentioned and the guy scuffled off. Shit, despite my shyness issues I think had I been there I would have grabbed one of his Chinese wonders and let it off in the twats face. Suffice it to say, Eddie was not best pleased with these goings on and ran yelping and shaking and no doubt scarred by the memory for life.

Eddie lost a tooth today, actually this is nothing new but it was the first tooth that he thoughtfully placed on the carpet for me to find. Damn strange looking tooth it was too, i had no idea that baby teeth were able to affix to gums with barely no roots. It was a rear tooth and almost flat, apart from a slight indentation and a bit of blood. To be honest I was a tad disappointed, I wanted something evil looking. I’m a freak, we all know this but I also have freakish teeth to go with my freakish nature. When i was a wee blighter I had a tooth taken out, but not after being taken to the nhs dentists to have root canal surgery, the most painful thing you can possibly have done, and as a child! Shit. Yeah, they gave me root canal sugery and then took the tooth out anyway, talk about a bunch of complete arse holes. Anyway, this tooth had dracula, no frankenstain qualities, the roots were distended and one of the roots was in the shape of hook. Yes that’s right, the tooth was hooked into my gums, meaning the dental surgeon had to wiggle and fight to set the tooth free. My gum was almost cut to ribbons.

My god was my mouth sore.

There are two new loves of my life, this is the first and he’s called Eddie. This is more of an excuse to show cute pics of our lil treasure, but i guess i ought to write something too.

It used to be that a dog was the last thing i needed, guaranteed to set my skin on fire, to make me scratch so intensely that all there is left is a blood splattered skeleton (eww). But then I discovered that some heavenly creatures had inventoried a pet shampoo that neutralisers the dander in fur. The clever swines.

So early august I was all we’ve been talking about getting a dog for years why don’t we just get one already, and as seen as everyone says they’re great stress-busters it would seem a perfect time. We flicked through a whole heap of choosing the dog for you books but i kept getting stuck at the page for the breed “Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen”, the cutest little creature i ever did see and heck, all the others dogs in the books paled in comparison, this mut always looks so happy! Well my heart was set on one and couldn’t be swayed.

I went hunting for one on the web and quickly discovered that i had chosen a rather rare and unknown breed. Sure they were listed here and there, but usually only to complete the category’s. There seems to be a lot of people selling dogs classified style, who would buy a dog from a random individual? I lucked out in the end, finding a whole club for the little blighters based right here in the uk, I’d link to it but their site seems to have once again vanished, talk about wanting to keep this lovely breed a secret.

The club has a list of breeders, some with email’s so i spammed them all to buggery, every time to only be disappointed, told that they haven’t had a litter in years. Heck, i was not going to give in! Then one night an reply popped into my inbox from Lincolnshire, they had 2 left! We had to act quickly as they were obviously going like hot cakes.

We were determined to be picky, not to just take the first one we saw, we also wanted a tanned coloured specimen. It turned out that this particular litter was tri-colored (white with patches of tan and black). We were hoping for more tanned than black, but alas when we got there it wasn’t to be, in fact there seemed to be a swarm of tiny beagles, but there fighting attempting to wade past the locust like cloud of beagles to get to us was eddie, he wasn’t the colours we wanted but as soon as we picked him up we fell immediately in love, he also wanted to please us, he grabbed a big leaf and gave it to my mum, how can you say no to that??

We’ve now had him for 8 weeks, and he’s 20 weeks old. It hasn’t all been plain sailing and he still has the occasional accident. He’s also suffered from a touch of diarrhoea twice, which was very smelly indeed. There was also a slight hick up with vaccinations which meant he had to wait an extra 2 weeks before he was safe to go walkies, and walkies themselves were hugely difficult. After enjoying 3 trips, he suddenly decided walkies weren’t for him. He wouldn’t budge an inch and became stubbern, digging his claws into ground if you attempted to pull him along.

But hey, all is great now! He’s a happy chappy, playful and hugely silly. And he’s loving his walks. Well i have to end this now as my god does he want to play!! OMG OMG