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.

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.

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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I still can’t remember what it was you know.

OK, how homely is this pic! We had the first frost of the year this morning, absolutely freezing, but it was a good excuse to get snug in front of the fire with an espresso and the ibook. And then Eddie comes and takes my spot How can you disturb that though?

I’m actually enjoying the weather at the moment, despite the freeeezing wind coming from the north or whereever, the sky is a perfect blue without a cloud to be seen anywhere and the sun is shining down all sparkly, and of course just to finish the perfect autumn picture is the beautiful golden shades of the fallen leaves. I must be getting old to be getting excited by such a thing lmao. Dear god.

I could have sworn that I had plenty to talk about today but i’ve gone blank. Boohoo de dedally doo. I gave my mum a dvd of her photo’s today, with a fancy menu and the photo’s faded into each other and she said woah you must have spent hours on that! She doesn’t know about macs. Muwahaha. Ahum.

Eddie had his first ever outing into the luvely derbyshire countryside yesterday. He was loving it, until he discovered how far 6 miles is and has been sleeping it all off ever since. Bless. It’s so cute when he runs out of steam and stops to stare at you with those take pity on me eyes. Is it me or does he appear to be drinking water on the moon in that photo?

Apparently the sony rootkit nastiness includes GPL’d software in a fashion that contravenes the software’s license. I luv all this, its about time Sony were taken down a peg or five.

This is driving me nuts? What the hell was I going to write about? It was so thrilling as to span for pages and pages and take the internet by storm. OK that’s possibly an exaggeration. On radio 4 this morning during one of those some people sitting around a table discussing everything and nothing type shows someone was discussing the importance of blogging in strict countries such as Iran, countries were certain people, namely females, are completely discriminated against. The blogging is important because it allows iranians and their ilk to suddenly discover that there are others who feel the same about their government who censors virtually any public discussion of, well almost everything it seems. The radio show had a certain resonance for me because the other panellists who were agreeing and getting excitable over the implications were the kind who have previously written the internet off as nothing more than a playground for the perverted. For instance (and only brits will know who i’m talking about) one of the panellists was ian hislop, and another was AA Gill. Ack its just great to know that their generation has finally been won over.

I ordered some of choice stationery’s cheapest ink the other day and it turned up in these oh so hilarious mock Easyjet boxes.

Tune in tomorrow to see me whestling with pregnant panda’s and for an opportunity to test my knowledge of Cairo’s most desirable lamp-posts.

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.

I could have sworn i wrote an entry yesterday, must be losing my mind. I also thought it was tuesday yesterday. Maybe its because the nights are drawing in. I’m going around all tired and confused. And whats happened to monica? She’s run off somewhere. I’m so lazy I can’t even to bothered enough to capitalise things.

How cute does eddie look all wrapped up snuggly, haha awww, he looks like he ought to have a hot water bottle with him.

Talk about a directionless entry. I installed ubuntu 5.10 ages ago, so why i’m mentioning this now i have absolutely no idea, it’s the dark afternoons, it is i swear it is. I was disappointed to find that they haven’t fixed the geforce 6600gt issue, you are still left high and dry when it finishes installing and boots to the login screen. See, the image, thats what the login screen looks like, now where is that password box? I’ve installed all sort of goofy os’s on the same machine in the past and ubuntu is the only one thats ever fucked up the graphic driver so royally. Things like solaris, debian, fedora, windows (obviously), even a hacked intel-osx and they all detected my graphics hardware fine. What gets me is that ubuntu doesn’t even realise that something has gone horribly wrong. Thankfully, unlike the previous ubuntu I could ctrl+alt+F1 into a text terminal to install the latest proper nvidia from the ntfs partition. Mind you, just to make things even more annoying they’ve disabled root by default and i had to go scavenging the net for how to enable it.

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