Well that was just bizarre!

Just when I finally get around to doing some half-arsed blogging, my blog disappears! Not like as in “Shit! I deleted my blog again.”, no this was more like “Where the fuck is my blog??”

I’m writing this post on the free webspace that WP gives you when you publish though them, I have been generously hosted by a good friend that I met on plurk ages ago. So, Saturday morning I see a comment on a famous social network from someone (you know who you are) saying they couldn’t get my blog to load. “Bullshit!” Was my first reaction – it always is, no matter the circumstance.

Clicking on my toolbar shortcut button, my next reaction was, “Bugger me!”

No blog, nowhere, nohow. This has happened before, and it’s always been a server issue. This time seemed different. I drop a line to my friend letting her know that neither of our blogs are working. I still haven’t heard back from her (and frankly I’m a little concerned).

So now it’s Tuesday and not only have I not heard from my friend, but the blog is still down and the hosting service says that neither I nor my domain are known to them. Oops!

This morning I went out and got myself a hosting service, right now I’m just waiting for them to set up the servers so I can make the changes to my domain and wham-bam-thankyou-m’am, I back! Sadly I predict that when everything is working again, the only thing I’ll be back to, is not blogging.

Postscript: I had intended just to start on a draft while I was waiting to get my DNS info, and then I’d just export it to the new blog for posting, then I thought “Derrr, this is a live blog, post it here and tell people where it is to keep them informed. – Insert forehead slap sound here.) Hopefully it all works.

Keep up to date!

The Dingo has MOVED!!!

Don’t forget to update your feeds and bookmarks

In case you’ve been wondering…

Yes I know, I have’t been around much lately, I just got bored with it all. However, something happened the other day that gave me a burst of energy.

Here’s what I’ve been doing today.

You might want to bookmark it or subscribe or whatever floats you boat.

A filler

I’m sorry but the dog ate my post, so while I wait for it to re-appear in a more compact form, here’s something I found a while ago that appealed to my love of English…

I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
to learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
that looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead — it’s said like bed not bead —
and for goodness’ sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)

A moth is not the moth in mother,
nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose —
just look them up — and goose and choose,
and cork and work and card and ward,
and font and front and word and sword,
and do and go and thwart and cart —
come, come I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive.
I’d mastered it when I was five.

It’s time for an Award…

…Because we all know that the blogosphere desperately needs another lame award.

Recently I’ve been flagged, tagged and double bagged. I’ve gotten an award, an honourable mention, and even been invited to do a meme (which I don’t do these days, unless they are either ridiculously easy or easily ridiculous). So all this got me thinking, “Hey why don’t I give out an award?” which isn’t necessarily an original thought, given that I’ve created not one, but two different awards in the past.

As I’ve been thinking of rejoining the blogosphere lately, what better way to end my hernia (huh? that doesn’t sound right…oh shit, I meant hiatus), than to create an award, not just any award, but possibly the best and most coveted award ever seen on the interwebs.

However, as those of you who are bloggers already know, there are usually a few simple rules you need to follow when you are given an award, and this once in a lifetime honour is no different, so I’ll just list them here first in an effort to build excitement:

1. Take a copy of the award and post it in your sidebar (preferably in front of all the other meaningless crap you already have there).
2. Write a post about how thrilled you are to be awarded this great honour, and link back to me at least three times within the post.
3. Repeat step 2 every Friday for the next three months.
4. Take out an ad in your local newspaper informing everyone of  (a) your great fortune in being awarded this prestigious gong, and (b) my URL.
5. Name your next born child after me. If you are barren, or have finished your child bearing days, then your next pet will be fine… as long as it’s a dingo.
6. Deposit five thousand dollars into the account number listed at the bottom of your notification email, this is needed in order to clear the $100,000,000 prize money that goes with the award.
7. Send naked photos of yourself, preferably mounted.
8. Award this to five other bloggers and have them send me money and photos too.

There, that seems easy enough doesn’t it?

At this point I guess I should show you what the fuss is all about, so with no further adoodoo… I present the latest in a long line of much sought after Dingo Awards (I think I’ll call this one “the Dingo III”).

As you can see, no effort was spared in coming up with a truly spectacular piece of fine art. If you would like to impress you friends with your very own limited edition print, but haven’t been awarded the honour, you can purchase a limited edition print for five grand.

And don’t try just copying it without paying, because I’ve done magic to it so that’s not possible, I’m warning you – don’t even try, I used some serious mojo.

Now for the winners:

• Daily Diatribes:  There are few people on the interwebs that have a more jaded and cynical view of life than her, she is almost as funny, clever, insightful as me, plus her husband is a vet so she can easily afford the five grand.
• Rotten Correspondent:  Another humorously snarky blogger with a less than healthy outlook on life, and three kids who are determined to drive her crazy, and who, by comparison makes me look good, but most importantly, I’d really like to see her naked.
• Three Dog Blog:  I pondered over this one fore a while, the fact that Laurie is an accomplished writer challenged my insecurities to the point that I almost didn’t include her, but then I remembered that she has yet to master capital letters, so my sense of superiority was restored.
• A Spot of Tea:  How could I not include Joy? After all, there aren’t too many people who, when describing me and my blog use terms like, “strange exotic bug” and “poke it with a stick”. Oh, and never mind about the photos.
• Jo Beaufoix: Jo recently listed everyone (individually) in the entire universe as her friend…except me. So I’m giving her an award to prove there are no hard feelings.
• Topsurf: This plurk buddy, is a late addition, while not very snarky (normally) or particularly schizophrenic, she is new to blogging so she may fall for the naked photo scam just to get some sidebar bling.

If you missed out, don’t be too disappointed, that just means means you are either not psychotic or are simply a nice person (or have mastered punctuation).

Thank you Bentley.

I mentioned on plurk the other day that  I had to take Bentley to the Vet, what I didn’t mention was how proud I was of him.

For years I’ve harboured resentment towards vets in general and my vet in particular. It’s not that they are bad people, it’s just that once the emergency has passed, the only pain remaining is in the hip nerve. I’ve often wanted to make them feel pain just a little too, call me a bad person..go on I dare ya!

But before we get to Bentley’s revenge, lets go back to the beginning. Last Friday Ben seemed to be limping on the other front leg (not the one that just paid for the vet’s new plasma TV, the other one). I monitored him for a while and he seemed to forget that he had a sore leg after about 5 or 6 steps, so I went on with my miserable sex-free life and let him do the same.

By Saturday he was still limping, but now he was whimpering a little when he moved. I resumed monitoring him and he seemed fairly stable, but was moving a lot slower. However on Sunday he was clearly in a good deal of discomfort, and so was I because he let out one of the most toxic farts I’ve ever encountered. Even after I opened all the windows and turned all the ceiling fans up full blast, you still couldn’t see across the room.

At this point I realised that he probably had a bowel blockage (he’s had them before) that was causing him to limp, or he had a bowel blockage and a limp for another reason. Of course, all my dogs are extremely aware of the days of the week, so he planned his rapid decline for Sunday afternoon when the vet rates quadrupled.  But he was in a bad way so I called the vet and discussed it with him, and he was of the opinion that unless Ben was at the vomiting stage, we could wait until tomorrow (apparently there was no room for another TV anyway).

Bright and early on Monday morning we arrived at the veterinary hospital and he was seen immediately. We put him up on the exam table and the vet had a good look at him. No matter what the vet did, not matter how much pulling and pushing of  his front leg, an no matter how many awkward angles he tried, he simply could not get him to wince or pull away, so he declared that a non event and started to focus on the other issue. Speaking of issues (I’m sure you all know what’s coming next, but I’ll tell you anyway). Ben appeared to be arching his back and in addition to this, he seemed to be bending his body in a ‘C’ shape horizontally as well. At this point the vet manoeuvred him so that he was facing directly away from him in order to get a better view of the curvature of the spine.

Come on, you really don’t need me to lay this out for you, do you? Well ok here goes,  so if Ben was facing away from the vet, that meant that his butt bazooka was facing directly at him. Being the perfectionist that he his, Ben waited until the exact moment when the vet’s face was closest to him before he let fly with a blast that took at least three layers of paint of the exam room wall and left the vet alternating between gasping for breath and retching. Damn! I was one proud doggy daddy; good boy Bentley! It may not make up for all the gouging I’ve suffered over the years, but it sure as shit (literally) helped.

It was now determined that he would be kept under observation in one of the cages out the back for a few hours, and if nothing happened they would knock him out and x-ray him to see what the deal was (that’s vetspeak for “get this goddamn putrefying dog out of my exam room!”).

Later that day I got a phone call to tell me that they called in another vet (one who had lost his olfactory glands in a childhood accident) to examine him before they resorted to a general anaesthetic, and by poking and prodding he found that there was an impaction rather than an obstruction, so working on him from head to tail (ie a heavy duty laxative and an enema) they were able to move it.

So it seems that not only am I full of shit (as I’ve been told many times), my dog was too! Good boy Bentley, and thanks for the memory of the vet with the ghastly green face.

Some clarification…

First off thank you all for your support, but I think I need to set the record straight.

1. For those who are holding out hope that he has been adopted/fed by a neighbour.

I thought you understood that I live in the middle of cattle country (literally), that means I’m surrounded by beef producing properties.  Now in case you don’t know the implications of that, let me ‘splain…Apart from being half a mile away from my nearest neighbour (and cats rarely travel that far for fun), there are no pets around here for miles except for mine, the dogs are all working dogs. To my knowledge there are no domestic cats at all, if there are any, the property owners don’t feed them as they are used to keep the mice down in the barns, so no, no-one would be feeding him.

2. For those who think he might have met a lady.

We are responsible pet owners, and as such all our pets are neutered as soon as they are old enough, that’s dogs and cats, boys and girls, there are no exceptions. This means it’s very unlikely that he will show up with a litter of kittens.

3. For those who hope he had a quick demise.

Me too, he has come home beaten up a few times, but he’s always made it home. There’s a good chance that he was bitten by either a black or brown snake (both of which are plentiful right now).

Fortunately, whether he’s dead or alive there’s really not that much diferrence, given that he rarely came inside except for those times that he didn’t manage to catch his own dinner. Depsite the fact that I’ve had him since he was a kitten, neither he nor Buzz have ever been ‘people friendly’. Having said that, he still was a pretty good cat, not like Buzz who’s a real  pain in the butt.

But you never know, he may just show up one day.

MIA

This is a sad post to write.

There has been no sign of Booey (the one that I like)  for a month now.  And while up until now I’ve not given up hope, I have to accept the fact that I probably will never seen him again.

I’ve had him since he was this big…

That’s him with his mum (she was one ugly cat, but a great mother).

If he shows up I’ll let you know.

Fun (quirky) Monday

For those of you who know me, you’d know that I don’t do many FMs these days, but there was something about this one that hooked me (maybe because it goes back to the “show and tell” roots of FM).  Coincidentally, next week will be the 2nd Anniversary of Fun Monday.

That said however, I almost didn’t do it, for after I had signed up, I realised that while I had plenty of quirky crap, there’s almost nothing that I wouldn’t be prepared to give away. Just when I was about to go back and take my name off the list, I remembered these two gadgets, neither of which would I ever part with under under circumstance.

First off we have the wonder pliers, this thing has been my most handy all round tool for over 20 years, and it only cost a couple of bucks…

What the wonder pliers are to the garage, my magic scissors are to the kitchen…

All the other FMers can be found over at Jan’s place, have a Fun Monday.

I’m not that deep.

Well here we are, at the all important revealing the answer post. Rather than spend the time and effort required to fill out the post with a cleaver and insightful preamble (because if any post ever needed a clever and insightful preamble,  it’s this one – which you’ll appreciate once you see the answer), I thought I’d let you guys provide the cleverness and insight.

Laurie summed it up most succinctly when, in her usual uncapitalised prose, she said “i love how all roads lead to Edith Piaf. all convoluted, twisted,winding and far-apart-from-each-other roads. if it’s maurice chevalier, i’ll eat my hat. hahahaha.”

If you haven’t taken the time to read through the comments, here are a few examples of what she’s talking about:

Molly opined: “The second bird on the January 10 post reminded you of Edith Piaf. This bird might be a Cormorant, which has black feet. The term, Pied Noir, refers to black-feet meaning people of European descent in North Africa, Piaf’s heritage is European and Algerian.” Ah…o.k.a.y….

Whereas Lene astutely pointed out that they weren’t Sparrows when she said “The only French singer I can recall that has anything to do with birds is Edith Piaf (The Sparrow), but that doesn’t look like a sparrow, more like some sort of wading bird, so I’m stumped.”  She gets extra points for including a cricketing term.

However,  Kaycie based her hypothesis on that very fact : “It’s Edith Piaf and you were reminded of her because of her nickname, the little sparrow?”

In a dazzling  show of global homogenisation, Mal decided that there were no longer any separate nationalities when he offered ” “The Shadow Of Your Smile” (Love Theme From ‘The Sandpiper’) by Perry Como…”

While in an effort to counteract Mal’s wanton act of Esparantoism, Chris employed the old french scatter gun technique with:  “Edith Piaf was my first thought then Charles Aznavour, Sasha Distel are two more that come to mind. And Maurice Chevalier just because I’m think French singers!” On re-reading that last sentence, I think she may have actually written it in Esperanto.

Ok, now Melissa in NZ gets included because even though she didn’t guess Edith Piaf, her answer is just so bizarre:  “does Celine count as French? Maybe the song is “My Fart will go On”, and that is the reason for the declining Ibis population?”

Speaking of inventive answers, in an attempt to bluff her way through, Bethany came up with this gem: “Great hint. I knew the answer right away. I just don’t want to ruin it for everyone else.” Although she never actually said what her answer was.

This one is pretty interesting, Karisma chose to disregard the fact that this song has been sung by virtually everyone except Edit Piaf when she went with: “Edith Piaf – Green Grass of Home —-Coz its grass and other than that I have no idea why! Google is my friend!” Google has let you down, the reason Edith Piaf and Green Green Grass of Home show up together in searches is because Tom Jones has recorded a few songs that Piaf also sang.

And finally, RC is the only one who supplied a completely correct answer when she offered: “Either you’re really devious or I’m really stupid. Or both.” Unfortunately, although she was right on both counts,  it was for the wrong question.

There are lots of other great answers (just look for anything with Swampy attached to it) but the preamble has already turned into a tome, so I’ll have to leave it there for now.

Oh shit! The answer! I almost forgot. We need to bear in mind that it wasn’t until after I posted the first photo that I realised that what I had thought were Egrets for the past 5 years were in fact Ibises, however as my good friend Dr. Pill always says “Perception is reality”, so we’ll therefore disregard ornithological accuracy for the sake of the pun.

So this picture… Egrets:

whereas this next picture

(the one that was in the original post)…..

wait for it….

No Egrets….

ergo Edith Piaf.  As you can see, I’m not really that deep. You may throw things now.