A Symptom Of His Nerves

L's decided she's on her bike today and I have a feeling this might be my fault. I pointed out that it would get her fitter, no matter that's it's only a short ride and would also open up around an hour of her day, in travel time saved. Only problem is she's picked one of the foulest days of the year to do it, there's a howling wind and it's raining.

Well she makes it to work safely, without being blown away. It must have been a tail wind because she was emailing me before I'd even gotten around to sending an ‘are you alive’ message.

If that wasn't stressful enough, tonight will be. It's MD's exam at dog training and she's convinced they'll fail. Especially since she had severe words with him this morning when he was biting her shoes. I'm sure it was just a symptom of his nerves; it's the equivalent of L reaching for the Mingles or something. The whole scenario would have seriously increased tonight's alcohol intake, had it not been an AF night.

It seems to be a case of 'out with the old, in with the new' at Sainsbury's, staff wise. Perhaps it's a New Year's resolution of theirs to improve the quality of their checkout operators. After all good-looking friendly staff cost the same to employ as ugly miserable ones. They know it makes sense, though it did seem to generate some uneven queuing patterns, with the men anyway. I see one trusty staff member has escaped the cull, the grumpy old dragon at the end. They really need to address this, everyone avoids her till, despite the fact it has the shortest queue.

I have the afternoon off, as a man comes around to have another 'look' at our boiler. Yep, it still 'looks' like a big white box with pipes coming out of it. He scratches his head, pulls a few levers that I could have done myself, before saying 'see how you go with that' and disappearing. Two hours later, it breaks down again.

I have a last minute pep talk with MD. He seems very confident, I’m sure he'll get L through tonight. We do a bit of practice brushing and he's a saint.

Later, I drop them off about an hours walk away from their dog class. They're meeting up with a fellow dog owner and walking her, with her dog, to class tonight, to take the edges off the animals. Apparently, she's a youngster of 20-years-old. I don't know, one rule for L, one rule for me; I'd get into trouble if I did that sort of thing.

Well, during the test, MD attempts to savage a fellow examinee; another dog that is, the dislike is apparently mutual. What you would do in this situation probably varies depending on whether there's an examiner present or not. E.g. don't get violent towards the other dog. Presumably, L coped with the confrontation correctly, as they passed. I had every faith.

MD is more or less out for the count from the minute he gets home. In fact, everyone's knackered tonight, L's all examined out and Doggo's had a hard night at class too. So, I settle down to finish Chris Hoy, although hardly a literally classic, that's my first book of the year out of the way.