We had a Scottish Gas boiler guy come around and look at our increasingly temperamental 14-year-old boiler. He fixed a number of things (hooray!), but informed us that we’d need to rip up the entire central heating system if we wanted to fix things properly (boo!), as whichever previous owner put in the boiler etc. did it in a cack-handed way (small plastic pipes rather than proper large copper pipes).
It could have been worse. When we were buying this place, one estate agent told us he’d shown people around a flat where the owners had put in laminate flooring without taking out the carpet first. You may want the bouncy feel of being in the Barrowlands all the time, but most people don’t.
Anyway, to give the boiler guy some peace and quiet, we locked the dogs in the bedroom. They were not pleased.
Dogs are pack animals. Separating them from the pack is torture.
Thankfully, dogs also have short memories.
That was yesterday. Tonight, out of the blue, we realised that there were suddenly large bloody marks all over the floor. We tracked it down to Taji, and I held him by his collar to stop him tracking it all over the flat while Cleodhna found bandages and socks and the other paraphernalia you need when treating a dog’s footpad injuries. I don’t have photos of the significant quantities of blood that Taji spread around the flat because Habibi promptly went around licking most of it up. Not all of it (dogs are not in any way methodical), but enough that any photos would be astonishingly uninteresting.
Still, there was enough random blood left on the floor that Cleodhna had to go around with a bucket and mop and mop it all up. And then empty the bucket into the loo. And stop Taji from drinking out of said toilet.
(He also likes to eat the soil out of the rubber-tree plant’s pot; a departure from our previous big dog, Laszlo, who liked to eat the soil out of the dragon tree plant’s pot.)
Anyway, Taji is now patched up:
And Habibi seems happy with a job well done.
Tomorrow I will wake up to Taji sleeping on the side of the bed where Cleodhna would normally be (the joys of working from home), and at some point Habibi will realise that I’m vaguely awake and rush in, wagging her tail, and a) jump up on the bed and burrow underneath the duvet, b) jump up on the bed, be stroked, and then jump off, c) jump up on the foot of the bed and settle down, or d) run out again. Berkeley may or may not come in at some point, get his head stroked for a perfunctory minute, and then crawl into his den underneath the bed.
I wouldn’t swap this for anything.
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