Dinner Illumination

I had planned to blip the dog today. She got well and truly scalped at the dog groomers this morning, which was a good thing though. My dog groomer only tends to work weekdays as she shows horses at the weekend, and as I work full time I can only get our dog to her during holiday weeks. I'd forgotten to book the dog in for a cut at Easter and by the start of June she was looking so bad that I actually bought a dog clippers myself and tried to cut her. I hadn't appreciated how difficult it is to do, and not having ever clipped anything in my life before didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that I hadn't bothered watching the "How to clip your dog" DVD that came with the clipper set. I had to put a muzzle on her because she kept growling at me as I tried to cut her, and then the clippers ran out of charge after an hour of me failing miserably to cut anything really, so I had to finish her off with scissors. She had hacks everywhere and long bits of hair here and short bits of hair there. Al said she looked like a punk dog. She did look awful. Not that she was remotely bothered though. I had to take her to my niece's 21st the next day and had to explain to everyone what I'd done. One old schoofriend who had subsequently joined the Met and has now retired joked that he ought to report me to the SSPCA for what I'd done to the dog, but another lady said "Never mind, it's only a few days between a bad haircut and a good one". Anyway, I managed to get her booked in to the proper dog groomers for today. I took the dog up and said to the groomer: "I have a confession to make. My partner tried to groom her himself a month or so ago. What a mess he made of it". She peered down at Suzie and said "I see what you mean". Well, I wasn't going to tell her that it was me that did it was I?! Especially when Ken doesn't ever go anywhere near the dog groomers, so it really didn't matter if I blamed him. I asked her to cut the dog's hair as short as possible and so Suzie came back with what looks the equivalent of a No. 1 (you can see the moles on her skin), looking tiny and shivering without her shock of thick hair. I was going to take her photo and tell this story for today but.....

Something else of note happened today. I went abseiling. Well....I went down a wee bit of a steep slope with a rope around my waist at least. I mean I didn't do that bouncy thing that abseilers do - I just sort of scrambled but we were being "better safe than sorry". I felt like one of those toddlers that get put on leashes (I bought one for J when he was young but only used it once - I couldn't get over the feeling that I'd put my child on the human equivalent of a dog's lead and that didn't sit comfortably with me) - I was trying to move but the rope was secured so steadfastly that it would only let me go forward a little bit at a time, and only then if I strained against it. It felt strange not to be able to move freely at will, but at least there was no chance of me tumbling and plummeting down the drop that we were above. Callie took photos of me going down and then she had a go and I took photos of her, so I could have blipped one of those too today but .....

Nick and Callie then came back to ours for dinner which we had in our conservatory and just as we'd finished our main course it started raining outside and this beautiful rainbow appeared next to Falkland Hill. I ran to get my camera to take photos of it. It was a choice of two in the end - one where the sun was flaming on the hill, making the contrast between the chimney line and the hill stark and sharp, but the rainbow wasn't quite so pronounced. So I chose this one because the rainbow was bigger and bolder. This was the view from the back of my house tonight then. It's at times like this that I feel happy to live here (and I forget about things like unplastered and crumbling bathroom walls - amongst everything else that needs repairing or replacing in this house!).