It was like the Somme, only with more protein

Another short one for you today.

Partly because I've noticed that the average length of my Blogs is increasing, but mostly because it took me over two hours to get to work today, and I'm probably going to end up being pulled off to do something at some stage - Or at least looking like I am.

Not looking like I'm being pulled off - Not in the office... Good gracious no! How could you possibly think such a thing?

-oOo-

Anyway, I think it might be time for another part of the DogBlog.   You'll remember last time, gentle readers that we were discussing the antics of Saffron, the vegetarian Rottweiler that could attain Warp speed with no external assistance.

A lot of the stories about her feature food, often other peoples' food... Well I say other peoples', I mean it starts off as other peoples' and ends up being hers.

Four dogfood based stories for you today.  Hope you like them.

-oOo-

As has been mentioned before, I used to live quite close to the countryside, which made dog walking very pleasurable   We'd often wander up onto the farmlands, get really muddy and toddle home for a refreshing hose-down in the garden, before wrapping ourselves up in front of the fire, in a tartan car-blanket and drink cocoa until we dropped into a coma.

On this particular Sunday, we had got halfway through the toddling home part of the plan when Saff decided to try an experiment.  She reasoned that if she stopped dead, the check-chain around her neck would loosen and all she would need to do would be to step backwards, and she would be free.  She performed this maneuver successfully and had it away on her paws.  Not into the road, not off down the street like a hairy Starship Enterprise, but through the open front door of one of the houses on our Avenue.

I said something like 'Oh poop! Stop you silly dog, I shall revoke your carrot privileges if you don't stop immediately!'

Then I followed her into the house.

Have you ever walked in, unannounced, on a family, having their high-tea on a Sunday evening? A family that seem to have invited some friends round? A family that had a large selection of sandwiches and salad and other pastries on a coffee table in a kind of smorgasbord for everyone to share? A family whose very fancy repast was being noisily decimated by a muddy rottweiler?

No?

I have... It's suprisingly peaceful - In fact, the only sound, other than that of a dog's jaws snapping open and closed repeatedly was me saying 'I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... Really, I'm really sorry...'

And a small child sobbing in the corner.

-oOo-

Another occasion, myself and a friend of mine (Strangely, this friend is now married to the young lady who dreams of me kicking footballs at her head) were sitting in my back garden on a glorious summers day, enjoying a casual beer or two and some nibbles.  We were sitting on folding garden chairs, you know, those aluminium deckchair things?

Anyway, we were being watched by the dog.  I use the word 'watched' here to describe a huge lump of dog, sat directly in front of the chairs, huge, fat, head some 18" from our plates, slobbering like an incontinent version of Niagara Falls.

My colleague reached down to get his beer and unthinkingly waved his plate an inch too close to her mouth.  The next few things happened almost simultaneously, I will describe them in slow-motion for clarity.

Saff launched herself at the food on the plate, within a femtosecond this was noticed and the plate pulled away and towards Dave's (for that was the gentleman's name) chest.  Unfortunately the food seeking centre of the dogs brain had fully engaged by this stage, and she changed her trajectory mid leap.  Her front paws both landed in Dave's midsection both winding him and pushing him backwards slightly.  As all his weight was now on the back leg of the chair, it folded up - trapping him with his knees up by his shoulder-blades and on the ground. His luncheon hit him in the face, closely followed by a sopping wet rottweiler mouth.

As ever in these situations, as a responsible dog-owner I laughed heartily until I actually wet myself and was unable to breathe.

-oOo-

This photograph, from Facebook, shows the dog we are talking about asking for some ice-cream.

Ahhh! I hear you say.  You know why you say that?  It's because you are not a petrified paperboy.

One day, much like any other day. I was preparing to go out - I can't remember whether I was intending to take the dog with me, but let's say, for the sake of argument that I was.  We were stood in the hallway (The same hallway where we locked her the time she drugged herself) and I opened the front door.

Captain Picard gave the 'Engage' command and she covered the hundred yards between the door and her chosen target in the blink of an eye, without her feet actually touching the ground.  Her target on this occasion was the paperboy, on a BMX bike, with an ice-cream (They should totally include that as one of the options in Cluedo).  Give the kid his due, despite biting his lip and shaking gently, he gave no outward signs of fear and just held his cornet up as high as he could, out of her way.

Which was great, until she, very slowly, reared up on her hind legs, stretched her neck, and bit the top off the ice-cream cone level with his fingers.  I think that it was at that point that he started crying - I did give him a pound to buy a new one though.

-oOo-

And finally, I thought we were all due a 'Greedy Dog gets her come-uppance' style story.

My pigeon-exploding Father, unwitting star of my most popular Blog post ever, had, and in fact still has, a thing about chocolate covered Brazil nuts.  Every Christmas and Birthday, that's the go-to present if we can't think of anything else.  Now, if you don't want to buy the poundshop ones that are covered in the same chocolate they make dog-treats out of, they can be quite expensive.  One Christmas, it was decided that we should try and make our own, so we bought a number of Brazil nuts, along with some very posh chocolate, and made some of our own.  Some... Some... That just filled a Christmas Quality Street tin.

We went out to do some last minute Christmas shopping and came back to find the empty tin on the floor, along with the dog, who was quietly moaning to herself.  The first thought that went through our heads was the old 'But chocolate is poisonous to dogs' thing... No, that's a lie, the first thought was to beat the dog to death with a broom a-la Tom and Jerry.  But we realised that there wasn't a lot we could do and we'd just have to wait and see what happened.

It didn't take long.

She was up and about in an hour or so, and dragged herself into the garden.  The mixture of nut-based roughage and upset stomach combined in a scene from the worst war/horror film ever.

Firstly, the nuts had been completely unchanged by the trip through her digestive system and were coming out whole, at speed, along with some very unpleasant plumbing type 'spattery' noises from one end, and strangled howling from the other.

Secondly, she seemed to think that the pain she was suffering was something to do with her location, so she kept walking around the garden whilst nature was taking its course.  I must admit to laughing when she got too close to the fence and they started richochetting off it.

She never ate chocolate again, in fact she'd actively shy away from it, even dog chocolate.  The next day when I went out in full NBC gear to clear it all up, it'd all disappeared... I'm guessing squirrels - Who knew that they didn't have a sense of smell?

Ahhh, what a cutie... Argh! Get it off me!

You know what's great?

Dogs, dogs are great.  Everybody loves dogs... Actually, I do know there are people out there who don't like dogs, they're odd people, but they are out there.  There are even people who are allergic to dogs, but then there are also people who are allergic to water (Yes, there are - The condition's called Aquagenic Urticaria) so we'll leave them out too I think.

I'll try that again... Everybody who doesn't not like, or isn't allergic to dogs, loves dogs.  I've had dogs myself pretty much since I first left my parents' home some twenty-five years ago and I wouldn't be without one.

Don't get me wrong, they're not all sweetness and light, they wreck your stuff, eat your stuff, urinate and defecate on your stuff, run off with your stuff and get hairs all over your stuff.  In fact they often do combinations of two or more of these things simultaneously.  But even when you come home and your dog has torn all the stuffing out of your new sofa cushions, eaten it, then vomited it all up over your other new sofa - All it takes is that tilt of the head to one side, lolling of the tongue and wagging of the tail and all is forgiven... And it's even more adorable if the dog does it to you, and not the other way around.

I seem to have always had, what the media likes to class as 'Dangerous' Dogs.  So I've had a couple of Rottweilers and a couple of Staffordshire Bull Terriers and they've all, to a dog, been as soft as grease (cue cries of 'it's the owners' from anyone who's ever had one of these)

As you can imagine, after so many years of dog ownership, I have a couple of stories.  These few are about my first dog.

-oOo-

My first Rottie, Saffron was a vegetarian. No, really, she was - Couldn't keep normal dog food down at all, made awful smells out of the other end too - But I think that that's a feature of the breed.  She is also the dog that provided the sauce for this famous recipe.

Now, that particular dog was with me through some pretty bad times, where I was associating freely with people who may not have been regular churchgoers, and had more than a passing interest in recreational pharmacology.

It was after a long, hot, Summer's day that one of my confederates was, how should I put it? Using my small living room mirror for purposes other than that for which B&Q supplied it to me.  Despite no financial transactions taking place, he was in possesion of a credit card and a rolled up £20 note.  All was going well, he had divided up a large amount of... Erm... Product... Into a number of longer and fatter than average lines and absently offered them to the person next to him.

The person next to him however, had gone to the toilet, and had been replaced by a 90lb rottie who proceeded to inhale the lot.

Ever seen a rottweiler that's just ingested a large amount of benzoylmethylecgonine? I have... And I don't want to see it again thank you very much.  They're a strong dog, but not hugely bright, and intoxication doesn't help.  We locked her in the porch, hoping that the lack of stimulus would help her to calm down, it did eventually, a couple of hours later, after her walking straight through the wooden door as if it wasn't there.

-oOo-

In fact, when I first bought her as a pup, the breeder warned me that 'Rotties don't go around, they go through.'  She displayed this admirably one day whilst I was training her to 'Stay'.  Simple trick you might think, make the dog sit, tell it to stay, walk a few yards away from it and then call it - very important thing for her to learn.

But I got cocky, and made the distances that I would walk away longer and longer.  100 yards passed without much of a hitch, I mean, she'd start crying and stuff, but she wouldn't move.  Then I got to about 200 yards, and she adopted that 'hunched' pose where you could tell that she wanted to run towards you but still didn't.  I thought that I'd take it to the next level, so I did the 200 yard stay, turned, called her, and then as she started running, I turned and ran. This is the last thing I can remember, but piecing various eye-witness reports, what happened next was that she sped up, to a point where she became a blur and people in the surrounding area claim to this day, that they heard something like the noise the Starship Enterprise makes when she engages warp-drive.

Then she hit me in the back of the legs and I flew up into the air, summersaulted through 270 degrees and landed on my face.  I awoke some minutes later to hysterical laughter from my co-trainer and ferocious licking from a very apologetic dog.

-oOo-

I was gardening once, no, that's a lie, I was in the garden, with a beer, and things were being gardened around me.  I found a couple of chunks of Aerated Concrete block buried in the soil, a bit like breeze blocks, but for girls... So I threw them into the pile of junk that was destined for the skip.  Moments later, I heard what my Mother (before she died) used to describe as a 'graunching' noise.

Turning around, I saw that Saff had eaten most of one of them, and was starting on the other.  Don't remember it effecting her teeth at all, but I tried to take it off her anyway.  She made it clear that she wanted to keep it in that particularly rottweilerish way of rotating her backside around what she was eating, so she was between you and it and, whilst not exactly growling, grumbling quite forcefully to stake a claim for ownership.  I was having none of this and took it off her altogether, but wherever I put it, she would find it and start eating it.  No where was out of bounds... In the end I gave in and let her eat it, it was easier in the long run.

I could go on all day about this, there are stories involving deck chairs and ice-cream and motorcycles, but I'll save them for another time.

Have a nice weekend if I don't see you before.

T-wit - who?

Did you know, that it's physically impossible to move your hands wide enough apart to indicate how awesome owls are? Give it a go now - spread your hands apart as wide as you can... Is that it? No, sorry, owls are significantly more awesome than that. Probably twice as much.

They're like Birds of Prey V2.0 - I mean, your average Eagle, marvellous bird, don't get me wrong, can pick up a sheep and carry it back to the nest and feed it to its young, you don't get blackbirds doing that do you? But an owl, any old owl (with the possible exception of those tiny ones that live in holes in the ground) could do all that... Only silently - It could do it before the sheep / lizard / haddock had even woken up. One second the prey's having a lovely dream about grass or tapioca or something , the next it's torn up into chunks and being swallowed by something that looks a little bit like a transvestite zombie ET.

Weird thing that, owls are one of the few things in the animal kingdom that have ugly babies, I mean, I like owls... A lot, but you happen upon a nest of owlets when you're out for a stroll in the countryside and the whole 'Kill it with fire' instinct kicks in - They also smell incredibly bad and make a noise not unlike Satan with his Man-danglies caught in a revolving door.

We used to have a resident owl at Dandy Towers, there are photos of him on my Facebook page for my stalkers to take a look at. His name was Twist and he was frighteningly bi-polar. Incredible bird though, beautiful plumage. A European Barn Owl, who would sit, imperiously in the corner of the kitchen like a judgemental biscuit tin, watching you with his cold, dead, sharks eyes - right up until the point where he deemed you below his contempt and closed them. Ever been ignored by an owl? it does nothing for your self esteem.

This is the Owl in question, sat on the Mini-Dandy's head, some years ago

Owls are not the perfect indoor pet, they eject their waste from both ends with unpleasant speed, accuracy and regularity. They seem to void the bodily fluids of their food seperate to everything else and that is not a sight, or smell that you quickly get used to. But if you persevere, they can become merely incredibly troublesome rather than a right-royal pain in the rear.

They're nice to take out for a walk though, they'll sit on your shoulder quite happily, or more likely on your head - And you'll get a lot of attention. In fact, I once got stopped by a couple of WPCs when I was out with the owl and one of the rottweillers - Once all the coo-ing and the aww-ing had died down (It helped that the Rottie was particularly cute too) one of the uniforms turned to me and said,

'I bet you don't get mugged very often'

The owl took this as her cue to flap the short distance from my shoulder to my head, and relieve herself down the back of my neck. This did not do wonders for my already limited appeal to the opposite sex and they quickly continued on their patrol avec le grande vitesse.

If you Google the word 'Owls', pretty much every picture of a real owl that appears has an implied tag of 'Owl thinks: I will kick your ass'; and the ones that don't, look as if they suffer with some fairly severe mental retardation, this does nothing to assuage their general air of ass-kickery as they can now be filed under psychotic predators with inch long claws and no remorse.

They can do unnatural stuff too - Everyone and their rabbit knows about the whole head spinning 'round like Linda Blair watching speedway, but did you know that most of them can turn their heads upside-down too? Some of them can make one of their front toes point backwards to create inescapable double talons of tearing - Although they're not all conquering instruments of death of course, otherwise we'd all be speaking owlese and living in holes in trees - They've been given a couple of disabilities just to keep them in their place - They have no peripheral vision and their ears aren't on straight.

Despite all this, I would have one again quicker than you can stir fry a possum, this time I might have something a little bigger, maybe a Great Grey or an Eagle (Owl) - Something I could fit a saddle on, or at least have a half-suit of armour made for.

I'd call him Trevor

Recipe: The Concussion Chilli with Rottweiler sauce

Originally posted on Facebook 30/10/12

Regular readers will remember that I promised to slowly release recipies from the 'Real' hairy bikers - i.e. Myself and Mike Farrish.

Today it's the turn of - 'The Concussion Chilli with Rottweiler sauce'

One thing to bear in mind is that although the ingredients and method are (with one fairly major exception) things you will find in the average kitchen, the complete dish takes a total of six months to complete - It can be prepared in advance.

You will need for the chilli: The standard ingredients to make a completely normal chilli - meat, tomato (fresh or tinned), onions, chocolate, herbs and spices, but specifically, and I can't stress this enough, no baby carrots.

You will need for the sauce: one 100lb+ good natured Rottweiler and a high-pressure water supply.

* Take a large pot and make a chilli as per any one of a thousand recipies as can be easily found on the Internet.
* Get slightly drunk and taste the chilli - decide it is nowhere near spicy enough and put in four more whole chillis.
* Get slightly more drunk and taste the chilli - decide it is nowhere near spicy enough and put in four more whole chillis.
* Get really quite drunk and taste the chilli - decide it is nowhere near spicy enough and put in four more whole chillis.
* Drink all the beer that is available and decide that you may as well put in all the chillis that you have in the house.
* Wake up and lift the lid off the chilli pot.
* Stop crying and look around at everyone else in the room with an expression of disbelief and mild panic on your face - as if to say 'I don't know anyone stupid enough to try that'.
* Remember that you do, in fact, know someone - And call your very good, but incedibly gullible, friend (ours was called Steve, but feel free to substitute your own as you see fit).
* Make sure that there is a clear path between the chilli pot and the nearest toilet (this is VERY important).
* Give 'Steve' a fork and ask what he thinks the chilli needs.
* Be completely suprised when he says 'Why have you put baby carrots in it'
* Turn to each other and mouth the words 'Baby Carrots?', then turn around just in time to see a fork with half a dozen whole chillis on it be swallowed whole.
* Congratulate yourself on clearing such a nice path to the toilet.

Now, for the sauce:

Wait six months (Yes, six)
* Have a party at your house on a Saturday night that gets completely out of hand and culminates with everyone becoming unconcious on the sofas, floor, hammock, garden or sideboard (It is important that the Rottweiler is invited, but 'Steve' is not)
* Approxiamtely 10:00 on the Sunday morning, arrange for 'Steve' to burst into the house and yell 'Helloooo' at the top of his voice, in payback for having long-term colonic shock due to the Baby Carrot incident.
* The Rottweiler should now launch himself at the interloper and stick a good 8" of doggy tongue down his throat - In a completely friendly, non-treatening way.
* 'Steve' will recoil from this and grab the first thing that comes to hand to wipe his mouth - You should make sure that this is the blanket that the dog sleeps on, for added gameyness, if you are a connoisseur of such things, it will help if the dog is slightly incontinent.
* Explain to 'Steve' what he has just done, he will make his way at a brisk pace to the kitchen, stumbling over slumbering bodies along the way, whilst trying to hold in his breakfast.

[Interlude] - I should probably explain that the house I was living in at the time had quite high water pressure, to the point where if you held a glass under the cold tap and turned it on full, it would blow the bottom out of the glass - [/Interlude]

* 'Steve' will now hold his head under the cold tap and turn it on full.
* Marvel at what a strange sound the human head makes as it bounces off the rim of a stainless steel sink.
* You now have three choices as to how you wish to finish off the sauce:

1 - Call an ambulance
2 - Continue to laugh until you feel quite sick
3 - Let the dog lick him awake

(We chose a mix of 2 & 3 - but obviously you should let your conscience be your guide)