So, well, yes we are going to do this thing. 

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/

I know you decided weeks* ago that the New Blog was all some kind of strange joke and that I’d be on lj till I was ninety-two and finally decided to append* my blog to my web site after all.  No, I’m just disorganised and absent-minded and easily distracted and web-nervous and spend too many hours ringing bells and playing the piano and planting roses and walking hellhounds and writing this blog, wherever it lives and sleeping.  Drat sleeping.  Hours every day wasted. . . . ***

            Anyway.  The New Blog Arriveth.  I hope.  Now please go click and tell me if it’s there.  Please. 

* if not months

** Note strong grasp of net jargon

*** Please note the list of things I spend too many hours on does not include writing stories.  I do not spend too many hours writing stories. 

Tags: new blog

I have my piano lesson in the afternoon and sacred* home tower bell practise in the evening. **

            I told you about my Song—my first-ever complete piece of composed music with two hands and everything, even though it’s only twelve bars long—and the Sonatina-ette.  I also told you that Oisin, in that tiresome way of teachers who are forever seeking ways to wind and ensnare their students deeper and more inextricably into their subject ***, took a few bars of the Sonatina-ette and noodled with them, saying—in that very careful voice teachers use when they’re playing you like a fish on a hook and don’t want to frighten you into breaking free—that I might want to think about longer phrases. 

            So, because I am a hopeless wet, I came home full of enthusiasm last week and started pulling the Sonatina-ette to bits, the better to add more bits.  What made it worse is that quite a while ago now Oisin had played me some bits of old Johann Sebastian B as illustration of how astonishingly innovative he’d been in his day and astonishingly modern even now.  This had rather lodged in my memory—I’ve come round late to Mr JSB, as I have come round late to Mr going-on-forever-and-no-sense-of-humour Wagner†—so I asked Oisin if he could photostat that page for me so I could take it home and drown in the chord progressions of someone who knew what he was doing.  Which is essentially what happened.  Oisin obliged, I took my page home, fumbled through it at my long-suffering piano, went, Oh, coooooool, and promptly disappeared over my head.  Fortunately I kept a copy of the original Sonatina-ette but the bits are proliferating out of control . . . and are showing precious little sign of pulling themselves together again and coming to a conclusion.  I wonder if Clementi ever had this problem.

            Meanwhile . . . I’ve been so busy burning up [music] manuscript paper that I’m not having enough time to play, especially when you have to factor in that it takes me f . . . o . . . r . . . e . . . v . . . e . . . r to learn anything, as well as a remarkably short time to forget anything I don’t keep playing regularly.††  So I have been determined to get back to working on something to play.

            And then, as regular readers know, it’s been a somewhat . . . otherwise-preoccupying week.  And the gaps between piano lessons seem to get shorter and shorter too.  So about three days ago it occurred to me that I needed to produce something, anything, I could take in to Oisin, so as not to waste his time (and my money).  And I bethought me of the three of Peter’s poems he’d printed out as possibly suitable for setting.  And I chose the one that is shortest.  Not because I only had three days left but because I Haven’t Done This Before—I only wrote my own first wordless Song a few weeks ago—and the prospect of setting a poem is daunting.  Very.

            As it happens I’ve had a gorgeous time doing it.  It’s fun working with words.††† I’ve only written the melody line—with a few hen scratchings in the left hand‡—and even the melody hasn’t, you know, um, well, set yet.  But its nature or character or what I’m trying to do is there—and, just by the way, this is a sad poem, and with my predilection for minor keys and edgy chords it’s a little intense.  Or maybe only to me.  But I’m really trying to make the abyss open for a moment during the last stanza.  My Benjamin Britten‡‡ to Peter’s A E Housman. 

            So Oisin took me through some of the implications of setting words, and how you want the rhythm of speech to work for you rather than against you.  This is maybe more important with the sort of thing I’m doing—there are an awful lot of Art Songs out there that seem to hold a grudge against their lyrics—because I’m clearly writing folk songs.  Well, Britten did it.  So did Haydn, Beethoven, Purcell and Vaughan Williams.‡‡‡  It’s like shooting ducks on the midway sometimes, guessing which ones are arrangements and which ones are (more or less) original.§  And sometimes the arrangements are the most original anyway.

            Oisin was waxing rhapsodical about what Britten had done with some of his folk songs, and I said—being a hopeless wet and a glutton for punishment—that if he could lay his hands on the sheet music of any of this I’d be very interested in having a look at it.  (And a fumble, at home on my piano, with nobody listening but Peter and hellhounds.)  And then the Fiendish Light began to beam out of his eyes and he said, I know!  Here’s your homework!  Go home and write your own accompaniment to The Foggy Foggy Dew!  Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!§§ 

            —Well of course I have a copy of it.  I probably have several.  Most of which, I hope, have not been eaten by rodents.§§§  But of the two I could actually, you know, find, one of them has been fiddled around with in a manner I deprecate . . . and the other is Britten’s.  I can’t effing read the accompaniment, so I don’t have to worry about cheating.  It’s also in . . . four flats.  Ho hum, never mind, I just wrote a Song in five horrible sharps, key signatures are never going to scare me again.¤

            PS:  I am somewhat hampered in all future descriptions of piano lessons because Oisin told me today he’s been reading my blog.  Aaaaaaugh.  He even wanted to take me to task about his name.  Eeeep, I said, holding up my book of Easy Sonatas by Beethoven¤¤ as a shield.  He was a warrior and a bard!¤¤¤  And you can’t possibly know anyone by that name who is a bounder and a cad!  —The life of a dedicated blogger is fraught with unexpected perils.

            PPS:  And at bell practise I came up with a new definition of how you know you’re not a beginner any more.  You may still be the least competent ringer in the tower, but you’re not a beginner any more. ⌂   It’s when you’re not the only person going wrong.  You may still be going wrong more than anyone else, but sometimes someone gets there before you.

* I have explained that sacred in the context of bell practise indicates its unmissability aspect?  Sacred home tower bell practise means that the floodwater has to be at least six feet deep, the hailstones the size of grapefruit, or the vampires in unusual numbers and in a particularly filthy temper, before I will stay home.  And at least the floodwater would roar and the hailstones bang and clatter^.  A lot of vampires stalking around and hissing or growling or whatever vampires in a filthy temper do^^ probably would not drown out the sound of the bells.

^ I am freshly clued up about the banging and clattering of hailstones since we had quite a lot of them today, pinging malignly off all the new young growth:  arrrrgh.  You can see the ten-inch-high delphiniums judder as they hit.  And these hailstones were only the size of cake decorators’ dragees. 

^^ There is some controversy around this topic

** I need to get out more.   I do not have time to get out more.

*** I dunno, though.  There’s got to be an easier way to make a living.  Pounding sand.  Sweeping crossings.  Writing novels.

† And Anna Russell still does it better than Bayreuth. 

†† I’ve finished memorising Für Elise three times. 

††† Stop that laughing.

‡ One of which, um, phrases, caused Oisin to say, Hmm, that’s an interesting thought.  I would encourage you to finish it.   —Did he say ‘thought’?  Help!  What do I do now!

‡‡ In my dreams

‡‡‡ Did Mozart write/arrange any folk songs?  Surely.  He’s The Man:  he did everything.  Cherubino’s arias could pass as belonging on that continuum, say.

§ And if you guess right, you get a six foot pink plush wolverine!

§§ No, he didn’t say Mwa ha ha ha ha ha.  But I heard it.

§§§ While I was looking for Foggy Dews, I discovered that the resident Gnawing Thing has eaten my piano arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon, and had a go at Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, although there’s enough of the latter left to play.  I am not happy.

¤ And if you believe that, allow me to reiterate my offer of this nice bridge I could sell you. . . .  And yes, it’s occurred to me to hum the sucker and write it out for myself in a key signature of my choosing, but I have this feeling I’d find myself writing it out in five sharps, so maybe I’ll just stick to Mr Britten’s four flats.  Or maybe I’ll just . . . have a little idle try at humming. . . .

¤¤ My current hacking and hewing project is his Opus 49, No. 2

¤¤¤ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ois%C3%ADn   But I refuse to accept ‘uh-sheen’ as the final word on pronunciation. 

⌂ Aside from the fact that you’ve been ringing for three and a half years.  Sigh.

Tags: bell ringing, peter, piano, poetry

So far so good.  We’ve now had four, enzyme-laced, meals in a row—two lunches and two suppers—where hellhounds simply ate, you know, like dogs.  Put food down, food disappears.  Sigh.  Magic.  I’m also looking forward to being able to walk around town without worrying about the sort of sudden . . . hmm . . . extrusion . . . that cannot be picked up in a plastic bag.  At least I hope that’s what I’m looking forward to.  It will be worth having something a little scary officially wrong with them to stop worrying about all the scarier things that might be wrong with them.*

But reading the comments on your previous post, I thought in so many ways what a wonderfool thing this internet is, time wasting, idiot full, not-always-working-the-way-it-should technological creation though it may be, that creates small tenuous communities of support and genuine feeling.

I like ‘wonderfool’.  A word with many applications in our modern world.

            Yes.  I've also been thinking exactly this.  All those virtual hugs REGISTER out here in three dimension land.  (In case anyone is worrying that virtual hugs may have poor navigational skills, take a wrong turn, and end up ghostlily embracing penguins.)  So does the virtual chocolate, but fortunately not around my waist,  and there’s a strange flickery light out of the corners of both eyes which is a virtual forest fire of lit candles . . .  I have a joke with a friend with a life as full of vicissitudes as mine, and with whom I have a reciprocal candle-lighting arrangement, that we should buy stock in some candle manufacturers or other and be getting a little of our investment back.  Anyway.  Thank you.  Thank you again.

------------------THANK YOU --------------

Now I like the way posting links makes lots of other people send you links.  So here are some you’ve sent me after yesterday’s dog links that maybe some of the others of you don’t know:

            I have just wasted a grotesque amount of time over on http://icanhascheezburger.com which is kind of like cuteoverload only different, trying to figure out how to obtain an address to a specific shot.  And I have signally failed.  So I’m going to have to stand in front of the class wearing a sign saying STUPID and they’ll strip me of my new digital camera—I was only ever a water-bearer, it’s not like I have the regimental insignia to be ripped off and trodden underfoot—and they’re even going to take the hellhounds’ flashy modern extending leads away and I’m going to have to walk them on six foot of heavy triple-stitched harness leather!  No, no!  Anything but that!  I’ll go back to a typewriter, BUT NOT THE EXTENDING LEADS!!! . . . Anyway.  I can’t send you to the specific shot because I am netstupid, but my favourite of the moment (but look fast, because new ones come in and push the old ones farther down) is ‘Schrodinger improves accuracy with increased sample size’ AND I WANT TO KNOW HOW THEY GOT THOSE CATS TO SIT IN THOSE BOXES. 

And no collection of funny dog links would be complete without this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alist/465270989/

Which leads me rather nicely to:

Of course the hellhounds are part of your family, and of course you worry about them. It's perfectly normal, says the woman who talks to her cats

I answered this once already: 

*********** You probably don't hold long involved conversations with them while you're walking down the street with other PEOPLE around however.

(I have two human daughters as well, but the cats are home with me all day, and yes, they do talk back).

 
*********** Fortunately so do mine, which is, I figure, how I get away with making a spectacle of myself, people just think it's all an elaborate dog training TRICK. Anyway, who needs to bother wearing purple just because she's getting old?

But I’ve been thinking about it since, and I realise that the reason they’re going to lock me up is because I’m shameless about it.  Of course I talk to my hellhounds!  I’m a human!  Humans talk to their friends!**  If you go for a walk with two friends, don’t you CHAT?  Although I admit that if I thought the hellhounds’ grasp of English was stronger, I would tell them less often that if they do x again, I am going to leave them by the side of the road in a box labelled FREE HELLHOUNDS.*** 

            I have just enough social conditioning left to realise that this is not the median view.  But then the median view includes people who leave their dogs locked up in small yards all day and believe that means they (the humans) don’t have to take them (the dogs) for any walks . . . and then these people get cranky when they allow the dog indoors as a special treat and it doesn’t know how to behave.  I’ll keep my fringe view of appropriate human/critter interaction, thanks.  It occurs to me that this is one of the advantages of growing old:  you can get away with eccentricity more easily.  You’re young and manifestly nuts, they come after you with the big butterfly net.  You’re old and manifestly nuts, you have a reasonable chance they just smile abstractedly and tell themselves, oh, she’s past it poor thing.  At least until you start sleeping on the roof to keep away from Cthulhu or possibly the Horla which is tunnelling up toward the surface and I don’t want to be there if it comes through in my cellar.†   And even then you’re probably safe if you don’t tell anyone†† that’s why you’re sleeping on your roof.  And I’ve worn purple all my life.

That comment ended: 

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

. . . which I’ve always seen attributed to Groucho Marx, but it’s worth repeating whoever it’s by.  I am also thus reminded of my poor New Blog which with the press of recent events has once again been sloshed into a backwater . . . the fact that my webcam doesn’t work with its microphone also has something to do with this . . . because it has a cycling Quote of the Day thingummy which doesn’t have nearly enough quotes to cycle among yet, and this is one of them.  So I get to see it a lot.  I don’t mind.

And this is completely amazing:

http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/

I admit I’m having a little cognitive dissonance trouble however because I’m from Maine where coyotes are vermin, and scary.  But I’m also a sucker, and what a photographer this woman is. . . .  Look at the coat on this critter—no wild coyote ever looked that good.  I also wonder, in a tedious and unromantic way, what’s going to happen when he finishes growing up—genuinely wild animals as pets usually ends in tears.  But maybe Charlie will be the gloriously furry exception. 

And I am now falling down with tiredness.  It’s Everything plus Not Sleeping Very Well. ††   So I am going to bed now. . . .

* Also to stop saying to myself, shut up, you’re neurotic.  I have that Jewish mum thing where I have to feed I mean feed anyone under my care, but after the previous dog generation, where Hazel was a Funny Eater all her life—and we just thought she was over-bred show-dog crazy—and then died of a combination of starving herself to death and autoimmune haemolytic anaemia almost certainly caused by too many vaccinations, I am really really jumpy about a dog that doesn’t eat, especially a dog that is clearly not right in itself.  I am also really really jumpy about vaccinations.  And when Holly started trying to die of the same horrible disease less than two months later, bullying her to eat enough not to starve to death was as awful as spending every waking minute reading homeopathy and poking fresh remedies into her and generally trying to find a way, any way, to keep her alive.  When you’re free lance, and obsessive, you can do things like this.  And I did pull her through.  But it left scars.  I didn’t find Mark till later. 

** Well.  Girl humans.  I wonder about the boys sometimes.

*** On the other hand, they wouldn’t stay in the box any better than a cat would.  How did they get those cats to sit in those boxes???

† I haven’t got a cellar.  Which will be the thing that proves that I am dangerously nuts.

†† Except possibly your hellhounds.  Or your cats

††† Despite planting imaginary rose beds with a pillow over my head at 4 or 5 am, with reference to a comment about the soothingness of gardening, both real and virtual.  Yes:  barring that in the real garden slugs have eaten Ernest Markham off at ground level, Ernest Markham being a beautiful rather small and tactful small-dusty-pink-bell clematis who should be out right now—as Purple Spider is out—and who was doing very well not that long ago and I went back there to see why there were no dusty pink bells and . . . waaaaaaaah.  I’ve put down enough [organic] slug bait to take out a legion of the slimy monsters^, and I assume she’ll throw up a new shoot or two.  But not in time for flowers this year.  Sometimes gardening is not soothing and relaxing.

^ Aaaugh!  Cthulu's vanguard!  I don't want to sleep on the roof!

Tags: gardening, hellhounds

I’ve been downstairs at the cottage most of the evening struggling with the Downstairs Laptop.  (Peter played bridge tonight so I came back here from Almost Sacred Wednesday Bell Practise*).  I don’t feel it has any call to be as tiresome as it has chosen to be tonight, but I have one or two moral imperatives left and one of them says that you don’t eat dinner at your desk.  Breakfast, yes.  Lunch, yes.**  Infinite numbers of cups of tea, yes.  Chocolate, yes.***  Dinner, no.  So it’s been the laptop, which keeps crashing.  I’m so tired I’m barely breathing—brooding will do that to you—and given the highly guessable† topic of said brooding, I thought I’d do an entry of spirits-lifting dog links . . . whereupon my laptop decided to be possessed by demons and crash every two minutes.  Arrrrgh.  The next blow fate has in store is that the links I did manage to extract from the wreckage won’t work.

            We’re also about to have a frost any minute—again:  you just stay tucked up out there, you magnolia buds—I have to go fetch the marmoraria indoors before that minute is up.  But I wish to report that my new system of hanging a blanket over a purpose-built railing just inside the front door works a treat.  Except for the complaining about the fact that this means I have two layers of insulation over the door—blanket and curtain—and this is the south of England and mid April.

            Hellhounds appear to be in the pink of condition.  I rang up to order their new regime of enzyme supplements the minute I got home yesterday and, hallelujah, the large brown bottle arrived today.†† And furthermore the enzyme powder is purple, and sort of glittery.  Mark told me to mix the powder in with the food, so I pulled the rather extremely green capsules apart and . . . I’m not sure I approve of ingestibles that look like they belong scattered over a sequined cardigan.  I was also braced for the enzymes to Taste Funny and myself then be the object of the Look of Outrage more common, in my experience, in cats:  the Are You Trying to Poison Me With This Stuff? look.  But no:  the enzymes either don’t taste, or they taste of something fabulously celestial:  fortnight-dead rabbit, say, or fresh herbivore faecal matter.†††  Anyway, the stuff went down with what, for hellhounds, is a reasonable amount of food . . . and we just happen to be in a hiatus from the Yellow Squirts, so it’s been a quiet day, except for the brooding.  And the yelling at the laptop.

            I used to lead the way upstairs but especially since they reached their full height the fundamental hellhound desire to get between my legs and then hold revels became a trifle more death-defying, on these stairs, than I was entirely happy with, especially either late at night or when I’m carrying knapsacks, books, cups of hot tea and/or chocolate.  So I now encourage them to go up ahead of me, which Darkness does willingly enough—but then he has a Master Plan—while Chaos hangs around hoping I don’t mean it, can’t we go up together, pleeeeeease?  Sometimes he wins, and then I either have to leave something behind and go back for it, or cling to the railing with my teeth.  Chaos is beginning to catch on to Darkness’ Master Plan, however, which is that they wait at the top of the stairs for me to see if anything I’m carrying is interesting.  Ah, well, almost everything in this house has had a dog nose on it some time or other.

            Thank you for all your supportive comments after yesterday’s entry.  Make that Thank you.  Critters really are members of your family and you can’t help reacting accordingly.‡  I didn’t quite manage to ruin a beautiful day for a country walk today by borrowing trouble but I had a good old try at it.  Sigh.  And while we were walking around town later on we had a couple of people—as we very often do—come up and say, oh, aren’t they beautiful, and I did not say, they have Pancreatic Insufficiency Syndrome!  I’ll cope, really I will, it’s just right at the moment, it’s One More Thing.  One more thing on top of lingering/returning stomach flu and ME.  Gah. 

Anyway, here, I hope, are a few links to amuse you:

Is there anyone (anyone who hangs around on the web, anyway), who doesn’t know this one yet?

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html

Probably not, but it reminds me that one of the things I’m tempted to run another competition for is Best Kitchen Magnet Slogan, since I happen to have it on a kitchen magnet, and it’s in my top ten.

And then there’s:

http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=1F60B4DKRD7D8KM3BT1KJW4XJWED1KV2&sitetype=1&sid=46204&section=notecards

I’m still hoping to find on the web somewhere my favourite George Booth cartoon which lives on my wall in its original, brown and crumbly round the edges and serially scotch taped to several walls condition, George Booth cartoon.  But I haven’t found it yet.   . . . Oh, gods, and do I need a George Booth umbrella??

This is another famous one, but worth revisiting, for anyone who likes dogs and/or doesn’t like lawyers:

http://www.stus.com/images/products/cla253f.gif

I hesitate to send you to the notorious:

http://cuteoverload.com/

. . . because you’ll either bail on first glance at the opening page or cruise its backlist for the rest of your life.  Or are presently making AVERT signs at your computer screen.  I do recommend clicking on ‘pups’ . . . but then I would, wouldn’t I?  My favourite is the second one down, which is also here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bunchofpants/1105985095/

And for those of you either too strong or too weak to risk clicking over to cuteoverload at all, I also recommend today’s header, which is also here:

http://nfccomic.com/index.php?comic=247

Which sums it up nicely, although I think it might have been puppies.

~If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one. -Andrew A. Rooney

. . . .is maybe the best, but this has some other good quotes:

http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/patch/dquotes.html

AND THIS IS ME:

http://www.glasbergen.com/images/na13.gif

And Snowball stands in for the hellhounds, although they are far more distinguished looking hyperactive fruit loops:

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=22537

And, sadly, this explains a lot:

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=19331

And now, well dogged, I’m going to bed, with some hope of a brain tomorrow. . . .

 * I did not ring well.  But I rang less badly than I might have.  This was partly because one of the other ringers was definitely ringing worse, which sort of took the heat off the rest of us.

** Although I prefer not to.  Have you ever noticed the way lettuce leaves lob salad dressing over a wide range?

*** As, for example, right now.  Although this may just be for the abstruse pleasure of eating chocolate with a fork.  I don’t like a sticky keyboard.

† . . . to anyone who read yesterday’s entry

†† I will attempt not to say anything snarky about the Royal Mail for at least twenty-four hours.  It will be difficult, but I am strong and brave.

††† If the latter, that would explain why they come in capsules, since these are human pills.  Mark says the enzymes are the same thing, and the dog version costs—literally—about ten times more.  It what?  So it’s like okay, wait, let me make the intelligent decision here. . .

‡ Well.  Show me the person who takes it in their stride and I’ll show you a person I don’t want to have over for dinner any time soon.

Tags: hellhounds

We went to the vet this morning—again.  Although this was the homeopathic vet*, and we haven’t been there since last autumn—although there have been a few emails between.** 

            It is surprisingly easy to convince yourself you’re just being neurotic unless someone is conspicuously bleeding.  Chaos—as long term readers of this blog know—was very sick last December.  But most of the time whatever it is is so off and on, and sighthounds are famous for being both bad eaters and generally strange,*** and I know how obsessive I am, and impatient, and prone to, hmm, highly imaginative anxiety, and homeopathy very often works rather slowly.  So I’ve kept telling myself that I should wait a little longer. . . .   Hellhounds had the best spell of apparent normalcy they’ve ever had right after Chaos was so ill too, when they ate whatever was put in front of them without fuss, and were lively on their walks without any of the manic/collapse business, and the behaviour of their bowels was exemplary.  Six or seven weeks’ worth of having, you know, lovely young healthy jolly exuberant dogs.  And I was slipping into the happy habit of assuming that whatever it—it—was, they’d outgrown it finally, or the latest homeopathic remedy had worked.

            It all went pear-shaped about the middle of February and has only got worse since.  I haven’t been telling you about it—and if it seems as if you’ve been reading rather a lot about the erraticism of hellhounds, trust me, you haven’t begun to hear what it’s been like.  And they’ve been worse yet, at increasing velocity, since the probiotics about three weeks ago.  Which, Mark told me today, is a crucial symptom.  As is the fact that they look great, despite all the off-stage havoc.  This is one of the things that has kept making me feel I must be being neurotic:  how can anything that looks that good really be sick?  In my never-ending quest to doubt and undermine myself I’ve been trying to come round to the notion that maybe some dogs just do have almost constant, wildly varying diarrhoea, and I should lighten up a little. †  I already know that a lot of sighthounds have a bad attitude toward food.  Maybe a lot of sighthounds have a bad attitude toward defecation as well.  Fortunately I have some residual common sense, and it rang up and made an appointment with Mark.

            Mark thinks it’s pancreatic insufficiency syndrome.  He says he’s actually reasonably sure that’s what it is—he saw a lot of it twenty years ago in Alsatians—but it’s taken the severity of recent symptoms and that probiotics aggravate and how good they look, bright eyed and shiny coated, when they ought to look anything but, to make him think of it, because till now it’s just been some kind of unpredictable bowel thing with supplementary vomiting, and a sighthound having better things to do than eat doesn’t even rank as a symptom.  Nor is PIS something sighthounds are known for.

            So.  This is the good news and the bad news.  We have a diagnosis.  Good.  But . . . PIS is serious.  It should be manageable, but it’s serious—and it’s not at all a good sign that they’ve had it pretty much from the get-go.  They’re only twenty months old.  Among other things this probably means it’s . . . ‘autoimmune mediated’ is I think the phrase:  what it means to the worried, guilt-ridden owner is that it’s a bad vaccination reaction.  I’ve already had one dog die of ‘vaccinosis’ as it’s called, and a second one try really hard to follow her—thanks to being a dutiful idiot who showed up every year for the booster jabs as soon as the first reminder postcard arrived.  The hellhounds were at least only going to be vaccinated once, and have blood tests for circulating antibodies after that . . . and I still seem to have managed to fuck their immune systems. 

            I have, of course, just been reading up on PIS in dogs on the net, and apparently it isn’t always or necessarily progressive.  But Mark had said that what they’ve probably got is, and what it progresses to is diabetes.  And since the probiotic disaster I’ve been noticing that Chaos—who in this as in everything is the more reactive—is drinking an awful lot of water.   

            Mark has told me what to do next:  digestive enzymes, and a severely limited diet.  (And isn’t