Christmas and the crazy dog lady

Tomorrow is the last teaching day for the year, and I am hoping for fourteen or so restful days of eating, drinking, walking and writing, before returning to the scholarly fold. Since the dogs number five and their walking harnesses are identical, I have resorted to this natty eponymity (courtesy of these fine people) to speed getting everyone harnessed up for walking:

It’s not quite as bad as the many tiny t-shirts and bejewelled collars one can buy for one’s dogs (or use to decorate one’s cats), but this may be a slippery slope.

More exciting at present are my advances in the economical use of space for the dogs’ sleeping and resting quarters. It’s not that there’s not enough room in the house for them, so much as that the puppies are very good at moving about the space they take, in the form of beds, pens and newspaper. I let them out in the morning to find them in a different part of the room from where they went to sleep, but still inside their pens.

Now however, the pups are in more stable accommodation (which arrived in two days from here, at a reasonable price and easy to assemble), and look particularly cute to boot. It was necessary to shut them in to get the (phone cam) shot; attempts to photograph them with open pen doors resulting in a picture of … open pen doors.

My depression seems to have bottomed out this week, and with the help of Señor Mojito I am making some more constructive plans for the early part of the new year. In a move particularly heartening I have started working on my manuscript again. The rewrite is really nearly finished: all edits-in-progress more or less complete and about twenty thousand words to go, not to mention that I now know how it ends.

With my head a little more right I hope to write here a little more frequently, but this too must be balanced against the friendly hordes in town the next week or two, from regions far-flung and more local. I have bought presents for family, cadged wrapping paper off harvestmother and more or less organised my part of the food for the family feasting. Working almost up until the holiday itself has also helped distract me from the holiday overhang, although to sooth those who are feeling worn particularly thin by shopping mall muzak (Robyn? Deborah?), I offer this.

Bonus spoilers-of-a-kind: having bought the DVD, I can say that tonight’s episode of The Mighty Boosh on C4 is my favourite of the season, not only for Old Gregg (and his downstairs mix-up) but also for the moon’s Song of [Him]self, my favourite of all the moon’s moon-isms (although “you’re in my peripherins vision!” is perhaps close):

Tagged as: Boosh, Christmas, crates, dogs, pups, work, writing