Sunny Sundays are good for washing Bear...

The sun shone magnificently yesterday and as it was far too hot to take the beasts out in the middle of the day we decided to do the next best thing - bath them! Two out of the three were scrubbed, disgustingly brown water was sluiced off and we even managed to get a bit of a brush through the wool of Bear's trousers so it was a productive afternoon. He's still going to need a set of professional clippers to get the underfur out quickly - he really doesn't like being groomed overmuch - but at least he's now clean and shiny. Dog no.3 will be done next weekend, weather willing. I just need to buy more shampoo.

For your delectation, a picture of shiny Bear at play...

Quick lunch...

Back at work - oh, my God, what a morning. Haven't stopped since I got in. Just stopped for some pasta now (rigatoni with Sainsbury's chopped tomatoes with oregano - comes in a carton - v. nice) and then I've got two more meetings this afternoon as well as having to work on a worksheet for some students that I won't be seeing, so it'll have to be fairly comprehensive.

And I'm behind on NaNo :o(

Dog Whisperer came on Saturday, basically, the dogs aren't confident in us being the alphas so they're doing the job; so now we have to convince them that we are it. Going ok so far - they've thrown a few paddys. BB is the best, because he's the youngest I think so is more amenable to change. The girls are being cows at the moment - hopefully this will improve. Soon.

Anyway, more work on NaNo to do (while trying to avoid surfing the interweb - the perils of broadband!)

How are y'all doing? How's Sven going for those who NaNo not?

It's Friday!

The end of the week has come! Yay!

Ahem. Will calm down now. I've had two late nights at work this week, and didn't get home until nearly 23:00hrs last night because I had to phone the Dog Listener before I left work. She will be coming out to see BB and the rest of the pack in November, to teach housemate and moi how to be - not just top bitch - but top dog overall. At the moment BB thinks "I'm the MAN! So I'm in charge, yeah! I'm gonna bark-a-lot and protects my wimmins." Grrrr.
So, that's the behaviour we're going to knock on the head, so to speak. Part of the training will be around how wolf packs interact (and as we have a pack of border collies, who are quite close in attitude, apparently to their wilder cousins, this will be useful). I will update when we have been trained.

On the writing front, managed to iron out (in my head) a few wrinkles that had been bothering me. Got halfway through an outline of chapter 10, but I know I'm going to have to go back through the outline and tweak - I'm also going to put the scenes on notecards so I can shuffle them around more easily (thanks Amanda for reminding me about the notecards option!) I was going to attempt the post-it route, but to be honest, I don't have anywhere to put them up as, if there's a space on a wall, I try to cover it with a bookcase full of books. Anyway, I have bought notecards; I have plenty of highlighters so I can colour-code which scene is in a particular character's POV; and I've nearly finished the outline - I hope. Have I forgotten anything? Hmm. No doubt anything I've forgotten will make itself known pretty quickly and I can tweak it later if it doesn't stop the writing dead in its tracks!

Listening to: Monster by The Automatic

Temp: 22.3C