Well Xmas eve was grand… lots of nice pressies given and received. Daniel & Monica came round and stayed the night. Atticus behaved himself for most of the evening. But, in retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have given him leftovers, and Dominican Republic egg-nog, rompope, after he’d already finished off the brie. It played merry hell with his digestion and Sita has finally got around to cleaning up after him. I got Sita a gizmo called “BowLingual” which is based on bleeding-edge Japanese research and after configuring it for “Schipperke” and entering his name we tried it out by getting Sally to say 3 words and thus put him into a frenzied barking rage. The machine started applying its algorithms and condensed wisdom of the generations and it turns out that far from being a murderous call-to-arms, Atticus was merely saying “Let’s Play!”. Who’d’ve thunk it? Then Daniel sneezed which meant “I’m misunderstood!”. Suffice to say I’m glad I kept the receipt…
I woke up at about 3am not sure where I was (on the sofa in the living room), and after locating the Pepcid antacid stuff, ibuprofen and drinking 3 pints of water, i couldn’t get back to sleep and grabbed me coat and set off to explore the Santa Cruz coastline. I walked for about an hour heading towards the barks of sealions and ended up being confronted by either the most bellicose urban fox this side of the zoo or a mini-mountain lion. Having studied the sign for preparing for mountain lion attacks, I made myself look big by stretching my coat over my head and waving me arms around making loud shoo noises while slowly backing off. The animal started coming towards me, then a car went past and scared him off a bit and I walked away (backwards) v. fast. They tend to go for joggers, so I wasn’t going to run anywhere. So I couldn’t go back that way and wandered off to the pier where there wasn’t a soul. Just hundreds of seagulls doing their best Alfred Hitchcock impression and staring at me with their unblinking scavenging eyes. So I had a bit of a sit down and watched the moon reflected in the waves for a while. All very calming and I was having a think about what was going on in Blighty (see me dad’s blog for pix) then mosied on down towards central Santa Cruz and then back to the house. Sita had woken up 30 minutes before and was worried enough about my whereabouts to have woken her mum up. Lucky she hadn’t been up for all 3 hours… Sita appears to think there’s some kind of curfew in operation and I should have brought my ID at the very least. And I could have been assaulted or summink. And me, a veteran of closing time on the Kingsway, Swansea. Say what you like about the states, but I’ve never felt threatened by people on the street, unlike late Friday/Saturday in any UK town you care to name. Anyroad, I’m glad Sita didn’t call me mum up to worry her like when I went for a nap in the basement once at a hallowe’en party and she thought i must have had an onset of schizophrenia and was a danger to others and myself…
Anyroad, got back to sleep eventually and was woken up by a nice phone call from me folks but i hadn’t had enough coffee yet. so made coffee with me new grinder from sally, and headed off to that building with the pointy roof and the men in dresses who chant songs with words that don’t make sense or rhyme and play with incense and children. The mass was mercifully brief and then breakfast and the rest of the afternoon was spent with more pressies and working out how to convert PAL DVDs to NTSC format (“Never The Same Colour twice”, according to me Dad).
Sally’s cooking away right now and we’ll be dining in style again in a couple of hours. Anyroad, I hope you had a lovely Christmas, dear reader, and will check back again to see how the obedience training’s going. Also, another pressy for sita was a harness & lead for bunnies. We’ll be test-driving that one soon and may well be a photo-op. Stay tuned & nadolig llawen (mispelled Welsh for happy xmas) and bloywen newith dar (phonetic welsh fer ‘appy new year”)
