The curious incident of the poo in the day time

As happens on many occasions I came home late the other night. The house was exactly as I had left it: chickens in the chicken run, dogs shut up in the extension area thing, sheep in the pen and not a mouse was stirring. Or so I thought.

Having let myself in and fed the dogs I walked to the bathroom and out of the corner of my peripheral vision caught sight of a strange brown package on the floor. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be poo. "That's funny" I thought to myself. As well as a few other things. My eyes travel up and notice another poo - probably from the same animal my detective skills inform me. At this point I briefly consider whether I might have poo-ed on the floor by accident in my sleep, and whether a foray into Wikipedia to find out about poo analysis might reveal the nature of the guilty person but decide that I'm really not that interested. My eyes travel further.....

And I notice a third poo. Of a distinctly different nature. Not just slightly different but totally and thoroughly different - like the difference between a jacket potatoe and a bowl of rice pudding for example. "That's funny" I think to myself. As well as a few other things.

A sane voice in my head says: there are 2 dogs and they probably just snuck past you whilst you weren't looking and for some inexplicable reason left you some poo on the floor.

A less sane voice says: I wonder if some kind of other animal has gotten into the house and done that? It's quickly followed by a paranoid voice that wonders if Oxfordshire has a new serial killer that leaves poo as their trademark before dispatching their victims. Suddenly the rabbit warren that is the house I'm staying in becomes a much more frightening place as visions of "the killer poo-er", most feared person since jack the ripper walked London's streets fill my mind.

A bucket & several pieces of kitchen towel later and the poo is gone (except for the more liquid aspects which were a tell tale clue that the poo was fresh, ergo the culprit must still be in the house). Unable to contain my paranoia any longer I find a conveniently placed hockey stick and camping lantern and sweep the lower floor of the house. Thus armed and looking like a bizarre & modern-art version of 'The Light of the world' I begin rushing through doors prepared to brain the killer poo-er with a child's hockey stick until I ascertain that the ground floor is 'clean'. At least, it's clean of other human presence.

Only the upstairs remains. There are 2 ways up stairs so I boobytrap one of them and use the other. Fortunately each step screaches with the agony of old wood - thus alerting my unknown assailant to my every move. At the top of the stairs there are 3 ways to turn. I decide that between my cleverly devised boobytrap, the noise of the stairs & the difficulty of watching in 3 directions at once I might as well just go to sleep. A short but coincidentally timed phone conversation later in which a friend assures me that yes, there probably is someone else in the house with me, I call the whole adventure quits. But not before I find some way to barracade the door to my room.

The mystery is more satisfactorily solved when I notice that one of the dogs seems to eat a lot of grass and I remember that the poo had been full of what looked like either grass or thread. I further remember that cows need some strange amount of stomachs to process grass and that humans can't do it anymore (something to do with the appendix I think) so probably it was a dog.

The bowl-of-rice-pudding poo however, remains a mystery.

A dog's breakfast

Meaning either: a complete mess, or the thing that a dog has for breakfast. Sadly both things applied to the doughnut I bought for my own breakfast this morning after an extremely wet & enthusiatic golden retriever nearly pushed me off a bridge and then destroyed my bag in order to get to the doughnut inside it. Needless to say the half eaten, wet & covered in dog hair thing that I rescued was inedible. The dog's owner looked quite embarassed about the whole thing but I couldn't find it in my heart to be angry - just mildly annoyed and amused.

The parallel with this week didn't escape me. Since having a really nice weekend I somehow seem to have ended up with a week that's involved a one way trip to chaos & destruction. I have no plan of escape currently, only a glimmering hope that somehow the lord might have some kind of plan. If he doesn't then I could be in trouble. I'm beginning to wonder if the lesson might be: there's a way to be ok in the middle of chaos that's to do with Me - you don't have to control chaos in order to be 'ok'. I think that's worth checking out.

Walk it off....

I think that I've noticed that I often write my blog when I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed or miserable - when I'm finding it hard to get through life and remain sane. It's not a thing I tend to find that easy anyway, frankly I think that I need some form of daily miracle just to make me a vaguely normal person. Maybe that's what Grace is for.

In either case I'm resolving to write when I'm feeling happy instead of when I need to vent the craziness inside. It's a bit sad to think that all people tend to get of me is when I'm not doing so well.....it's just backwards.

This weekend we had a fairly full-on time of work with a breakout on Saturday and then a training course and youth service on Sunday. Despite a certain amount of coldness and a lot of being not as prepared as I should have been I appear to have made it through. My talks went well (at least I think they did) contrasting the work of the lord almighty with the film Zorro (the old one, not the new one of course); and the only scars that I bear appear to be an incredible inner thigh/groin strain from the bucking bronco that we hired. On the upside I understand why cowboys walk like they do and have enjoyed a few days of accidentally being John wayne.

I also stumbled across the following video on youtube that I think is quite funny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn2V_43rmPk