Fun Monday and more

I signed up to participate in Fun Monday, though I'm not at all sure how it started, or even how it works. I do know that there is about one hour and thirty-six minutes left of this Monday (at least in America, sorry England and Europe and parts easterner to be tardy) so I'd better get busy posting. I don't want to blow my very first Fun Monday assignment!





So the assignment was given by The Lurchers of London, although I gather the assignment duties shift, but I don't know how, and here it is:

• For today's Fun Monday, continuing in the spirit of "being interested in people", I would like to know, or see, what's on, in or under your bedside table! So open those draws and bare your soul to us! Is there anything special there that has a story or a memory that you can tell us about? Books that you keep there to delve into from time to time? Trinkets that you don't know where else to put? Let's see!

OK, here goes.





This is my bedside table:
Several months ago, Fat Charlie decided that he did not want to sleep in his crate in our bedroom. The crate was where it had been in the bank of eight crates on the opposite side of the room. He could see me, and he had been happily sleeping there for four years. Having him sleep on the bed with us didn't work out, because our dear Very Old Dog already does. And he is rather frail and there is only so much room.
I moved my bedside table out of the way and put Fat Charlie's crate where it had been, and BINGO! Happy dog.

On the top, on the back left hand corner are two water glasses. One for me (I drink a lot of water, not because I'm being healthy, I just like it) and the wider one is for Very Old Dog. He gets thirsty at night, and he should not jump off the bed by himself. When I hear him rustling, I grab his water and give him a slurp, and he plunks back down to sleep.
Then there's the Ikea lamp, which I inadvertently cut off when I took the photo. There is a Casual Living catalog which I carried up at least a month ago but I haven't thumbed through it yet.
Underneath the catalog are two rough drafts of commentaries I've written for our local NPR station. (National Public Radio) Now, mind you, I finished those commentaries and recorded them in December, and one has already been played, but there lie the rough drafts.

Then you see the medicine for Fat Charlie's owie toe, not put back in its box, of course, and the Clock From Hell. That clock is the meanest, most ornery, cussed piece of electronic devilry ever invented. It says Made In China but I think it was made by some furiously frustrated leftover Evil Spirit which had no other outlet for its Creative Calamity, owing to the fact that no one believed in it any more and that took away all the fun.
So It made this clock, and it visited it upon ... me. You cannot make this clock behave. If you set the alarm for 4 AM it will go off a 2 PM. If you turn the alarm off altogether, the radio comes on at midnight, full blast, on a station to which you have never, ever listened. And the next night the alarm goes boop, boop, BOOP BOOWOOP, BOOWOOP at midnight, and 1 AM, and 3:30 AM and five.

I'm telling you the thing is Evil, and it was made by something Very Bad. I've unplugged it.

You can just get a glimpse of a lovely quilted piece that Bill's daughter Beth made. It is sort of trying to disguise the fact that I have a crate as a bedside table. It's a pretty, if ineffective, disguise. And Mama Pajama's old collar lies next to my reading glasses. It's not good for the neck to try to use trifocals in bed.



And this is what is inside my bedside table, at least from the time Bill comes to bed, until we get up in the morning. (Until Bill comes to bed, the contents of my bedside table warm Bill's side of the bed for him. )






If he looks a bit concerned, or perhaps disconcerted is a better word, it's because I popped him into his crate at 11 AM this morning. An unprecedented event.
They get crated in their downstairs crates at odd times of day quite frequently, if I have an errand to run or such. But I put Fat Charlie to bed before lunch and then snapped photos.
I can barely imagine what he was thinking.

So, that's my first Fun Monday!
Thanks for letting me join in the Fun, even if I almost missed it.

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We went to Sam I Am's second ever Agility Trials this weekend. I had planned to tell about it here, but I'm falling asleep, so it shall have to wait.

He was a super wonderful superbly clever fantastic boy, though!

hug your hounds

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