Steve Oliver: Part Website, Part Blog: Pets at Home (shop)

Showing posts with label Pets at Home (shop). Show all posts

Sunday, 19 April 2015

I was meant to go to a gig at Nottingham Contemporary last night but I crashed out on the sofa and woke up too late to have a shower and get ready to get into town. Matt Henshaw is someone I have wanted to see for a while so I felt bad at missing him but I am sure I'll get the chance again soon.

Maybe it was the last two nights that caught up with me, I can't ask my fellow Nottingham music champions as they only go out occasionally and won't be able to empathise with my predicament. Thursday night didn't have an adverse effect on my working the next day although I was tired and Friday night was done on very little sleep at the end of a long tiring day at work followed by drinking rather more than usual. Yesterday started slowly and work-wise I didn't achieve anything apart from putting the music together for the podcast. We had planned to take Jack out with us for another walk along the canal and after a bit of shopping have lunch at Waters Edge, a place we have always said it would be nice to visit but for some reason never before got round to it.

We chose a lovely day to do this (especially compared to today which at the time of writing is rather gloomy) apart from the occasional cold breeze. Jack behaved himself impeccably while we ate, we asked for a spare sausage to give him and he had a piece of my burger so he was more than happy. I drank two pints of Greene King IPA, usually the equivalent of asking for mashed potato as a filling in Spud-U-Like but it was the only ale they did and it went down a little too well. We always bring along a tub for Jack to use to drink water and I tipped a little bit of beer in there as a treat for him and he loved it. It seemed to mellow him a little apart from a lot of stopping to lift his leg, more than usual. This is only the second time we have given him beer, the first being last summer in Skegness, so it isn't like we're doing him some damage. I would recommend Waters Edge if you don't mind waiting at the bar a while; two pints, two glasses of wine, a Max burger, a New Yorker baguette with a side order of chips, and of course Jack's sausage just brushed over the £20 mark. As the place was packed out I suppose they can afford to keep the prices reasonable.

Jack's continued fussy eating (yes, you have had two music related blogs in a row so this is mainly dog themed) led me to take him into Pets At Home for a couple of trays of food. If you need proof that price is irrelevant in the eyes of a dog, then look no further; he ate the Pets At Home food although he brought one of them back up. Today I bought him a tin of Max costing 59p from Londis and he ate the lot with no argument.

I set the podcast up when we returned from lunch and recorded it this evening after a very pleasant bedroom diversion. It certainly made things a lot less stressful and it enjoyed the best first day listening figures for a long time, I'll have to remember this particular pre-show routine if I ever get back on radio.

This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative can be heard here.

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April housekeeping

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Saturday, 11 April 2015

On a Saturday I, as regular readers will know (although I shudder to think what someone would get from reading every single entry I make, this is why I have started illustrating them so that when you see the link on Twitter and Facebook you can decide whether it is for you or not - the only flaw is that the blog is read by far more people than follow me on Facebook and Twitter so whoever these people are I don't know, maybe they're planning to kill me one day and want to try and establish a pattern of my movements, it might be the ice-cream man), I take Jack to the park for a run around on a Saturday late morning. However you may remember that he got into a fight with another dog last week and I was going to buy a bike lock for the gate. We had planned to take Jack to town for a walk along the canal today so given that he was going to get plenty of exercise I didn't bother. The vet once said that we provide very well for him regarding walks so it isn't as if missing the park will make him unfit.

Yes, this is mainly a blog about Jack so this is your chance to bail out now and go through the list of subjects below and find something more interesting to read. I am aware that me writing about my dog and posting pictures of him are as annoying as people on Facebook who bang on about their new baby as though they were the first person ever to become a parent.

For some reason I was in a pretty crotchety mood this morning, perhaps caused by the pressure of knowing I had the podcast to record and a pile of work mounting up in my office. It didn't help that breakfast was a bit of a disaster thanks to the lack of cooking oil in the house to fry with so I had to have cereal and toast instead of anything hot (first world problems) and was hungry when we went to town. It was one of those moods where everything and everyone annoys you for the smallest reason but it soon faded once enough caffeine and nicotine had been allowed to flow through my system.

Jack (you were warned about the majority of content regarding this blog) is a lot better now following his fight. He has got his energy back now and doesn't yelp when you touch his ear, although his ear is still pretty gammy looking. Motorbikes and birds are no longer safe from his ire, and he hasn't learned his lesson regarding other dogs and still barks at them, it is nice when the other dog barks first because it looks like the other dog started it. We had a nice afternoon walking along the canal and stopped for a coffee in the retail park after which we took Jack into Pets at Home, who allow you to take dogs in providing they behave themselves. He now has a new collar and lead although I'm not sure that barking at rabbits and pissing up against a corner unit was behaviour that deserved a present, you wouldn't reward a child for that sort of carry on by buying them something nice.