One spoilt dog

Shortly before her first rolling incident!

We did well to get to 9 months without having to get the tomato sauce out to be fair.

Lidl have pet stuff in at the moment, they had some car seat hammocks

We do in the boot with a dog guard or clipped in on a car seat hammock on the back seat. She preferred the back seat until she was big enough to see us from the boot. She’s now quite happy with either. Boot tends to be for local journeys, back seat for trips away when we have luggage/camping equipment in the boot. One of the things I was most relieved about is she’s been an awesome traveller from day 1.

Driving in Madeira is fairly straightforward I think, so many tunnels (new ones every time we’ve been) that you can mainly stay off the old windy roads. I’d say generally the roads are better than in Tenerife.

We never found anything similar to autoreisen, just made sure we had separate excess insurance.

We don’t have a phone line so I’ve never dared the threaten to leave option.

Where are the photos?

We went with a lifetime policy with BoughtByMany – first year costs are just over 30 a month with I think a 15 grand limit per illness. Expect it will go up year on year and there may be a point where I might choose to self insure. It wasn’t something we considered particularly when purchasing, but the firstvet service you get included is good. Saved us an out of hours vet fee one weekend.

I see one quite regularly in our garden. Normally know by the birds alerting each other. Annoyingly the one time I had the camera about and thought I’d taken some great photos it didn’t have a memory card in.

In season at the moment so really missing our off lead adventures. Now weighing in at 26kg at 9 months old. Not sure how much growing she has left.

You’ll want to make a claim with the insolvency service. Alongside redundancy you can also claim for lack of notice period, unpaid wages and any untaken holidays. If you have something else lined up, be aware that if you start that before your notice period would have been up you cannot claim the lack of notice (I think that’s how it is).

I found the claim from the insolvency service surprisingly efficient back in 2018

Claiming from the insolvency service – any experience of timescales?

I went back to my swimming club last week after 3 months off and I wasn’t demoted a lane. It didn’t feel like a positive during last night’s session, but I’d expected to lose a lot more fitness.

Puppy dog makes me smile everyday

Obligatory photo, helping out with the big garden birdwatch last weekend

How are you getting on?

With hindsight, I’d have let her sleep with us sooner as that’s where she’s ended up anyway and everyone would have got more sleep :-)

We started off with a crate but she never really seemed to see it as a safe space, although she’d happily jump in there for a bedtime biscuit after last wees. She’d sleep anywhere she fancied as a puppy, now her favourite spot is under the kitchen table.

She’s awesome in other ways though so I don’t hold the sleep thing against her, although currently in the midst of her first season and taking out her unspent energy on my garden. Living the labrador dream though, managed to fit two tennis balls in her mouth earlier today!

We had most of our regular visitors with the exception of blue tits

Wood pigeon
Greenfinch
Goldfinch
Chaffinch
Great Tit
Robin
Blackbird
Sparrow

It’s surprising it’s never been picked up by ANPR. When my car was stolen the police were quite confident that it hadn’t been driven into Nottingham because they would have picked it up on ANPR. And once they identified the false plates via a mismatch between the tax disc and plates just outside Lincoln they managed to track it all the way into Bestwood where they picked it up on someone’s drive.

Starting to be more fun than hard work now, although at 8 months that could still all change

Great photos Bregante, am loving these cold crisp winter mornings

Christmas decorations, strictly speaking I only designed them, my paper cutter did the hard work

Faulty lab!

I would have loved a vizsla, wirehaired or smooth but decided they might have been too much for a first dog

Yesterday was a beautiful morning for dog walking

Today not so much

Not a fan of Day24, wasted a load of time creating my Arithmetic Logic Unit then had to go in a totally different direction.

Day25 nice and straightforward, still short 8 stars

I’m still playing catch-up after being away. Just completed Day20.

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Sleeping the other night was a fluke it seems

Evening sofa snoozes

I don’t really think it is separation anxiety, we don’t have any issues in the daytime. Can go from room to room, go upstairs, out the door to the bin without her following, getting upset etc. And she generally will go to sleep downstairs, she just won’t often sleep all night on her own. Must have read my threat of free to a good home because of course she slept downstairs on her own all night last night :-)

She’ll sleep all night 10pm to 8am if she’s in with us, just not on her own. And that’s following a 2 hour evening snooze on the sofa.

She does plenty of brain work too, as she is a broken lab a lot of her food has to be in a puzzle feeder before she’ll eat it! We also do lots of find it games and gundog training. Overnight sleeping has just always been a struggle if we’re not right there with her.

She generally looks like this after gundog training

This one might be free to a good home if she doesn’t learn to sleep through the night on her own soon!

First day home

7 months

On holiday in Wales last week (7.5 months)

We feed Millie’s Wolfheart, mixed with a bit of wet food, liver pate, sweet potato, egg, sardines etc. depending on day of the week. She’s not hugely enthusiastic about food (must be faulty considering she’s a lab) especially straight out the bowl but she looks in good condition on it so we’re sticking with it for now.

I’m playing catchup as busy over the weekend but now away on holiday and it’s peeing it down so it’s keeping me occupied

I’ve not attempted today’s in just FME yet, I’ve completed it with FME/Python, I’m pretty sure part 1 is possible but I’m not sure I can be bothered as it will be a pain! Too much hard work understanding the puzzle today rather than actually solving it

I’m sure there must be a cleverer way of doing Part 2 today, but I just made a coffee whilst my workspace was running instead :-)

Alpkit?

Ride to the Mountains [Womens]

Not managed the last two days in vanilla FME thus far, have had to resort to using PythonCallers. Day 11 I’m pretty sure is possible, not sure about Day 12.

Glad to have something a bit easier in FME for Day 13.

We started off with a kurgo harness, with a tether that slides over a seatbelt and a back seat hammock. Enough movement that she could sit up/lay down but restricted enough that she couldn’t join us in the front

Doing this kind of thing in what I imagine FME to be sounds horrible

Yesterday’s was really straightforward in FME as it was essentially a spatial problem and FME was initially developed as a tool for spatial data.

E.g. part two I just had to create a grid, discard the squares with 9 and dissolve the remaining squares together. The dissolve transformer helpfully keeps a count of all dissolved polygons, so then just keep the largest 3

I’ve got all the stars for days 1 through 10 in FME which is an improvement on last year. I had to resort to a pythoncaller within FME for part 2 of one of the puzzles by this stage last year.

Pleasantly surprised that my part 1 solution today led nicely into part 2

Loved today’s puzzle, right up my street.

You don’t need to complete a day to go on to the next so you can always dip in and out.

My solution today feels clunky but not sure I can make it any more elegant in FME