Recall training and Irish Stew
Did I mention how much I love Sundays? Oh yes, I think I did. This Sunday we have mostly been slobbing around and having a go at a bit of recall-training with B. This has proved very funny. J has given me a few tips to prevent so many occasions when B has realised that she’s free and buggered off for the next few hours. Central to this training is the need for B to WANT to come to us when we call her. This is achieved by the stashing of treats in pockets and then calling her, even when she’s on the lead, and giving her a treat when she comes. Trouble is, B has consumed several hundredweight of treats today and is now permanently glued to our sides, with a bad case of the burps. This, as you can imagine, makes recall training difficult: ‘B, come here! Oh, you’re here already…’ I think it’s called recall training for that very reason - she recalls the fact that you have a treat and spends the rest of the time standing on your shoes whilst simultaneously trying to climb into your pocket.
Ah well. In the end we stalled training for a big slap up Sunday lunch of the usual epic proportions. I think I told you how lovely Irish beef is and today I used it again (a huge pack of stewing steak already trimmed cost me E2.99!) to make a lovely stew complete with huge, fluffy dumplings (no jokes, please). For pudding, seeing as everyone wanted lemon cake but I’m getting a bit bored of it, I did lime cake instead, which was still rather nice. Mind you, the sugar syrup that you pour over the top was a tad..er…evil made with lime, and we all made some pretty silly faces whilst eating it. Nice though.
This evening we’re heading to the school as #2 (surprisingly, if you knew #2 - he’s more Motorhead than Mozart generally) is in the final of a poetry reading competition. Unfortunately, he’s got to have his school blazer and tie on (oops, I knew there was something I’ve been meaning to buy) and yesterday evening when he told us (as well prepared as ever) it was sadly too late to go out and buy one. So we’ve hatched a plan: we’re going to get to the school a bit early, hide in the bushes by the front entrance, and leap out on the first child that looks the right size, knocking him on the head, dragging him into the bushes and stealing his blazer and tie. Or we could just borrow one. We’ll decide when we get there.