Zumbador
Masha du Toit, #writer of #ScienceFiction and #Fantasy, living in Cape Town, South Africa. #Autistic, Afrikaans, and #nonbinary 🙂
Post about #ThingsISaw, #SPCADiary for weekly walks with SPCA dogs, post book reviews, am fascinated by #etymology, love #cycling, foster pet rats #RatFosterDiary, fan of #criticalrole. #fedi22
Aren't they *gorgeous*?
This is Stormy and Smokey's last night with me, their mom is coming home from holiday tomorrow. I've washed and folded all their hammocks and packed their bag.
I put my hand inside that hammock and both of them immediately started giving me a gentle manicure, holding my fingers firmly between their little paws and nibbling on my nails. Big, soft, warm, good natured potatoes.
It's done.
All the family letters and photos have been sorted. I started on the 9th of May!
Today at the SPCA I walked Roxy, Rex and Fran.
Fran is doing much better! She's much more confident. A volunteer was walking another dog, a small brown puppy called Scooby, and the two of them played through the fence. Just running up and down and doing play bows. I think that's got to be so good for them.
Scooby was fascinated by one of the cows in the field next to the dog run. The cow was interested in him as well. Scooby kept running at her, sometimes barking, and she'd respond by waving her horns at him and occasionally pretending to charge him.
He'd run away in alarm and then immediately go back to her again. I'm pretty sure she was just humouring him.
There are a lot of interestingly named dogs in the Adoption Block at the moment, including Potato Chips, Miss Puddle, Bumblebee and Best Ears Boy. Who does, indeed, have the best ears.
I didn't get a chance to walk any of them though. Maybe next week.
New non-apology variant I noticed today:
"About that thing that happened the other day: It's a pity that we had such different perceptions of events. "
😬🫠🤪
One of the other foster-rat people just shared these photos of the baby rats they're looking after. They are TINY!!!!
And I'm going to meet these little guys on Monday. I can't wait. They're not coming to me, I'll be visiting the person who's fostering them. I'll be dropping Peanut and Raisin off with her, and she'll take them to the courier, who'll ship them to their forever home in Johannesburg.
In other news, Raisin has just started running on the wheel in their cage. Hopefully Peanut will do it too. They're such high energy girls and I've been worrying that they'll get frustrated in their cage. They get free roam time outside their cage at least once a day, but that's not really enough.
I've just heard that there's someone wanting to adopt Peanut and Raisin. She's in Johannesburg, so these two little hooligans will be travelling via courier.
I'm going to miss them. The last few days they've really started to trust me.
Peanut and Raisin are telling ghost stories this evening.
I think the writer of a short story I just read might not be familiar with analogue clocks. They refer to the clock's hands as "clock arrows".
Which kind of makes sense I suppose!
Today at the SPCA I walked Roxy-Lee, Matty and Trudy.
Sophie's been adopted!
Roxy-Lee seems sad and a bit stressed. She didn't want to play with me.
Trudy is a gangly puppy, about 6 months old. Wire-haired, white with brown splotches, medium small and fine boned. I realised quickly that she's an ideal candidate for agility training (constant focus on me, and very food driven).
So I tried to get her to run over the little A frame in the dog run.
At first she was scared. I put a treat on top of the A frame, out of her reach. She sat. She stared at the treat. She stared at me. It was like she took off a mask. Her "I'm a good girl, please love me" manner dropped away and you could almost hear the little gears turning in her head as she puzzled it out. I just waited, giving her space.
Then she carefully climbed up the A frame and got the treat. After that it was easy to get her to run up and over. She's been applied for, so I probably won't see her again.
#SPCADiary #dogs
I don't know if any one else will find this as funny as I do. This is the colour dialogue of a kaleidoskope drawing app. It reminds me of the "web safe" palette so many years ago, and its many shades of virulent green.
(the app is called "Doodle Kaleidoskope" and it's a lot of fun, if very buggy. It's my favourite way of calming myself at the moment. So sooooooooothing)

