Well I spent Sunday doing a makeover of the downstairs kitchen. Alan was away in Modena meeting up with his old Motoclub friends and so I thought I’d take the chance to move things around a bit.
In mid Changing Rooms trance, I suddenly realised I hadn’t heard our English Setter Gassie for about an hour and a half since letting him into the garden. He’s normally very vocal and comes and goes while the other two dogs sit patiently and watch his antics. This time there was a suspicious silence but when I called him he came inside wagging his tail. All was well, or so I thought.
This morning as I passed by the lean-to we have next to the garage I saw why he’d been so quiet. During one of his obsessive lizard hunts he had managed to rip apart about ten plastic bags of carefully stored woodpellets for our pellet stove as he tried to catch his prey!It was total mayhem in there.
It took me about three hours to tape together the broken bags and to collect up the loose pellets. I Googled what to do with spoiled wood pellets as they turn into sawdust at the slightest touch of damp and weigh a ton. There was surprisingly little on the Internet apart from the fact they make great cat litter or horse bedding, but as I don’t have a horse (yet) and the amount on the ground would have kept a colony of 100 cats happy for weeks, I decided to compost them. Back and forth I went for it seemed like hours and then tried to mix it in as best I could and hope the rather surprised worms liked sawdust.
Ironic really as I was just telling Alan how well we had done to have so many bags left over from this winter. I did reflect on the sweet irony of phrase which had captured my heart when I read the appeal for poor abandoned Gassie on the internet. It went along the lines of ‘All he wants to do is sit by the fireside and rest his head on your slippers.’ It didn’t mention there would be no fire in the fireside stove as the dog would have flung the fuel to the four winds in his mad hunt for reptiles. Oh well. I still love him to pieces despite his funny habits and you never know, pellets might make great compost.