Not once did I wake during the night! Until the alarm announced it was 04:30. I was out and about searching for a pair of shorts with pockets. One for my phone and another for the other remote controller. Now that I have five remote collars, I’ve divided the dogs between the two remotes. Isabella, Skinny and Obi on the 1,200m one with Charlie and Oskar on the 400m. With both controllers combined, I can technically work with nine dogs assuming I had nine dogs and nine collars. We’ll assume that situation will not/never arise. The good thing about the old controller is that a dog is assigned a button so it’s a matter of simply pressing the appropriate button. The bad thing is that there’s a knob which selects vibrate or the stimulation level and this applies to all the dogs. With the other, more sophisticated controller, it’s not possible to assign a button for a dog. It requires the dog to be selected on the screen and then to press the required action: vibrate, stimulate at the set level or stimulate at the set level +2. The vibrate is to get the dog’s attention and comes with a command. The stimulate is in case the command is ignored and the plus two is to make your point under more challenging conditions. Also, each dog’s stimulation is preconfigured as some are quite sensitive but others less so.
Today we completed three circuits of the Promontory as the plan was to allow Skinny off the lead for the final part of the river walk and the seashore section. He’s walked nicely with Isabella so now he needs to show he can do the same with all the dogs. As I’d hoped, he didn’t disappoint, playing energetically with Isabella but also not sloping off on some mission of his own.
I’ve concluded that VGD has been moved to another location away from the compound gate as now all we get from him is the occasional distant and slightly muffled woof. If one didn’t know he is a soppy bugger, one would be careful about entering the compound.
The river walk, other than being partially in darkness, was without incident although it’s still quite sticky and muddy at the lower end of the river near the sea. The brief showers of today will not help that either.
I cycled to Paleochora to complete the other half of the shopping begun yesterday. Today’s excitements included, cabbage, potatoes, carrots and a couple more sweetcorns as they looked good. All heavy stuff to cart back.
The morning was disturbed by getting the Doggy Dinners ready and a couple of visits to the central kitchen to extract items from the large fridge. It’s easier to have the things I need accessible in my own fridge rather than try to cram it all in. Bona had emptied the fridge/freezer and was cleaning it. She then started on the larger, former display fridge but didn’t know which items had been left behind by departing customers. It might have been a cunning plan to go round the customers for them to take their items and put them in the other fridge deciding to empty it. But…
In the end, there was a mixture of unknown items all crammed into the much smaller fridge/freezer and no room for my stuff which is now in my own fridge.
Janne and Erica were preparing to leave as I came back with the dogs as they have been on a walk from Sougia to Paleochora. They caught the ferry from Paleochora and walked back via Lissos which is a worthwhile visit.
They were unable to buy a Chromebook from Chania yesterday but came back with another printer/scanner. I have inherited their old device so I will see if it works more reliably with the Mac. I do almost no printing but the occasional scan is useful and I have a load of old photos which require culling, sorting, scanning and then binning.
There has been a general packing up of the bar and restaurant which has necessitated a number of visits to the storeroom next to me. As expected, the operation requires quite a bit of shouting so the dogs were initially quite barky. The current situation is that Isabella has her collar on, Luis his bark collar and Oskar his collar on. The others have remained reasonably calm. From the cameras, I can see that most of the furniture has been removed from the restaurant and bar areas so it’s now a matter of packing away the bar and winterising it. The few remaining kitchen staff have been giving the kitchen a deep clean and I can see that the freezers and fridges are empty now that the kitchen is in darkness. The camera stares at some boxes stacked on the nearby racking. I will ultimately take that camera and mount it externally so I can keep track of what’s going on in the lower part of the camping.
With the main offenders immobilised it’s funny to watch how they react. Luis keeps leaping to his feet and rushing off to bark at something then remembers the bark collar so utters the slightest woof which he knows won’t set it off. Isabella goes to join him and runs into the same problem. She sees me pick up the controller and knows I’m going to go directly to stimulate bypassing the vibrate phase.
The DDs are ready and we’re coming up to dinner time so Isabella is very fidgety!
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