Labour Day

So, today is Labour Day here in Spain and unusually, it coincides with a UK bank holiday. I’ve mentioned this before, but in Spain, they celebrate the holiday on the day it falls. So last year it fell on a Sunday, so as shops don’t open on Sunday, people didn’t have the extra day. But instead, when a holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, they have a ‘bridge’ day on the Monday or Friday and that apparently evens things up over the course of a year. I’ve never tried to work it out, however I guess it must do so, as people don’t complain when a holiday falls at a weekend or suggest the system is unfair. Perhaps I’ll work it out one day…

Talking of different ways of doing things, they also work out the number of days in the month differently – they count on their knuckles. I think they count the months with 31 days on a knuckle and the space in between is a month without 31 days. They count on one hand and when they get to the last knuckle they start again – and that’s obviously July and August. I’ve just tried and it worked out, so I think that must be right.

Ian posted a nice photo of Horace and mentioned about Horace attacking legs. This is very funny. He only does it where he feels safe, which is mainly in the bedroom where he has his little bed. When we put him on the floor he becomes like a little demon – lunging at any (human) leg and attacking it. It’s play fighting, and very funny, but I’m not sure we’ll think it’s so funny when we are wearing shorts in the summer.

We’ve been trying to encourage Horace to attack our legs in the living room too. At the moment Horace isn’t confident to go over to Ian’s side of the room, so we’re trying to entice him with Ian’s nice attackable leg.  Encouraging a dog to attack your leg is probably not found in many dog training guides.  I did realise, again, that the trick with very special need pets is to do the opposite to what we ‘should’ do when training a dog.

I’ve been thinking about this and I think it’s because with a dog like Horace, we need to get him to engage with us, so we need to do things to encourage him to engage, so when we see he likes something, we encourage it (it’s made all the more difficult with Horace because he doesn’t like food). However, with a ‘normal’ dog, part of the training is to get them to NOT engage with you. So I guess is makes sense what we do. I know when we had Herbie we used to give him a little bit of food from the table. Something we never do because it would just result in mayhem. However, with Herbie who was completely blind and deaf with an unknown past, we needed to do things like that so he realised that he was with nice people, and to encourage him to come to the table.

It rained at the weekend, so this might mean that there’s a strong finish to the asparagus season! Can’t believe that it’s almost over for another year already…