Another half day of greyhound-sitting this week. Apart from occasional bursts of manic activity, she seems admirably lazy (I see why people compare them to cats). Here she is relaxing (?) after having refused to go for a walk:
The trail camera I ordered finally arrived, and the first night I put it out it picked up a pair of badgers passing through the garden. And some impressive weeds.
On Thursday evening I got a phone call from someone up the road who’d found a friendly hungry cat wandering round and thought it might be Shadow, but when I went to check it wasn’t her. They seemed pretty convinced it was a stray, but couldn’t take her in as they had several cats and a dog and nowhere to shut her away, so I said I’d take her for the night and find out whether she had a microchip. I went home and got a cat carrier, at which point she suddenly became a whole lot less friendly, and shut her in the utility room (which she also wasn’t too happy about) with some food and water and a litter tray.
I took her to the vet on Friday morning and it turned out she did have a chip, so they contacted the owner to go and collect her. Apparently she only lives just round the corner from where she was “found”, so clearly not a stray at all. Hopefully she’s not too emotionally scarred from an unexpected night of incarceration!
A bit of a bike-run-bike type weekend. Ipswich parkrun was cancelled yesterday because of travellers on Chantry Park, so a few of us rode out to Alton Water to give that event a try. It made a nice change, although I didn’t do a great job of saving my legs for today’s race, finishing in 21:36. Then today we got back on our bikes to head out to Woodbridge for the post-covid return of the Ekiden Relay. This is a great event in which teams of six run a marathon as a relay on a 2.5km loop (the legs are 7.2km, 5km, 10km, 5km, 10km and 5km). About 150 teams take part, from pretty much all the running clubs in the area (our club had ten teams across the various categories).
This year was the first time I got to run the 7.2km leg, which meant (a) it wasn’t quite as hot as later in the day (but still boiling, as is traditional), (b) I didn’t have to stress about being ready at the right time to take the baton from the previous runner, and most importantly (c) half an hour after the event started I was free to indulge in ice cream, beer (an extra incentive to cycle there instead of driving!) and the mountain of cakes etc that people had brought along.