Ooh, where to start?
- Dogs. I hate dogs. I'm not afraid of them, honestly; I just really, really don't like them. Maybe I got scared by a dog jumping up at me as a kid; I don't know. And I know exactly what you all mean about people thinking it's ridiculous when you back away from a dog that's sniffing all around you and jumping up at you. The number of times I've heard "He only wants to be friendly!" Well, I bloody well don't want to be friendly to it!
Yesterday I went out to get the post and the huge, uncontrollable dog from across the road ran over to me. Now, this dog is referred to by some of our neighbours as the 'village idiot'. It's not trained and completely ignores its owners. Normally, I avoid going outside if I see this dog around anywhere, but yesterday it appeared while I was already out. So, of course, I got dirty paws and dog-slobber all over my coat, as well as a huge, horrible dog throwing itself at me while I try to back away. Owner shouts for dog to come away. Dog finally gets bored about three minutes later.
. - Toothache - oh, Yvonne and Rat, you so have my sympathy! Been there, know how it feels.
Eighteen months ago, I was out in our back garden laying out hoses to water the grass - I was walking down stone steps to get to the lower area, and tripped. Fell forward, flung out my arm to break my fall and then just lay there in agony for a couple of minutes. Got up, couldn't use my right arm, and I was spitting blood from my mouth. I have no idea how I managed to get myself back to the house, and I was very lucky that my husband arrived home ten minutes later. He took one look at me and went pale. My mouth was all bloody, my face scratched and bleeding, and one of my front teeth was half-missing. Literally half. The tooth itself was bleeding badly. My arm, as it turned out, was broken at the elbow, but the hospital could do nothing with the tooth. I had to wait until the following morning to see an emergency dentist, who actually did a fantastic repair on the tooth - supposedly temporary, but I still have it. I love codeine. The hospital gave me Tylenol 3 (30mg codeine on prescription) for my arm, but it numbed the tooth as well. The dentist couldn't understand why I wasn't climbing the walls in agony, until I told him about the codeine. 
In the UK, by the way, guys, you can get Syndol over the counter - that has 10mg of codeine and that really helped with a painful tooth I eventually had root canal work on.
My biggest irritant this Friday? Dealing with recalcitrant authors in a ficathon I've co-organised in my other fandoms. It sounds easy: people volunteer to write stories, you assign them prompts suggested by other people and you give them at least a month (in this case, two months) to write the story. Stories were due on 31st October. Some people asked for a week's extension: fine. Others made no contact at all. I spent an hour last night writing to those authors, and now I'm getting excuses like 'I forgot', or 'I never got the assignment' - with that last one, I'm wanting to yell and ask why on earth she never
told us that she didn't get it?
*makes self calm down*
Hope all the tooth-pain goes away soon!
Wendy
