Oh how I want to be free

Bit of Queen for you this morning. You can’t beat Queen if you need a Monday morning boost. Here’s my favourite cross-dressing mustached man with a vacuum cleaner for you

I most love this video because of Freddie Mercury dancing. Who doesn’t love that?!

I have to confess I don’t know what happened the last couple of weeks or so. I’ve been insanely busy as per usual. Last week was one of those weeks where you don’t seem to achieve anything. I made lots of phone calls, spent a lot of time sorting things out, but don’t feel like I got anywhere.

I say that and I’ve spent the weekend managing the notoriety of one of the refuge dogs. I did a post for Bob last Friday… and Bob went viral! Three million views, seventy five thousand shares, offers of homes from the UK to the Philippines, from Canada to Australia.

It’s also true that Bob has now made the average number of shares to find a home skyrocket. Now I’ll have to say ‘On average, a dog needs 3000000 views and 50000 shares to find a home.’ Thanks Internet. You just made my job insanely hard.

I ran the advert together on Friday afternoon and it just seemed to take off. Forty or fifty shares by tea-time. Seventy thousand views by bedtime, and eight thousand shares. When I woke up on Saturday morning, Bob’s post had been shared over ten thousand times and he had two hundred and fifty thousand views. That just got silly. I spent all Saturday evening trying to manage the posts. He has four hundred comments!

So if you saw Bob on Facebook, or you shared him… whooooo!

It was silly that he’d been at the refuge for a month. He’s a great dog.

Admittedly, it’s not the kind of content you want to go viral. What’s the point in three million views when the vast majority are out of the country? Even though the post clearly said he was in France, I did spend a fair few minutes explaining to those people who’d not read it that he wasn’t available for adoption in Australia or Canada. Well, not easily anyhow. Plus, there must be Bobs in shelters there, I’m sure of it. And then when he was reserved, there were still loads of people sharing him. Oh well. I got what I asked for, in spades. Who moans about going viral?!

I then spent the best part of Sunday morning realising that people from all over the world were now liking my Woof Like To Meet page and I had to go through and add ‘FRANCE’ to every single photo I had up. It does say it everywhere, but even so. Then Facebook had a fit because it didn’t like me copying and pasting, or adding ‘adopted’ where appropriate and it blocked me from posting on my own profile for a few hours – which was slightly frustrating! People were trooping through all the photos on my timeline and asking who dogs were that I’d snapped in March. Oops! Nothing like a panicked clear up, is there?

That about sums up my crazy week.

I spent a lot of it on the phone trying to sort out ghosts in the machine. Orders that had gone awol. Post that hadn’t arrived. Emails that had bounced or not bounced. I suspect my hotmail account is having a meltdown, but I can’t have been the only one as I got a group email on Thursday about a meeting on Thursday night and it seems that a few people didn’t get it, or got it late. Luckily, by that point my diary chaos had left it free and we ended up chatting til the wee hours. You know it’s going to be a long one when the drinks come out after the work has been done. We’ve been working on the new refuge website. It’s going to be absolutely amazing. I’m just crying at the length of the list of the photos that need redoing over the next couple of weeks before the site goes live. The Hope Association have just bought some fancy new gear for the refuge that I can’t wait to trial once I get all the other bits as well.

Some of my time was just faff time. Like the fact that my car has had a fault light on since last week and although I’m fairly sure that the good people of my lovely local garage have fixed what’s causing it, the fault light is still on. I’m pretty happy that they got what they should have (or that they would have said ‘Bloody hell! Your exhaust is falling off and hanging on by a whisker!!’) but it still needs a diagnostic. My bike is busted too. Lucky I have legs.

Other faff time was just the inordinate amount of publicity I did for things last week. No wonder Bob went viral! Very heavy on the charity stuff though and not so good for paid work. I worked like a demon though. So much so that I’m sure that’s how I burst a couple of blood vessels in my eye. Yes, that’s how hard I work.

On top of that, Wednesday morning found me shoulder-deep in a flooded manhole trying to turn off my water to see if the leak that had turned into a small stream outside my property was coming from my side (and therefore my cost) or the side of the water board (and therefore their problem and their cost) Happily, the men that turned up said it was their side and if they fixed it or not, the leak has stopped. Still, I had to go and round up more clients for a market we’re doing in September and I hadn’t showered. I don’t know what they thought of the smell. At least my arm was clean from the immersion whilst I tried to find the stop tap.

Worse still, I have no idea what happened to my diary last week – and all my clients seem to have been the same. I missed an appointment and then I turned up for another when they were still away. I’m very glad I wasn’t the only one to have diary malfunctions and email malfunctions. I ended up with a rescheduled-reschedule that drifted from Monday to Wednesday, then weather conditions meant what I was doing on Thursday got bumped to Wednesday so I bumped the rescheduled-reschedule to the only time we both had free – my sacred Friday afternoon, which I did not like very much but the next time we were both free was going to be two weeks on Monday! No wonder last week’s diary ended up with more crossings-out than usual. I think there was quite likely a universal mishap bug going about. I went to do photos on Thursday afternoon at the refuge and ended up waiting for the vet instead as there were so few volunteers. It’s kitty season so all the kitties in foster families got to push in first. It’ll be my time next week so I shouldn’t moan.

A week where I should just have stayed in bed, I think. Design work, photography, website innards, adverts, car malfunctions, oil changes, air filters, diary issues, weather dilemmas, appointment changes, forgotten appointments and cancellations, viral dogs, puppy returns, kitties in every room I have with a door… Perhaps Freddie is right. Life still goes on. No wonder I want to break free! Roll on September where I get a bit of order again.

Bet you never thought I’d be saying that!

I had kind of hoped to launch the book ‘Finding Shelter’ this week, but I’ve not finished the final edit, or putting photos in. That’s this week’s task. I’m going to ride the Bob rollercoaster and hope that some of those 500 people who’ve liked Woof Like To Meet this weekend might buy a copy too. Might as well take advantage of Bob’s notoriety. I think I’m going to call him ‘The Dog That Broke Facebook’ and he could have a series of photos like Kim Kardashian’s ‘Selfish’. ‘Doggish’ by Bob the Labrador.

Anyway, have a good week. If anyone needs a job (no pay), Bob needs a social secretary.