“Come too!” is all I ever hear from Pepper as she squirts out of two catflaps, jumps the garden gate and arrives beside me while I am walking to my car trying to leave for Lerwick.

I have choices – I can either put Pepper back in the house, which seems very cruel after the mahoosive effort she made to get here, or take her with me.

I opted for having some companionship along the way. It’s always nice.

We had three places to go and some shops don’t mind dogs. I do always ask beforehand though, as Pepper and lurk at the doorway.

At the Agricultural Feed Merchants, we met a very nice doodley-dog and they both instantly made friends.

Then to Commercial Street where Pepper didn’t drag me along as she is now wearing a Halti (anti-pull method) which looks horribly like a muzzle.   We delivered sheep to Jamieson’s Knitwear and a lovely random stranger offered to hold Pepper’s lead while I counted up the sheep and wrote a delivery note.

We stopped and talked to tourists off a cruise-ship and were shown photos of their dogs.  We concluded leaving our dogs behind during holidays was worse than leaving family!

And shops in Lerwick are pretty tolerant of dogs, which is wonderful. I do appreciate that very much.

Pepper’s behaviour was much improved since last time. She even sat in her crate with all the car windows wide open while I did a quick shop around Tesco’s. I kept checking there were no small orange dogs running around in the car park and, when I returned to the car, I gave her half my lunch (mini-Cheddars and a bowl of water).

She slept all the way home.

The Shetland ponies know the best way to my heart and the contents of my pocketses is to stick their hopeful noseys through the gate and smile.  We were waiting for the rest of the herd to arrive before I threw all my celery bits out for them.

Even Vitamoobag (on the right), though she did bite me when I didn’t open the gate.

I was not happy and ouch, it hurt which is proof Vitamin still has teeth that function well, thank you very much.

Waffle, of course, would never bite, which is not strictly true – he ate the zip on my coat and broke it on day 1 of its ownership.  It was never the same again.

And this sweetest little brown nose belongs to Newt who was standing on his tippy-hooves to reach.

But reach he did. Being small has its advantages.  He would’ve climbed through if he could.

Vitamin, now sulking because I had told her off about the bite, gave way to Waffle and Newt who quickly took over trying to seduce me into opening the gate early just for them.

How could I resist?

Once everyone had arrived, they had their celery.

Breakfast buckets next and after I was confronted by Tiddles’ best smile.

🎶Simply irresistable. 🎵

Fed up of watching Vitamin trying to break my electric fence by leaning over it, OH and I took action.

We built an electric fence to stop her.

I know I said in a previous blog that I didn’t mind Vitamin having the extra grass but I do mind her wrecking my fence, and my neighbour’s boundary fence. It had to stop. Enough was enough.

Obviously, like all things at Thordale, it was a family affair.

This is my neighbour’s boundary fence and you can see Vitamin has been helping herself and, while this fence is not perhaps in its first flush of youth, it is still a perfectly functional fence that is not helped by Vitamin’s awful habits and I noticed Waffle was working out how to lean over a fence too.  It had to stop.

When OH’s drill died, he went home leaving me to clear up all the old fencing stuff that was annoying me and was going to earth the new fence.

Finally cleared up, and I went up the hill to find Vitamin (and friend, Newt) whereupon I told her to cease and desist as she would get a nasty shock……

…. quite literally.

And then I went back to the track and set up the energiser with a brand new battery.  Bring it on Vitamoobag, bring it on!

Later on I noticed the fence was working very well.  Job done (and btw, the corpse is Newt).

Last night, while I was making my evening sheep, Lambie came a-knocking.

He was in a bit of a state so I told him to come in…..

….. And we could even talk about things if he wanted but I don’t think he was listening because the doorstep appeared to be a problem.

But, luckily, Lambie successfully defeated the doorstep demons and came in, along with a faint waft of pee.

Anyway, we had a long chat, well, I did most of the talking and he listened while we watched Private Practice together (I’ve moved on from sobbing my way through Grey’s Anatomy – too much death).

I also scratched his back for him with my back-scratcher (a long large fork from an old carving set). Lambie was much happier. I think he was just itchy, hot and being bothered by the flies (possibly attracted by the slight smell of pee about his person).

I know he will be happier once he’s sheared (hopefully looking at the end of the week) and I can also put his fly-collar on which will help.

The field grass is growing very tall now and causing my electric fences to earth and stop working. So today OH went out with his trusty strimmer and cut it all back for me.

I followed on behind him with a rake (and yes, I managed to step on it more times than I can think) and dragged back all the freshly cut grass out of the track.  I didn’t want the ponies to eat it.

Albie was transfixed by our efforts.

I feel sorry for the ponies, though, they live in constant sight of long green lush grass which they can’t have.

A quick pit stop by the electric fence unit and OH kindly put the newly recharged battery back which had been charging all night (the grass had grown over the solar panel so it could never recharge itself and had subsequently run down.). The ponies had never mentioned this.

But the fence wouldn’t work, so we abandoned that task and went back to strimming and raking all the way around the track.

I love this photo.

And this is the home-straight – the ponies stood and watched hypnotised.

You just know they are thinking “you’re doing that wrong”.

Job done and OH had to go racing up the hill to rescue his petrol tank as Albie had plans for it *** sigh *** oh, Albie).  It’s a rookie mistake to leave anything near Shetland ponies.

And then hours were spent by OH at the kitchen table successfully re-soldering bits of battery connections but, on a plus, I ended up with my own electric fence tool kit.

I put it safely in a drawer.  Now, it’s just a question of which one.  The fence is happily zapping on full revs with no earthing or problems all thanks to OH.