You can take my lasers and my twinkle, but you’ll never take my trek!

Here in our part of Ayrshire the last fireworks sounded about four days after Bonfire Night, and we should now be free of them until the New Year. Their affect on Beanie didn’t pass quite so quickly however; for about a week after she remained very sensitive to sudden loud sounds and her fear of beeping noises was re-awakened.

Unfortunately it was during this period that Susan consulted my help in setting up a new app for her phone – a timer to help her with interval training exercises. I use the same app when I’m running, and without thinking I configured its settings to match my own, including my choice of sound to indicate the end of an interval. Called “Laser” the sound is, as you might expect, a short electronic “zap”; I find this noise is hard to miss, even if loud music is playing in the background. As I demonstrated the app to Susan in our living room it was flat out impossible to miss, because it was immediately accompanied by a scared Beanie trying to get on to my lap. It took a few seconds for me to realize what had happened, but when I did, I stopped the timer and dived into the settings menu to find a sound less scary to little Beagle girls.

I came across various titles as I scrolled through the options until, finally, I landed on the most innocuous name possible: Twinkle. I could quite understand that after sitting through hundreds of end-of-the-world sci-fi movies with me, The Beanster might have cause to fear “Laser”, but surely nobody – even someone with really big floppy ears – could be afraid of something called Twinkle? Well, it wasn’t as terrifying as Laser, but it was still pretty unsettling. I decided to quit while I wasn’t quite so far behind and ended the demo at that point.

A few days later Beanie even reacted to noises on a repeat of an original Star Trek episode which she has sat through many times before, and at that point I publicly declared her fear to be silly and unacceptable. I don’t mind having a ban on lasers in the house, or even twinkles, but my right to watch old Star Trek episodes is sacrosanct. Oddly enough Beanie seemed to understand this and her beep-phobia has gone into remission once again.

On a different note, after all that driving around to distant hills and lochs I’ve rediscovered the joys of walking round our local park. Amazingly this was the pups’ first visit in maybe a year, so there was lot of re-sniffing to be done, along with rolling, stick chomping, and of course woofing (but only as a parting shot to big doggies that were safely on lead as we passed).