A couple of weekends ago now, I had a Proper Weekend. For the first time in ages, a Saturday and Sunday were blighted neither by an excessive hangover nor unreasonably crappy weather and were filled just so with pleasantly engaging activities. If it didn’t feel pompous to do so, I’d have gone right ahead and called it ‘beatific’.

Ash had been invited to a barbeque on the Saturday in a small village called Dirleton, a few miles west of North Berwick, for her boss’s birthday. It was taking place at a nearby beach called Yellowcraigs, and it seemed cruel to leave Maisie the Dog behind in the flat while were off gallivanting in the dunes and munching on barbequed burgers, so we decided to take her with us in the car.

The only snag, of course, was that Maisie gets motion sick. Voluminously so. On the very first car journey we took with her, driving back to Edinburgh from the dog rescue centre in Dumfries, she lurched around the back seat like a seasick muppet and glumly yakked her way through a series of technicolour yawns. We stopped each time to clean up the mess, and as soon as we pulled away again she would start panting, then drooling, then perform another stripey laugh.

We tried her in the car again a few months ago with similar results, although by then we knew the signs and hastily pulled over each time it looked like things might go awry. I was not overly optimistic, then, about the forty-five minute drive out to Dirleton, and it was with some trepidation that we coaxed Maisie into the car on Saturday afternoon, whereupon she curled up in a pathetic ball on Ash’s lap and gazed mournfully around at nothing in particular. We opened both windows, set the fan to blow a cool stream of air over her, and set off.

And miraculously, Maisie was fine. She fairly bounded out of the car as soon as we’d arrived and fixed us with an accusatory stare from a safe distance, but within seconds she was back to normal and bounding off after her tennis ball. We found the barbeque in a hollow between the woods and the sea, said hello to the various archeologists and heritage types in attendance, and settled in for a couple of hours of random chat+burgers. It was a relaxing afternoon: Jeff and Devon arrived a while later, guests of Ash’s boss’s husband; we overdosed on burgers; we blethered about nothing in particular, and, to Maisie’s great consternation, we wandered over to the beach to throw the ball into the water for her.

We were getting ready to leave when a boy of maybe 5 or 6 came over to us and held out his hand for Maisie’s ball-chucker thing.

“You want to throw the ball for her? Sure, okay.”

He took the launcher in two hands and walloped the ball off the ground. It bounced away in the direction of the barbeque with Maisie charging after it.

“Er, you might want to not throw it quite so hard…”

Maise came trotting back and after a bit of persuasion, dropped the ball at his feet.

“Sit!” the kid bellowed at Maisie, who was a little taken aback.

“And you don’t need to shout,” I tried to tell him. “She’ll sit down if you just—”

“Sit!” he bawled again, for good measure. Maisie sat.

And so, for the next little while we tried to curb Connor’s (for that was his name) enthusiasm and minimise the psychological damage meted out to Maisie in the process. Eventually the ball was getting just a bit too wild and Connor’s demeanour was heading towards that staring-eyed, foot-stampy enthusiasm that immediately precedes someone getting hurt.

I knelt down to call time.

“We’re going to go now. Can I please have the ball launcher back?”

Connor conveniently forgot how to speak, and evaded my eyes. The adults in attendance looked at each other, foreseeing a tantrum. Not wanting to be seen to be wrestling a five-year-old for control of a plastic stick, I tried a different tack.

“Okay, how about we take turns? You’ve just had a go — can I have a turn?”

Connor fixed me with a cold, dead stare and said:

“It’s. My. Turn.”

His Mum arrived shortly after that and tutted him into handing over the ball launcher, thank God. We collected Maisie and bolted for the car.

* * *

The rest of the weekend was a genial amble through a series of untaxing but enjoyable activities. On Saturday night I watched the England-USA game over at Jeff and Devon’s, complete with Bud, snacks and snarky Eurovision-style commentary, and on Sunday I took Maisie out for a walk in the glorious sunshine before a leisurely cycle and finally collapsing in front of the box for the Canadian GP. Good times.

Things have been quiet of late; not boring as such, but to borrow and roundly abuse a mathematical metaphor, the graph of excitement against time is smoother than normal even as the integral of said graph is somewhat greater. Dog ownership enforces more responsibility and regularity on life even than I’d expected — who stays in tonight with Maisie because this pub or that pub isn’t dog-friendly? Who walks Maisie this morning/lunchtime/evening? Who’s dog-sitting this week? — but the rewards are worth it. Our furry friend appears to be happy in her new home.

Other than hound-related activities, the last couple of weeks have been anticipatory in nature. A prelude, if you will, to greater things. The band is limbering up for a 15-hour recording session in Lofi Studios in Glasgow this Thursday, wherein we will commit the bare bones of our putative album to some sort of electronic recording medium (doesn’t have the same ring as “tape”, does it?). Charlie, the selfish bastard, has of late been off enjoying himself on a variety of work jollies and holidays, and so I must admit to a certain degree of trepidation. We’re not bad, we’re just a little rusty. Time — 15 hours of it — will tell.*

Looming alarmingly over all this, though, is that which is gradually coming to occupy all of my conscious thought: I’m off to Vancouver for three months starting at the beginning of June. My work has signed up to place an on-site support/communications person in our customer’s office for a trial period of a year, and I’ll be taking up the reins when Dom finishes the first stint during the first week of June. I’m see-sawing back and forth between enthusiasm and guilt at the moment, what with the promise of sunny days and mountain biking in the Pacific Ranges balanced out by having to leave Ash and Maisie in Edinburgh. Ash & I are planning a holiday (a drive down the West Coast of the US) when my time in Canada is up, but of course this means that Maisie will have to be left with some understanding friend or relative for a further fortnight. I feel bad already.

And that’s it really; The Project lumbers onwards whenever Maisie has fallen asleep, exhausted from herding tennis balls around the living room, when the band isn’t reheasing, and when we aren’t enthralled by the terrible spectacle of Prison Break becoming the worst TV program ever made.

God we rock.

* Although having said that, a rather rocking practice last night (relaxing Crossroads jam ahoy) has assuaged my fears.

Enter Maisie the dog.

We picked her up from Dumfries & Galloway Canine Rescue Centre a couple of weekends ago, having made the trip a week previously to meet some of the centre’s residents*. Ash’s first choice — Leo, a rottweiler/German shepherd mix of distinctly Satanic aspect — was, tragically, already reserved, and so we were introduced instead to a ten-month-old puppy named Zara. She was the (half-scale) spitting image of Ash’s dog Reuben, rescued as a puppy from Dahab on the Sinai peninsula, and I think that worked rather strongly in her favour.

We took Zara for a walk up and down the driveway to the centre, and threw a ball around for her in the paddock out front.

“We’ll take her,” we told them when we came back. How could we resist?

We spent the following week convincing ourselves that we could make enough time for her, and that we had enough dog-loving, work-shy friends† to help us out with taking care of her during the day. Having never owned a dog before, I was wracked with doubts, but Ash reassured me that everything would be fine so long as we changed her ridiculous name.

“Laika,” I said immediately. “She has to be Laika”.

So, Ash we named her Maisie. Aliases thus far include “May-Z” and “Willy Mays”. Further suggestions are welcome.

She seems to have settled in pretty well; she’s a relatively easy-going sort and we’ve been lucky enough to have had plenty of time to keep her busy and get used to her new environment. Devon and Jen have both been great, taking care of her on those weekdays when we’ve been unable to massage our flexi-time hours into some sort of useful form, and in fact just about all of our friends have been instrumental in keeping her occupied and getting her socialised with unfamiliar people.

We’ve managed to teach her to sit and stay more or less on command, although thus far it does rely on being visibly in possession of something she really, really wants — a tennis ball from which she can strip the fur, a stick from which she can strip the bark, or a treat which she can grind up, drop on the floor and then hoover up — and we’re working on some more tricks like “come”, “heel” and “hammer time”.

I am officially now a Dog Person.

* The journey down to the centre is great — winding, tree-lined A-roads and then a thoroughly alpine cliffhanger of a drive skirting the Devil’s Beef Tub near Moffat.

† I kid, I kid.