Newshound Ady & Flo www.sunlive.co.nz

I like going to The Shed. The Shed is where cool things happen. Only me and the boss are allowed in The Shed.

It's a man-and-his-dog sort of place where we fix things and make things and talk quite a lot of complete rubbish.
Only men are allowed in The Shed. And their dogs. Although I'm not technically a man, but she-dogs have exemptions in sacred places such as The Shed.
God forbid anyone who is not a man or a dog turning up in a shed. Although I quietly suspect there's been a cat or two in there. A blanket with Ralph on it (no self-respecting dog would be called Ralph) and the initials CM, which I believe is possibly Chadwick Maulder, carved in blood into the rafters alongside the skeleton of a rat, still with a very surprised look on its face.
Anyway I digress. The Boss and I were having a great day in The Shed. We'd powered through the List of Things to Fix and were up to the exciting part.
The List of Things to Make. I was getting a bit boisterous while the Boss was trying to focus. I don't think the bourbon was helping so I decided not to have any more.
No, he was having the bourbon. I was just being naturally boisterous.
So the Boss suggested I might like a bone from the Big White Cold Cupboard.
This is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Not only does it produce an endless supply of bones, but it keeps them cool and fresh.
There's a smaller mysterious little chest next to it. The Small White Cool Cupboard – but I've never seen much interesting come out of there, but the Boss does a lot of jabber when he goes near it… about Woodstock. Must have been a great festival about that, cos he's always reminiscing about Woodstock.
Anyways, I was happily chewing on my very cold bone, with the Boss assuming I was well occupied, and he took the opportunity to create a masterpiece of something involving acres of canvas, some graphite rods from Steve's Marine and enough contact adhesive to assure Mr Ados a happy and well-heeled retirement.
All was going well, until a pesky fly buzzed my bone. Now Ady has taught me well. I have the German Pointer instructions etched into my Labrador skull.
'Don't let zer buzzing fly land on zer bone. Zee fly must die, at all cost.”
At that point, the fly left the bone, landed in the contact adhesive and had all six legs firmly glued to the canvas.
So torn between an insatiable drive to eat bone as fast as possible, and the instinct of a retriever, brainwashed by the obsession of a pointer – I ended up leaping off the mat, diving at full speed across The Shed, and landing in three acres of very tacky contact glue-covered canvas.
The fly parted company, leaving all its legs still adhered, and flew off somewhere that didn't require landing gear.
Meanwhile, one medium sized brown dog was stuck with enough canvas glued around my legs to have opened a small circus.
The Boss, not too happy, dived in to the conglomeration of dog, canvas, Ados and fly legs, to try to salvage the situation.
There was a great amount of flailing limbs and eventually we all extracted ourselves from the disaster, less one Croc.
It was firmly glued by its worn out sole to the mess.
The Boss sat on the floor laughing, while the fly buzzed around, without clearance to land. I was standing with tacky feet on the concrete floor, having a good whiff of glue and wondering why he wears Crocs anyway. They are a crime against fashion.
In the end, The Boss decided the whole episode could probably be sorted with a bit of solvent and more bourbon. The fly, we presume, is still flying.
So we switched off the Shed lights, retired to
the lounge and watched some dogs in ancient re-runs of Country Calendar.
Interesting stuff there, but I notice none of the dogs managed to eat a bone, pull the legs off a fly, sniff glue AND cure the world of a fashion disaster …. all in
one day.

- Flo