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If you start counting the 24 hours from midnight, then I'm usually up once or twice during the night with the dogs. I'm either letting one of them out or, if it's a full moon or the squid boats are out fishing with those glaring lights, they start barking. I shut them in if it's a full moon, but then I have to face the consequences in the morning.
I get up at 6.30, let my dogs out and the other puppies come rushing in. I have five dogs of my own - Midge, Goldie, Inky, Holly and Beanie - and at the moment I also have Topper, Beezer, Jaffa, Corky, Sammy, Samantha, Cindy, Spike, Amigo, Gizmo, Blanche, Dusty, Jill, Brewster, Katie, Ginge and Exel - who's called that because he's extra-long. That means I'm down to 22; before Christmas it was 27. Yesterday I homed three puppies, and the day before I homed two. They all have names, of course.
Since October I've had two houses next door to each other. When the neighbours moved out of the house next to mine and I knew I was going to have foster dogs, I thought it was better to take over the house and not annoy any new neighbours. The other house is bigger than mine and the idea was that I'd move into it and the foster dogs would live in the little house with a helper. But the way it's turned out I'm still living in the little house with a selection of dogs, and the big house is unoccupied apart from the other dogs.
The doors of the big house are kept open at night, so when I get up the dogs are all waiting outside the little house - in fact they're hammering on the door. I go into the kitchen, put on the kettle for coffee, and start clearing up the newspapers. Hopefully, the little dogs have pooed and peed on them. Brewster now likes to go out for a pee, so I have to carry him outside and stand guard while he whirls around the garden, sniffing what he has to sniff. The big dogs would beat him up otherwise.
Then I feed the dogs. Some of them hate each other, like Brewster and Spike, so they have to be in different houses. It's really funny: dogs have as many likes and dislikes as humans. In fact, it's more pronounced because they have fewer inhibitions about showing their feelings. I wanted Dusty and Blanche to play together but they wouldn't. Then Jill was depressed and I brought her into the small house to be near me, and Dusty and Jill became best friends. Now Blanche is depressed. She sits in her box at the far end of the kitchen and only comes out when I'm in the bathroom: she has bathroom privileges.