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brown burqa on Dug Hill Road
Thursday, April 25 2013
Yesterday's altercation between Eleanor and the cyclist had me worried about leaving Eleanor unsupervised this weekend, which Gretchen and I would be spending in Manhattan (we'd be there for her book release party and a number of other things). We had her wearing the collar that would shock her if she attempted to go near the road, but it would be best if she developed road-avoiding habits as soon as possible. And the best way to facilitate the development of those habits was to have her experience a shock. So I decided to try to tempt her into running out to the road by performing a spectacle there. This wouldn't be easy; if I were to, for example, ride a bike, she'd be able to see it was me. Or perhaps not; it frequently happens that she sees me in the distance in some place where she doesn't expect me to be and starts barking. With all this in mind, when I saw her lounging in the sun out in the driveway, I grabbed a blanket and snuck out the back patio door of the basement, crept through the brambles out to the road, climbed over the guard rail, and started walking up Dug Hill Road with the blanket covering me like a brown burqa. Things being what they are in our reality, a car passed me before I got to where Eleanor could see me, so I snatched off the blanket and held it under my arm so as not to create a distracting spectacle among my fellow humans. When I finally passed Eleanor, I watched her reaction through a small peephole. Ideally she would have charged after me, but she didn't even let out a wuff. It was as if she knew it was me and that she didn't even find what I was doing particularly interesting.
Later in the day there was an incident in which a couple Spanish-speaking gentleman came by with a chainsaw and cut up a fallen White Pine in the patch of woods across the road (administered by the Fussies II). This seemed to be a bit more interesting for both Eleanor and Ramona, though only Eleanor barked and neither went anywhere near the wire that would have triggered Eleanor's shock collar. Perhaps both of them were feeling sheepish about accosting people on the road, though I don't want to read too much complexity into what was going through their tiny wrinkled brains.
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This evening Gretchen had a hankering for tempeh reubens, but because we lacked tempeh, she made them with tofu instead. For cheese, Gretchen used some sort of fully-vegan Swiss-style "cheese" she'd made from scratch. I've eaten a lot of good tempeh reubens in my life, but the sandwiches Gretchen made tonight were better than any of those.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?130425 feedback
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