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sick of booze and pot doesn't work
Thursday, April 7 2016
On another respectable loop through the forest involving the Farm Road and the closer half of the Stick Trail, I felled and bucked up a smallish piece of very dry oak. It came to 54.5 pounds of great just-in-time firewood.
By noon, nearly all the snow had been burned away by rapidly-climbing temperatures. At some point those temperatures reached into the 60s and I flung open the front door. Later, though, a strong wind came out of nowhere, and it was soon followed by the kind of April showers that purportedly bring May flowers. (When I was a lad in Virginia, those showers usually came in March and it was the flowers that came in April.) I'd known the rains were coming and had brought in the indoor firewood rack from the south deck. It contained only a few sticks of firewood, which in a normal April might be enough to heat the house for a week. But April is erratic this year, and I'll be spending a week of it in Los Angeles, so I want to restock the wood rack.
With that in mind, I went into the nearby forest just west of the Farm Road with my big battery-powered chainsaw and bucked up a bunch downed Chestnut Oak that I can come through and pick up on another occasion.
Normally my personal self-enforced decadence rules allow me to drink as much booze as I want when Gretchen is gone for the night, but she's been gone so many nights now that I've grown kind of tired of drinking. I've also noticed that marijuana has almost no effect on me; what little effect it does have isn't worth the stress to my still-not-fully-recovered lungs. (I still cough up phlegm resulting from that illness of over a month ago.)
This evening after dark at some point I happened to notice that the dogs Ramona and Neville weren't in the house. So I went outside with flashlight to have a look around, hoping that if they were snuffling in the leaves across the road I could at least bust them and make it into a teachable moment. (Neville recently met the yappy little dogs at That 70s House across the street, and they actually seemed to like each other.) But I didn't see the reflective collars or eyeshine of either dog anywhere. Occasionally I could hear barking off in the distance, but it was infrequent and I couldn't get a lock on the direction it was coming from. There's also the fact that Neville's bark is still a little unfamiliar to me. It resembles Eleanor's bark back in her prime, but it's more mouthy and houndlike. Ramona's bark is deeply menacing and easy to recognize, though she doesn't bark as much as the others.
Eventually I figured out that the barking was coming from somewhere behind our neighbor Andrea's house (across the road about 800 feet to the northwest). So I silently walked over there with my flashlight, turning it off as I crept across the lawn of one of the neighbors I've never really met. Sure enough, there was Ramona at the base of a tree, whimpering about some creature way up in the canopy. I couldn't identify it, but it had orange eyeshine and was probably a Raccoon (we were very close to the place where I'd once disposed of a Raccoon corpse for Andrea). Neville was nearby, but he was just there because of his adoration for Ramona. Ramona had come for the wild animal, and Neville had come for Ramona. I picked up Ramona (she weighs 70 pounds!) and carried her some distance homeward, and led her from there by her collar (I didn't have a leash). Neville, who just wanted to be wherever the cool kids were, followed along. The only complication was an inevitable truck passing us while we were using the road to walk home. Neither dog is particularly smart about moving vehicles, but such vehicles tend to drive slowly near our house due to Dug Hill Road's most treacherous curve.
Back in our driveway, I sat Ramona down and pleaded with her to please stop teaching Neville bad behavior such as prowling the neighborhood at night. It's something Gretchen and I have tolerated with Ramona (since she does it infrequently and we find her kleptomania adorable), but she needs to be setting a better example for her new brother. Ramona looked me in the eyes with serene attention (the kind that Adderall gives to children with ADHD) and seemed to understand what I was saying, but the proof will be in her future behavior. While I don't believe that dogs can successfully parse English sentences for all the nuances of their meaning, I do believe that they understand the content and implications of social situations, particularly when interacting with humans and other animals they know well. In this case, I felt that the request I was making of Ramona was obvious from context in a way that she could understand. Where I have my doubts is that she has the impulse control to carry through on the promises her eyes seemed to be making.
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