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sometimes you have to do nice things
Thursday, January 23 2020
Gretchen will be gone until Friday night, meaning the dogs will have been home without anyone in the house for four entire workdays. They don't seem to mind sleeping all day on the bed and then getting a sundown walk in the snow when I get home, but I still feel guilty for not spending more time with them. So today I decided to break up the monotony by bringing them both to work, even though I knew they would make me regret it. Sometimes you have to do nice things for others even if it brings you some grief. I knew that today wouldn't be a particularly stressful day for me at work, so if I was going to bring both dogs to work one of the days this week, today was a good day for it.
When I got to the office, there was bag of trash that was no longer in its can. I knew that it would be too much of an attractive nuisance that way and that one of the dogs would probably start tearing through the side of it in hopes of finding a half-eaten chicken patty (though I never do this, it's not uncommon for others to only eat half their lunch and then throw the rest in the trash). So I left the dogs in the office while I took that bag (as well as another from an overflowing can) to the dumpster. When I got back, Neville was licking the remaining grease off a compartmentalized plastic clamshell, the kind sandwiches with fries are put in when ordered as takeaway. He'd had trouble opening the clamshell and had had to brute force it in the way that dogs always do: by tearing little bits of it off until he'd opened a hole he could get his muzzle through. Fortunately, this was an easy mess for me to clean up.
When we took our big walk at around 11:00am, things initially went well, even though Neville didn't seem to like walking in untrampled snow.
But after we passed the solar panel farm and went into the woods, Neville caught a scent and seemed in danger of charging off in some direction (and off my mental map of the area). I eventually grabbed him and carried him some distance and then put him on a leash, which I let him off as we drew near the building complex where my workplace is. At that point he immediate went running back out into the field and got going on some different trail and I had to go catch and carry him a second time. It was exhausting, and I was in a sweat by the time I returned to my desk and sat down.
The third walk of the day is the last one and is usually pretty short. I often time it so it coincides with one of my several afternoon piss breaks (which I can usually do in the woods). Today, though, as I was using a large water tank to give me the privacy I needed to urinate, Neville went snorting off on the wooded ridge separating the grassy lowlands from the back of the Agway. And then, inevitably, he ended up in the Agway. I went running around in hopes of retrieving him near the Agway dumpster, but in doing that I somehow lost sight of him. Ramona was good through all this and stayed with me, but Neville was completely lost, and (as you may recall) he is terrible at responding in any way when called. To limit the moving objects I needed to track, I put Ramona back in the office and set out on my own to find Neville. He wasn't in the back, and he didn't seem to be in any of the buildings that are open to the outdoors. I tried asking the Agway's hulking lummox (all such places hire one of these) if he'd seen a dog, but he didn't seem to hear me (or he was frame-jacked to a much slower clock). But then there was Neville, trot-trot-trotting towards me across the Agway parking lot. I will never know where he'd spent the previous several minutes.
On the way home this evening, I went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store. This was the first time I would make it into the store in over two months. Amazingly, though, it had accumulated nothing in all that time that I had any desire to purchase. There were a number of obsolete WiFi routers that they were trying to sell for $30, and there was still that old cassette video recorder with the $20 price tag, as well as other unwanted odds and ends (locksets, wireless landline phones, and various old bits of stereo equipment) that have been there for months. Had Rob still been running that place, you can bet those WiFi routers would've either been priced to sell ($2) or thrown in the dumpster. It's amazing the difference in utility one employee can bring to a thrift store.
Tonight went similar to last night, though I drank less booze and I ate an enormous Dagwood sandwich instead of pasta. My fascination with the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case continued, and I watched the final two episodes of The Act, the Hulu original series.
Ramona and Neville near my desk in the office today.
Obsolete $30 Routers, a wireless phone, some paint, and an air pump that nobody wants at the Tibetan Center thrift store today.
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