chocolate lady bugs - Thursday November 11 1999    

Today Kim went out and bought 40 chocolate lady bugs in preparation for the Friday night tantric workshop we'll be attending up in Los Angeles. She'd misunderstood a request that she bring "an offering," and had gone hog-wild, buying a lady bug for everyone in the workshop.

After an extremely successful but demanding day, I returned home to find that Sophie had climbed up on a chair and knocked the bag of chocolate lady bugs to the floor and then torn through the foil and eaten one. Like everyone else, I've heard that chocolate is poisonous for dogs, yet Sophie looked just fine to me. She was, however, incredibly guilty about the mess she'd made in the middle of the living room floor, hanging her head in shame even before I'd reacted. And when I sternly brought up the all-too-obvious error in her ways, she went away and hid under the bed for awhile. She was genuinely, touchingly, embarrassed by her own behaviour. I'm sure that if she only knew how she would have cleaned up the mess.

The initial impulse to knock the lady bugs to the floor was an entirely irrational one, driven by a dog's typically figgety oral fixation. As soon as she'd satisfied herself by eating a lady bug and investigating the other contents, she probably realized she'd made a terrible mess and that this wouldn't make for a pleasant homecoming when that cool guy Gus finally came home.