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limits of parsley
Sunday, March 25 2012
More then two weeks of misplaced summery weather were scheduled to end today, as the cold air approached, I burned through a large accumulation of cardboard husked from recent UPS and USPS shipments. (The Makerbot alone had made a huge contribution.)
It was now the fourth day of looking after the household in Gretchen's absence, and the responsibility was starting to wear on me. Even our normal-scale household, with its five mature cats and two mature dogs, can be a bit demanding. There's always someone with a need, either for a warm lap, a lump of wet food, a little attention, or distraction from boredom. But now that we also have Ramona, an active ten-month-old puppy lacking in discipline and canine common sense, I was starting to feel frazzled. Some of this came from just the constant distraction of Ramona playing with Eleanor, either in the distance or underfoot. But then there were the nagging silences, when I'd wonder what trouble Ramona was getting herself in.
An example of the sort of trouble I had to worry about: I caught Ramona making muffled barks at our neighbor across the street as she gardened in her lawn. I told her that No, that's our neighbor, and she stopped. So then I went inside and was puttering around only to hear the barking again. When I went outside to look, I saw that Ramona was now standing in the middle of Dug Hill Road barking enthusiastically at this same neighbor, who was now less than 50 feet away from her. Oh yes, and a car had just driven up and was forced to stop because Ramona was blocking the road. I yelled "No!" and "Ramona Come!" and she immediately returned, but now I had a new thing that she is capable of doing to worry about.
Gretchen returned from Maryland in the early evening, having stuffed her car with two carts' worth of groceries from Trader Joes. After helping unload and put all that away, I took the dogs down to Ray and Nancy's place for a dinner we'd been invited to. I'd actually hoped Gretchen would want to go and would go in my place, giving me some "doggy alone time," but after five hours of driving, she was in no mood to socialize.
Sarah the vegan and Ray had made a number of salads, some cooked, and some raw. I usually like meals down there, but today the food wasn't resonating with me. Part of the problem was that there was way too much parsley on the couscous, making me gag a little even to write about it. Ray had also made cucumber-and-mint cocktails, which were a bit weird at first but that I slowly grew to like.
The plan for the evening was to watch a French horror film, but the version Ray had downloaded via bittorrent lacked subtitles, so we ended up watching part of a Korean film on Roku instead. (Ray and Nancy are among the very few people whose chief entertainment screen is still standard-definition; even my mother has an HDTV at this point, and I didn't even buy it for her.)
The dogs (including the two enormous Labradors Sarah has been housesitting) had been crazy at first, but by now they were sleepy and had settled down.
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