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Neville chews on a deer head in the cold Wednesday, December 16 2020
This morning on the conference call with our Ukranian outsourcers, Roman, who is the main project manager in the Ukraine, said he'd stayed home to avoid the icy streets and that his "husband" had slipped and fallen and broken an arm. Later Alex and I discussed this, and wondered if it were really true that Roman had a husband. Alex said that if Roman is gay then his (Alex's) gaydar is most definitely broken. I agreed; Roman doesn't read as gay at all. On top of that, it seemed unlikely that gay marriage is even a thing in Ukraine [it's not]. I said I didn't think it was easy to be gay in Ukraine, and Alex was inclined to agree. But perhaps the issue here was one of language. Maybe in Ukrainian, "husband" and "wife" are the same word [apparently not]. Or perhaps a man referring to his "husband" could mean the male spouse of his sister.
This morning Neville found something very exciting in the forest: the body-less head of a deer (it appeared to be a doe). Perhaps it had been shot by a hunter illegally (since does are only rarely in season) and field dressed to avoid legal ramifications. In any case, Neville couldn't get the head through the pet door, so he gnawed on it in front of the old dog house, the place where I store dry pine needles. It was miserably cold outside, and Neville would've probably had a better time had he taken the head into the dog house. At one point I approached Neville with his jacket, hoping to get him to wear it. But he just stood his ground and growled at me. I didn't want to get bitten, so I bided my time. Eventually, though, Neville was so miserably cold that he had to come in. He brought the head to the front door and dropped it outside the house and came in. Then, while Powerful had him distracted, I put the head up on top of the woodshed, where I've put other Dr. Neville & Mr. Guard morsels. Without the deer head in the picture, Neville immediately returned to being the sweet dog he usually is, a transition that always seems to come as a great relief to him. Ramona, who'd been freaked out by his behavior, came down out of the laboratory and sniffed his face to find out more about what he'd been gnawing on.
A big snowstorm was predicted for later today, so Gretchen had taken the Subaru to Woodstock for her bookstore shift. Meanwhile, I was doing what I could to beef up the indoor firewood supply. I bucked three fat pieces of the red oak I'd recently cut down west of the Farm Road and carried them home individually in my arms. I then cut down a small dead chestnut oak and carried pieces of it home. I also brought home a six-foot-long piece of dry chestnut oak that was about eight inches in diameter. Once cut and split, all this wood nearly filled out all available indoor firewood storage capacity (which is about a fifth of a cord). If there's much snow on the ground, I won't be salvaging firewood for awhile.
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