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Charlotte's ways of acting out
Wednesday, November 8 2023
This afternoon I managed to get the dogs to come with me on a walk up the Farm Road that then cut over to the Stick Trail, where I found enough wood to assemble a backpack load without having to cut any more. Unfortunately, this wood wasn't dry enough for immediate use, so most of it ended up in the rearmost tranche in the woodshed.
With regard to our new dog Charlotte, good news is typically followed by bad new, usually because she'd do something in defiance of the rules after several days of obeying them. Today things were a little more complicated; I went to the end of the Farm Road (where it meets Dug Hill Road) to check the mail (since our mailbox is across the Dug Hill Road from its intersection with the Farm Road). Charlotte followed me, and when I crossed Dug Hill Road, I told her to "stay!" Happily, she seemed to know what that meant and did not follow me. So when I came back with the mail (which included a temperature logger that had been misdelivered to Morgan Hill Road), I made a point of praising Charlotte. But she's such a freak that something in my praise cause her to suddenly want to run away from me, and the place she ran was into the road. She stood there looking at me while shouted "Charlotte, Come!" But she did not come. Eventually she ran down the road a hundred feet or so and went back to the house via our driveway. (I've seen this before, where she's been in the road and it would easiest to come back via the Farm Road but she goes to our driveway instead, since it's the only way she knows.) Charlotte seemed to distance herself from me even more than usual, and later I found she'd managed to grab the data logger, remove the cardboard box it was in from its bubble wrap envelope, and then destroy that box (though, thankfully, she didn't damage the actual data logger; I'm not the sort of person who cares about the boxes that things come in). That's exactly the kind of thing she does when she's acting out. Later she took it a step further by ripping the spine off a hardcover art book that had been in the shelf of the teevee room's coffee table.
At around dusk this evening, I cut down a mid-sized semi-skeletonized chestnut oak west of the farm road. The tree was leaning against another, and I didn't manage to bring it all the way down. Instead, I cut three pieces (each long enough to make three firewood-length chunks) from the bottom of the trunk one after the other, letting the tree fall each time that much further down. The last of these cuts grabbed my saw, pulling it out of my hands and ramming the side of its bar against the ground with full force of the falling mass of the the rest of the tree. This was an enormous force, and I expected the bar to be destroyed or at least partially bent, but it was completely unaffected. [REDACTED]
This evening our friend Fern and Nancy (from down in Old Hurley) came by for a small dinner party. It was a weird gathering in that Gretchen never offered alcohol to anyone, which is something I've never seen before at a dinner gathering. The main dish was a pasta with a cauliflower and a white sauce, served with unusually well-cooked kale. It was taking our house a long time to heat up despite my constant stoking of the fire, so we ate the whole meal in the teevee room. Most of our conversation was about Charlotte (who was presenting herself to our guests as friendly well-adjusted dog). Early in the evening Nancy told the story of her sister almost falling prey to smash-and-grab thieves in Mexico City and then Gretchen updated everyone on her new job advising an AI on how to better write and critique poetry.
Charlotte and Neville on the Farm Road today near home.
Click to enlarge.
The bluestone wall I built back in 2019 as it looks today, viewed from the south.
Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile "River" where it crosses the Stick Trail.
Click to enlarge.
Ramona's grave, encircled now with pinecones.
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Sally's grave beneath a mountain of pine cones.
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