And I Thought Life In One Place Might Be Boring

Still in Wisconsin at my parents' place, all enjoying a visit from my sister, nephew, & dog-in-law (brother-in-law had to work). The nephew and the dog provide most of the entertainment. I think time spent with them can best be summed up in small snapshots. Like this routine morning: the nephew (17 mos.) taunting the longsuffering dog with its leash, hanging on throughout the resulting tug-of-war, and refusing to let go even after the dog wearies of the game and simply departs, hauling him across the floor face down. My sister, seeing his legs slide past horizontally, sighs and says, "Timothy, stop bothering the dog."

The dog did have its little revenge while we were all out. This is a very good dog while you're around, but then when you leave it figures no one will ever know what it's doing as long as it hears you coming back in time to get off the couch. The problem with this belief is the evidence sometimes left behind, like the little shreds of plastic on the floor today that used to be wrapped around a whole pound of turkey on the counter. Turkey, you understand, being the one meat that causes this dog to emit the most amazingly foul varieties of flatulence you have ever been around. I mean like in the old episodes of All Creatures Great And Small where the dog would lurk under the buffet table at a party and clear the entire room. Even the whole pound of butter she consumed last time - wrappers and all - didn't do anything like that. (Didn't do much of anything at all, really.) Years from now, i suspect, this dog might be even more legendary than my wife's old dog in New York, the vomiting epileptic one, where all their relatives eventually just stopped coming over cuz the dog bit them all the time. So all in all, today was a pretty good day for staving off boredom. Not that i've ever really had time to be bored around here.