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At Home 11-20-09
By Milt Abel | November 21, 2009
| November 21, 2009Typical Oregon weather today, sunshine is only a thin pamphlet wedged into a bookshelf of rain, clouds, and wind. Cold too. The kind of day meant for reading, but everything on the shelf looks dreary.
Not all gloom though. Tonight I enjoyed some old-time media. Our local high school’s football team, involved in the state playoffs and at an away game, was being broadcast over the internet. No video, but a live play-by-play announcement from local-market sportscasters who contained their partisanship to commercials and updates from other playoff games, the rest of the time their team was talented and aggressive, and we were lucky and suspect. The game was a win for us, and “an inspiring effort all season” for them.
It was fun to listen to the game in front of the fireplace, playing Scrabble with the wife; the kind of evening you go to work for, so you can come home to, and getting both ‘blanks’ in the game made my Scrabble play ‘an inspiring effort.’
Nothing’s perfect. We have two dogs; one I love and one I hate. It’s not easy for me, being a parent of three kids, to be so partial to one and so dismissive of the other. I’m exuberant in greeting the dog I like; “Hiya Boy!, How’s it going, eh? Yeah, good dog!” petting and stroking him, and the the other will come up and he gets; “Oh, it’s you.” Everybody in the family wanted a second dog but me. I travel so much that my vote was reduced to counting as less than one, and now we have a dog that I hate. It farts and snores, so it’s able to bother me even while unconscious. Very early this morning I couldn’t sleep from its snoring so I left to sleep on the couch -shutting him in the basement has caused more disturbance than me just relocating myself, but even then there’s no escape. He followed me downstairs and showed his love and devotion by laying next to the couch and farting and licking a paw that been bothering him, repeatedly. There’s something unnerving about hearing a dog licking himself, with my eyes closed I think of automatic car washes, that section with the soap-soaked ribbons of outdoor carpeting dangling and jerking back-and-forth, slapping against your hood and windshield, this is what comes to mind when a large dog rhythmically licks himself nearby.
He’s got a thorn or cut on his paw and it’s been bothering him for a couple days now. He so big it’s hard to get a good look at the thing, and my wife knows that any expense with a trip to the vet for an inspection will be a hard sell. I regret getting too excited when we discussed his hurt paw, if I had a tail I’m sure it would have been wagging when I asked, “Do you think it could be fatal?”
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