The water was afroth at the Pond this week.
Blowfish stomped on my very last nerve .
According that graybearded puffball even minimal civility is a struggle.
Visions of blunt force trauma have danced through my head.
Very creative trauma too, in wonderfully vibrant K9 ish colors.
This gets complicated.
Maybe boring .
So don't feel like you have to read my wrath.
Saturday I went on a cooking spree. I do this from time to time. I cook up pots and pots of my favorite comfort foods and package them in vacuum sealed , space age plastics for the freezer. I do this more often in the Winter because I need comforting more in the winters.
This Winter seems particularly hard cause the snapdragons, pansies, violas and dianthus I plant in all the big pots around the Pond to cheer me thru the Winter are absent this year.
Blowfish came home one day in late Fall with some chemical in a bottle you hook up to the hose for cleaning gutters and such. He did a great job on the gutters but he didn't read the warnings about hazzards to living things like plants and animals and......well , there are no potted plants this year. I even had to dump all the expensive dirt out of the pots and bag it like toxic waste.
Anyway,
I was up and out early buying ingredients and hauling them back to the Pond. Usually Blowfish helps get things unloaded and hauled into the house, but this time he didn't. He was reading and seemed a bit broody.
"You okay Blowfish'? I asked
No answer.
"Are you ill" ?
A big puffy sigh before the Blowfish said," Listen Fishy, not everyone is a morning fish. Not everyone wants to haul 50 grocery sacks inside before the first cup of coffee is fully savored and the paper is recycled."
Well, okay.
So I set about doing all the hauling, unpacking, sorting of those 50 sacks. Blowfish came on into the Kitchen to investigate the scheduled productions: pasta sauce, three meat chili, chickenfishy, vegetable beef soup and roasted rib split pea soup. He asked a few questions about the schedule of events. I explained I wasn't cooking for the day, I was cooking for the freezer. He puffed up a bit but finned on out of there without comment.
I decided I would season up the spare ribs and get 'em ready to go in a hot, hot oven. That way they could be roasting while I washed and chopped a mammoth amount of veggies. It wasn't too long before Blowfish came back thru asking about the good smells. I told him he was just smelling the onions grilling . He sniffed and commented it smelled like more than onions to him but went on back outside to tinker with his tools.
When those ribs came out of the oven they were perfect. Crusted on the outside, juicy on the inside and smelled wonderous. The Hound was half a house away, out on the deck standing on her hinds to look inside and was sniffing the air between the yowls. Blowfish came in and said,
"What's the matter with that Hound"?
"Rib envy" I speculated.
Truth is, Blowfish looked about the same as the hound; leaning over the counter and breathing in big. He started to reach toward the pan when I brandished my wooden spoon thru the air.
"Those ribs are going in my pea soup" I reminded.
Blowfish gave me a stern look and said,
"Fishy, I am having some of those ribs right about now. That's a half a rack of prime spareribs there and all of em don't need to be in your damn soup".
"My DAMN soup?, don't you mean my wonderful soup"?
"What kind of fool puts ribs in soup!" he yelled.
I paused, something was definitely wrong with Blowfish. I mean, there he was standing in the Keep looking snarky and yelling at me about some ribs and cussing my soup.
" Are you really going to stand there and tell me what to do with my ribs"?, I asked.
"If you have a powerful hankering for ribs why not just be polite and ask if there's enough ribs for the soup and a Blowfish snack? Why get crazed about it and ,will you please do something about the dreadful noise coming out of that HOUND !" By now the hound was hurling her body at the door and making enough racket for the neighbors to be wondering if they should call 911 about a murder in progress.
Before I finished getting the words out of my mouth Mermaid was on the cell phone calling to tell about the hardships of life in an icestorm. I left the kitchen so I could hear my child rail about the vagaries of Mother Nature and the many complexities of dealing with large animals confined by weather, etc, etc.
As I came back downstairs I was thinking Thank God Blowfish did something to quiet the Hound. As I entered the Kitchen I noticed immediately the ribs had been reduced in number by about a third. Well, I thought, I am not going to war over a few ribs, I have cooking to do.
So I happily scrubbed , chopped, stirred and cleaned for an hour or more. I got things to a point where I could leave the pots on low heat and went to start the weekend laundry. For once I was actually enjoying the domesticity of the day.
When I came back to the kitchen, there were just 4 ribs remaining. Not enough for the soup and now I WAS thinking about going to war. I made my way outside for the confrontation only to find Blowfish wasn't playing with the tools. So I wandered around til I found him out on the deck drinking an icy cold beer and feeding rib bones to the Hound.
"Stop"!
"Blowfish, you can't feed rib bones to that dog! Good grief, that animal has the most touchy digestive system of any living creature on the planet! If it doesn't kill her I guarantee you it will make a ginormous problem to deal with directly'!
Blowfish took a swig of his beer , puffed up a bit and informed me he and the Hound were bonding. He knew exactly how she felt about rib depravations. He mentioned he had fed table scraps to all his dogs his whole life and there wasn't any reason he couldn't or shouldn't do the same thing with this one. What did I think animals in the wild ate? I clearly did not know what I was talking about and ,by the way, those were the best ribs ever.
"How many ribs did you give her?"
"All of 'em"
"All"?
" Yep. I ate the meat, she ate the bones. Bonding is good".
"Yes well, we'll see how bonded you are in about an hour"
I figured I knew what was wrong with Blowfish, he'd clearly lost his mind.
I left the deck, returned to my domestic activities and turned on a movie.
About half way thru the movie I heard the most godawful noise. Made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I started running before my brain could even process the source of those ever increasing dreadful sounds. As I was running toward the Garden Room door to the Deck I saw Blowfish come rushing from the far side of the Pond. I flung open the door but stopped just in time before opening the storm door. Blowfish wasn't as quick.
The Hound!
That poor Hound with the touchy tummy, was keening like a wounded animal. Spinning round and round like a whirling dervish and just slinging the spew from her backside like the psychedylic paint machines at the fair. It was a pitiful site. That animal was suffering something fierce. I yelled thru the door for Blowfish to help the dog while I phoned the vets. Blowfish looked stunned as the psychedylic decorations from the Hound sprayed over newly painted house walls, windows, railings, doors ... and Blowfish.
If there is no bleeding said the vet, then she hasn't perforated anything so you need to give her some doggy pepto bismol stuff and a tranquilizer. I could barely hear her the keening was so loud. I went to tell Blowfish I was off to the vets to pick up injectable medicines and would be right back.
Well,
we got the hound medicated to a nice calm on all fronts. Gave her a bath and even snuggled her up to a hot water bottle to aid in soothing her terrible tummy ache. When the drama was over and the dog was settled I got up and went inside. I did not say a single word to Blowfish during all that drama except to say, hold this or that .
I was on my way to the shower when my cell phone rang.
It was Blowfish standing at the Deck door on his cell phone.
"Fishy", he said "Are you coming back outside to help me?
There's quite a bit of cleaning up to do and I need to come inside and get squared away myself"
I could not believe my ears. I marched over to the Deck door and stared that Blowfish in the face while informing him he was not setting foot in my house, I had locked all the doors . I also informed him the clean up was his duty, not mine . I went on to say once the house was sanitized he could call me back and we'd negotiate from there.
I red phoned him and headed back to get a shower.
My phone rang, I turned it off.
The back doorbell rang, I didn't answer it.
I made it upstairs and stopped to peak outside. Blowfish was looking as tired and gray as that bleak winter day. He was just standing, looking forlorn and confused . He didn't look bonded to a damn thing besides his own misery. I suspect he was trying to figure out how he and the house came to be covered in dog muck. Eventually he will figure it out and I'll unlock the doors.
