Yesterday after I posted, I took Sunny outside and discovered it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was. The rain had cooled things down a bit.
So I took the woofus for birthday WALKIES!!! It was so humid that it felt like we were swimming and when we got back my clothes were as wet as if we had been, but Sunny loved it.
I love the little critter, but his taste is more than a little questionable! It was his birthday, though, not mine.
Today is Sunny’s seventh birthday.
His original family knew his birthdate because they were there, and it was the daughter’s seventh birthday. So they were able to tell me.
Unfortunately it’s too hot and too rainy for WALKIES!!! The best I can do for the little guy is keep him in my air-conditioned bedroom and give him treats.
In a week we start home-buying classes together. Yup, that’s we. Sunny is allowed along, so hopefully I can be less stressed at the class. He’ll love it. WALKIES!!! and humans, two of his favorite things.
Hopefully this time next year we will be in a house of our own and will have room to actually frolic a little, if it’s not too hot to frolic and he hasn’t given up on it because of his age. If not, well, we’ll sit in the air-conditioning again and feed him woofy treats. I’m sure he’ll still like those.
Sorry I have nothing inspired to say. My muse may be on vacation with the rest of the Western world.
Sorry I didn’t post last week. My internet connection went out the day I wanted to post.
Lately the weather has been too hot for WALKIES!!!, so in my free time I have been renewing my acquaintance with Homicide: Life on the Street. The network that ran the show (NBC) was continually fighting with the producers about how depressing it was, but actually I find it less depressing than the usual TV fare. Homicide didn’t cop out until the very end of the series (the final movie). Not all the loose ends were tied up. Not all the cases were closed. Of the murderers who were caught, not all of them were convicted, let alone punished. When at the end of season five, the network forced the producers to have the biggest bad guy of the series shot, they made it an illegal shoot by one of the central cast, and there was instantly another big baddie that stepped into the dead guy’s place. In short, Homicide played it like life plays it, no too-neat, happily-ever-after lies. There’s a lot of comfort in not being lied to, at least for me.
Unfortunately, it’s not a woofus show. Yes, Sunny watches TV, but he’s a very picky viewer and Homicide just isn’t what a woofus wants to kick back and look at when it’s too hot to frolic or after some intense WALKIES!!!
First, Homicide was originally conceived as (and with very few exceptions remainded) a cop show without gun fights and car chases. It’s very dialogue intensive. The woofus cares not for dialogue! Action! Give him COPS, with doors being broken down and people running frantically about. Better still, find some basketball. Football and baseball don’t move fast enough to hold his attention, but basketball Sunny can watch until a commercial comes on. If the commercial is a dog food commercial, then he can watch even through that.
That’s Homicide’s other and more serious failing from a woofy perspective: no dogs. In Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan reported that chimps prefer movies about chimps over movies about humans, so I suppose it should not have surprised me that Sunny prefers shows about dogs. Of course, watching him watch TV, I discovered that shows ostensibly about dogs actually spend less camera time with the dogs than their humans—Sunny’s attention wanders when there isn’t a dog on the screen—so the same is apparently true for humans, too. We watched “The Wolf Within,” a documentary about dogs, several times (unfortunately now lost to the Video Mold Catastrophe), and he loved that. It had mostly dog footage, plus wolf footage, which Sunny found very fascinating. Whenever they had dog or wolf sounds playing, he’d tilt his head, just as he does when he’s trying to figure out what I’m yammering on about. I wished I could ask him if he knew what in particular the sounds were trying to communicate. It was a great hour for the two of us. Sunny also enjoys shows about bears; I remember one documentary about a pair of hand-raised polar bear cubs, and Sunny couldn’t get enough of watching them swim around. I suspect, though, that Sunny doesn’t know that the bears on the screen aren’t dogs. He cannot, after all, smell them, and scale is distorted when it’s just bears and vegetation.
Now that I don’t have Animal Planet, though, and I am only watching shows that I like on DVD or tape, Sunny doesn’t have much use for video. He will sometimes sit next to me while I’m watching, but mostly he tries to distract me from the show, and if he doesn’t succeed, he wanders off to pout. I have tried to turn my Homicide viewing into Sunny-tummy-rub sessions, but it doesn’t seem to be enough for him. Last night, he was being extremely pesty, and wanted me to stop watching the video. “Just let Mommy finish the episode,” I tried to soothe him, but he wasn’t having it. Finally, he got drastic. He knows how Mommy feels about any woofy physical contact with the laptop, but he was so annoyed that he flopped a foot onto the keyboard.
The screen went black, the window minimized, and Gee was cut off mid-speech. The disk popped out of the drive. With typical Sunny luck, his random keystroke had connected with the eject button.
Maybe I should get back to converting those Wishbone tapes to DVD, huh?
