The Wrong Dog Blog

With the weather getting cooler, I have been trying to master the fine art of tofu baking. Well, that and the high price and high fat content of the baked tofu at the coop have inspired the tofu baking. At any rate, I’ve been running my oven more. I don’t use it much: ovens are pretty much for baking meats (so far I’m no higher up the food chain than fish), casseroles (usually with a wheat-based pasta and/or cheese, both of which I’m allergic to), or breads/cakes (also wheat based), so there just isn’t much call for it in my life.

About fifteen minutes or so after the oven would go on, the woofus would go nuts. I’d put in whatever it was to bake, go back to work, and in fifteen minutes or so, until I finally took the food out, Sunny would be at me, pawing, whimpering, trembling. My first guess was that he wanted the tofu I was baking (he likes tofu), but when I cooked salmon on the stovetop and he didn’t react, I began to wonder. A woofus wanting baked tofu more than some version of DEAD ANIMAL? Unlikely.

But there was a problem: I believe I have mentioned that I am a recovering clutterbug. My hated mother’s idea of house-cleaning was to assign each of us a task or an area, leave us to do it, and when we thought we were done she would come and “inspect,” by which she meant let us have it about how lousy a job we did. So “cleaning = trauma” is the equation in my subconscious, and my stove needed to be cleaned before anyone came to inspect it. It took a couple weeks, what with needing supplies to be got in and with my working the night shift, but finally yesterday, Helen and I had a counseling/cleaning session in my kitchen. Helen says that I try to clean too perfectly. I’ll try to keep that in mind in future.

With my newly cleaned stove, I called the utility company this morning. They thought I was a little nutty calling entirely on the basis of a dog’s testimony, but they can’t mess around with possible carbon monoxide poisoning so they sent a serviceperson. He also was dubious about the “call from a dog,” but he listened to my story and then pulled out his gadget and turned on my oven. We waited about ten minutes while the oven heated up and the gadget showed slowly increasing levels of CO, with occasional downturns. My CO detector went off for the first time. Sunny started getting trembly and whimpering. “What’s the matter, boy, think we’re trying to poison you?” the serviceperson asked. Sunny went on whimpering.

In the end, the serviceperson’s summation was “Good job, dog!” He tagged the stove and turned off the gas to it. My landlord is being informed that he must replace the stove or get it cleaned so that it burns more efficiently. One can’t help but wonder how long that will take. Meanwhile, I languish for lack of cocoa and miso.

Sunny continued to tell me about the CO for sometime after the serviceperson left, but we went down to the Biscuitwoman for some well-earned woofy treats and now the little guy is having a nap to recooperate from his stress. He knew that oven wasn’t safe, and his nose was better than the supposed CO detector that’s been sitting in my apartment all this time.

The moral, once again, is take your woofus seriously. Odds are that there’s something really going on and your monkey senses are insufficient to realize it.