I am a long time lurker at Daily Kos. Damn near sixteen years now. Recently I joined after seeing a plea from Zen Trainer for a Wednesday Woozle blogger. I presented her and the rest of the PWB peeps with an idea for a different kind of Wednesday Woozles. A prose presentation of Wednesday Woozles instead of a pictorial Wednesday Woozles.
Never fear, pictorial Wednesday Woozles will be back. Of course if you could and would volunteer for that, I am sure that Zen Trainer would be forever grateful.
Prose woozles are especially easy for me as my VSOP (Very Special Other Person) gave me permission to copy her Ralph Unleashed stories. She retains the copyright. She is not Elizabeth.
But of course the rules first:
Pooties are cats; Woozles are dogs. Goggies are dogs, too, and moggies are cats. Birds...are birds! Peeps are people. PWB Peeps are Pooties, Woozle, Birds People. By definition, my goggies are the bestest in the whole world. No trolling the diary.
- If you hate pootie or woozle diaries, leave now. No harm, no foul.
- Share any and all pootie/woozle photos or issues that you would like .
- If you have health/behavior issues with your pootie or woozle, feel free to bring it to the community. We just may have someone whose experience can help.
- Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.
- There are some pics we never post: snakes, spiders, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated.
- There is no such thing as stealing a photo around here, but if you would like a pic from the comment threads, please ask the poster. He/she may have a copyright to those pics. Many thanks!
- It should not need to be said, but ANY/ALL photos that imply or encourage human violence against an animal will be considered verboten! Whether it is “comedic” or not.
It’s a Dog’s Life, but Your Goose is Cooked
Ralph stretched his legs leisurely and rested his chin on the arm of the couch. He loved the feel and the smell of the leather, and the addition of a few dog biscuits would be all he needed to complete the illusion of being in Heaven. Although typically he was not allowed on the furniture, he was there now because he and Arthur had the house to themselves. If Elizabeth were to find him in this position, she would give both Arthur and him a piece of her mind, and as far as Ralph was concerned, she really didn’t have enough of that to give away at random. Arthur was bustling around the house and every so often would pass by, depositing a quick scratch behind Ralph’s ears. Life was good.
Life was good not only because he was ensconced on the sofa, but because Arthur was recently retired and had more free time. Suddenly Ralph’s days contained more walks along the country roads and rides in the Ford, more sensory stimulation. Just yesterday morning he could have been seen, his head craned out the window, ears flapping in the wind, as he cruised down the highway in the Ford next to Arthur. He could have gone on like that forever if not for the swarm of Asian beetles they’d suddenly plowed into. Unable to close his mouth before contact, a bitter taste lingered even yet, and he still hacked up occasional bits of iridescent body parts.
For now though, he lounged in contentment, keeping a watchful eye on Arthur, should he need his assistance. He would love to be able to stretch his paw out as Arthur walked by and imitate the dog in one of Leo Cullum’s New Yorker cartoons he'd seen.
“Arthur,” he’d say, wishing he had opposable thumbs, “I’ll have a scotch and toilet water.” He’d never really sipped such a concoction but knew that he approved of half of the drink’s ingredients. Not that he was given to slurping out of the stool, but occasionally his water dish was as dry as a bone.
Yes, he was content. And he very much hoped that Arthur was as well, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Arthur had always been a man on the move. If drugs to counter hyperactivity had been dispensed when he was a child, his dosage would have been astronomical, and his parents’ lives would have been a bit more serene. But Arthur’s hyperactivity was a part of his personality that Ralph actually enjoyed. There was rarely a boring minute when he and Arthur were set loose on the world.
Ralph was not the only one glad of Arthur’s retirement. Arthur himself was feeling a sense of freedom like never before. All of the projects that filled his bucket list were now a possibility. His former career as an accountant had confined the hunter/gatherer in him to hunting data and gathering it onto spreadsheets.
While his day job had lacked an outlet for creative expression, Arthur’s fertile, if not well-regulated mind had continued to work over-time. One of his pet peeves had been to drive by the local commercial park every day on his way to work and note the vast number of Canada geese that inhabited its water feature. He was aware that they were considered quite a nuisance and yet here they remained, untouched by any human intervention. He had always felt that this issue was not beyond a solution. In fact, he had one.
Each time he had driven past the complex, his mind had said dinner, and he had wished that the plumpest goose could take up residence in his freezer, if not directly on his grill. He had shared this thought with several friends, who all derisively informed him that really they were called fowl, and no menu would be enhanced by their presence.
“Rubbish,” thought Arthur, “it’s all in how you prepare it.” He was a devoted viewer of BBQ cooking shows and could turn out a gourmet meal with venison and elk. Surely he could do it with a goose as well. He'd gotten no advice from Fred but he felt he could wing it, and a recipe was already forming in his mind. It included a secret dry rub, lots of garlic, and a six-pack of good dark beer, one to put into the drip pan and five to put into the chef.
Arthur had contemplated in earnest how he would ensnare the main course of this delectable meal, and his mind had turned to the largest of the humane animal traps that resided in his garage. He’d purchased it years ago to snare a pesky groundhog that felt the foundation of his house was quite suitable for development. He reasoned that if it could contain a groundhog, it could certainly house a goose.
And now on this beautiful early Saturday morning, it was time to execute his plan. He assumed that all employees would be safely gone from the site and the birds would still be somewhat groggy from sleep, yet hungry. He would take Ralph with him as companion and possible bird-dog. He had spent hours deliberating how best to proceed and had a fool-proof method of attack.
“Ralph, buddy!” Arthur called from the garage. “Let’s get moving. We have work to do.” Ralph went from sloth to sixty in the blink of an eye, streaked out the door and into the garage where Arthur was waiting by the Ford, vaulted into the passenger side of the pickup, did three quick turns, and sat tall. Arthur slid in beside him, lowered the window so he could feel the breeze, and off they went. Ralph hung his head out the window, mouth closed.
In no time at all, they were pulling into the parking lot of the business complex. Arthur circled the area and backed into a spot overlooking the pond. Giving a quick look around, he noted with satisfaction the dense gaggle of geese on the left side of the pond. He then eased the truck up onto the grass and aimed the back of the pickup down towards the water.
He had brought a sack of corn and he began to spread its contents in an arc from left of the pond to his truck. Placing the trap on the ground beside the left back wheel, Arthur loaded it with a full two cups of corn kernels. Then he proceeded to scatter more corn with a liberal hand away from the truck in a wide swath that circled back to the right side of the pond and a fair distance away from the vehicle. Arthur reasoned that the geese would proceed along the left path of corn to the truck, one greedy bird would stop and enter the trap, and the rest would continue to feed on the arc of corn he’d placed that lead away from the scene of the crime down the path to the right. When the gaggle was well away and waddling back towards the pond, he would load the trap into the bed of the pickup and speed away with the beginnings of his stupendous dinner.
With the corn now scattered, Arthur headed back to check on his trap. It did not take long for the action to begin. Hunger and a bright sun did rouse those geese from their lethargy and soon they began to wend their way along the path that had been laid for them.
“A pied piper could not have channeled them better,” Arthur mused, scanning the left side of the pond, and he would have been partially correct. A fair number of birds were leaving the pond and pecking their way towards the baited trap.
Unfortunately, and initially unseen by Arthur, a few stragglers on the other side of the pond had noticed the commotion and had determined that the best way to get into the action was to commence at the other end of the arc. They were soon joined by fellow flock members who had taken to flight in an attempt to feed as soon as possible. Now there were two gaggles of geese, each on-course to converge at the site of the truck. And they were not quiet about it. They craned their necks and ruffled their feathers. They squawked and squabbled. And they agitated poor Ralph beyond measure.
“You bird brains! Get away from my truck!” Ralph blustered. He may have been past his prime but he still enjoyed a bit of a dust-up, and when he looked around to see the entire hoard of honking, pecking, menacing geese approaching his Arthur and his pickup that was too much to witness and remain a bystander.
Barking furiously, he bounced from seat to seat, ricocheted off the steering wheel to the back window and then slammed against the dashboard, hitting the radio button and turning it on as he slid to the floor. Startled, he clawed his way back onto the seat, heaving his body over the gearshift lever, and with a leap worthy of Lassie, catapulted out the open window and began to herd those wayward fowl away from his property.
Upon hearing this commotion, a stunned Arthur looked up from checking the trap to see an army of geese descending upon him from what appeared to be all directions and a black and white blur of a dog trying his best to make their feathers fly. Leaving the trap, he turned and dashed back towards the relative safety of the parking lot. He was about to call Ralph when another sight took all his attention. It was his beloved Ford, empty of occupant, yet rolling with increasing speed down the slope toward the pond.
“What the…” For a rare moment Arthur was speechless. And then he began the sprint of his life in an attempt to catch up to the truck before it hit the water. It was at this point that he realized just how sedentary his day job had been.
“Oh man, how deep is this pond, anyway?”he thought, getting close enough to catch the strains of Willie Nelson’s ‘On the road again…’ wafting from the open window.
“Surely it’s shallow…”he reasoned, as he stopped to gasp for breath at the same time that the back wheels hit the edge of the pond.
“More than three feet,” he concluded as he noted water lapping at the front grille. The day was not turning out very well.
And then Arthur became aware of another presence. It was the local cop, out on rounds, and demonstrating more than a little interest in the position of said pickup to water.
The reader will be spared the details of what transpired next. Suffice it to say that events involved a tow-truck, a warning ticket concerning his reckless use of a vehicle, a caution that Canada geese were a protected species, and the necessity of finding another way home. This last was resolved when the cop on the beat, a man with a well-developed sense of humor whose day had started off considerably better than Arthur’s, offered to drop both Arthur and Ralph home on his way back to the precinct office.
Arthur slinked into the right front seat, accompanied by visions of the reception Elizabeth would give them when they arrived home in this manner. Ralph was told to get in the back, away from gearshift levers and radio buttons.
A usually loquacious Arthur was quiet on the ride home. He was reviewing his plan, wondering how he could have gotten things so wrong, and pondering the fact that a fully-plucked, ready to grill goose might have cost him $25 max. His expression was somber.
Ralph, on the other hand, was eagerly watching all go by. He had had a great time and felt that, with all due respect, he had saved Arthur from serious harm. And if the currently mute Arthur was doing some meditating, something along the lines of Lamentations 3:26, “It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord,”, well he needed to rouse him up a bit, because Elizabeth was brash enough to queue-jump even the Lord so she could deal with him first.
“Crank on that siren!” Ralph begged, using telepathy to commune with the local cop. But despite repeated requests, the horn remained silent. As they pulled into the home drive, a frustrated Ralph provided one last desperate attempt for some action.
“Aoooww, aooowww,” he wailed, heralding their arrival with his own canine yodel just as Elizabeth rounded the corner of the house. At that moment, Ralph knew this experience would be hard to top. The day had been great, the ride home wonderful, the look on Elizabeth’s face: priceless.
Republished with permission from Ralph Unleashed, Mischief and Mayhem with a Man’s Best Friend, available at Amazon.com.