Sugardog

Back in California for school, familiar things acquire their humor again.

My family has this elderly bi-color Beagle, Sugar.  (My father is fond of reminding people that when four-year-old me named her, it was Sugarcookie Rabbit-Foot.)  She's seventeen, and she has learned to look like she's going to keel over any minute now so that people will pet her out of pity.  Mind you, she probably is.  Sugar has outlived six other puppies acquired years after we got her.  The last one, our endearingly dumb Border Collie-Great Dane mix Stormy, adopted when Sugar was already going white, recently died of old age.

Sugar's also figured out the art of selective deafness.  You can stand next to her yelling "Sugar!  Dog!  HEY!" and she'll lie there and sigh.  Open the cat-food bag, though, and suddenly there's an obese beagle sitting loyally at your side ... and she watches the mail-truck go by every day through a windowless wall.

Another habit she's picked up is pushing her food bowl around.  She never used to do this.  But we have full tile floors now and there's no one else to steal it from her, so she does vague wavering circuits of three rooms as she eats, until she fetches up against a large appliance or someone's ankle.  You'll be cooking and feel something smooth and hard collide gently with your foot, and look down and there's this small, fat white dog contentedly chowing down.  It's generally best not to move until she's done at this point.  She might fall on her face.  You wouldn't think a dog could do this, but she can.

On a vaguely related note, I can't look at a sloth without imagining it going ".... duuuuuuuuude."  Or possibly drawling "mIrAcLeS."

That is all.