Reduce Reuse Recycle

I’ve been off pretending to be a writer and was participating in NaNowrimo, however, I didn’t make the 50,000 word count in 30 days goal.  When I first started I didn’t have any concept of how difficult it would be to pull close to 2,000 words a day out of my imagination that actually made sense when read all in a row.  After reading the last thing I wrote one evening, the next morning, I had to wonder who actually wrote it, because I certainly didn’t remember ever striking those keys. And, no, they didn’t make any sense.

But that doesn’t mean I and my horde hasn’t been active.  Finn, the old man, is still able to put in a four hour middle of the night search on Massanutten Mountain, or as I like to call it, Mass-a-rock Mountain.  We were looking for a mentally handicapped person that decided that he really wanted to go for a hike, forgetting that he couldn’t remember how to get home.  A lot of people and dogs put in quite a few hours and covered many miles looking for him and the three dogs that went with him. 

I like searching at night, because if I could see what I was actually trying to search through, I’d probably turn around and go home.  Much of what was in my search sector that night consisted of rock.  Big rocks, little rocks, boulders, rocks that like to rock, rocks that hide under leaves, slippery rocks, moss covered rocks and holes that hide. All of them just waiting to break an ankle.

That looks like a field of ferns, but the ferns are covering field of rocks

The beginning of a laurel thicket

One of many rock slides Finn and I encounter on our searches

And then down at the bottom of the rock slide Finn and I were searching was the mountain laurel.  After walking across rocks, the thing I hate the most is trying to find a decent path through the woven branches that make up a mountain laurel thicket. 

But, if everyone got lost in a city park with walk ways, they wouldn’t need us.

The gentleman was eventually found safe after he set the forest on fire.  Literally.  He set a fire that ended up eating 10 acres of forest.  But he was found and so were his dogs.

However, Teagan and Deacon where feeling a little neglected and hatched a plan to make me pay more attention to them.  It consisted of some tag team vomiting and eating of said residue. 

Deacon is a dog with a severe sock fetish.  The first hint that this was going to be a lifelong problem and that maybe he needs some therapy for this mental illness, was Christmas 2009.  He stole the nearly naked carcass of the Christmas turkey from the counter at Mom’s house.  Pissed off was the least of what I felt, because I had warned Mom what a counter surfer he was.  I thought she knew what I was talking about, but obviously didn’t because she wasn’t watching him while he was in the kitchen with her and I was out with the other dogs.  My dad, who is normally very unflappable, comes rushing out the house with an extremely worried look on his face, to tell me that Deacon had inhaled the ENTIRE carcass in about two bites.  Fortunately, hydrogen peroxide works well on him, and urrppp up comes the carcass in its entirety. 

Then 20 minutes later, a sock.  A beautiful yellow tinged, sewer smelling athletic sock.   As of this writing, he’s puked up close to 5 socks.  Several in my truck coming home from hunt tests and SAR training.  I know when he’s got a sock percolating in that stomach of his.  He gets tucked up, his ribs start to show a little and he has a couple of days of throwing up small amounts of food.  And then it appears, always yellow stained, stinking like something dead that’s been rotting in the sun for a couple of days.

I do nightly patrols to pick up socks, make sure the door is closed to the room that has my socks in it, and make sure the laundry is put away as it is done.  All for naught…  Because he is a mission driven, sock seeking machine.  Nothing and nobody will stand in his eternal quest to find that holy grail of his life, THE PERFECT SOCK. 

A couple of weeks ago, while I was upstairs plunking away on the computer, he disappears for a few minutes taking Teagan with him.  I get down stairs just in time to see him licking his lips and a large area of fluid on the laundry room floor.  My suspicion, that he’d just re-eaten what he’d just regurgitated (canines-giving real meaning to reduce/reuse/recycle).  I didn’t think much of it and left to go do my morning rounds.  However, when I got back home for lunch, he’d continued to vomit in his crate.  So I called the clinic I worked for, in only a mildly panicked state, and advised them to prepare for what is probably going to be the first of many surgical sock retrievals I foresee in Deacon’s life. 

So I get to the clinic early the next morning and get started on his radiographs.  I make all the other veterinarians at the practice look at them and tell me there is nothing stuck.  And had to be persuaded not to send the rads off for a radiologist to put their mark on them signifying that there wasn’t a foreign body trapped in his small intestine.  But, both of them did feel a mass in there.  As I was leaving, one of the docs made me promise to call her and tell her what he craps out.  In my crazed Munchausen by Proxy fugue state, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to get him back up there for the surgery I sure he needed.

We get home safely and when I open the door to the laundry room, I nearly pass out from the stench that greets me.  It appears that Teagan had pushed Deacon away from the magnificent mass of vomit that he regurgitated for her and ate it, sock and all.  For in her crate was a beautiful yellow sewer smelling athletic sock, that she’d very carefully re-eaten everything around it but left that splendid sock for me to see.

In the middle of that night, Deacon leaves me a present of a sock on the dining room floor.  Wrapped very prettily in poop.