pet connection

I never intended to blog. I enjoy blogging—other people’s blogging—the same way I enjoy other people’s kids. That is, they produce them, I interact with them, we all go away happy. My neighbor Glenn had other ideas.

“You need a blog,” he told me late in 2005. “And if you don’t start one by the beginning of the year, I’m going to start one for you.”

Glenn’s in publishing, too, on the production side, so I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t go through with his threat. And he’s Canadian, so I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t come after me with a hockey stick—or withhold the Map-o spread that he and his wife Cathy bring me whenever they visit Montreal.

I blogged off and on last year, but never daily, as I’ve been told I must. I probably took too much to heart Dr. Johnson’s maxim that no man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money. And I needed money to pay for my darling Darcy’s rising vet bills. My blog went mostly on hiatus after she died last June.

But Gina has coaxed me back, dangling the carrot of no daily blogging—which the imp of the perverse will probably use to prod me into blogging, well, if not daily, at least more frequently than I would if left to my own devices—a chair, two dogs in my lap, John D. MacDonald in my left hand and a cup of perfectly steeped Singbulli at my right hand.

When I’m not staring at a monitor wondering what to write next or giving tummy rubs or reading or giving tummy rubs—Cavaliers are slave drivers, I tell you—I serve on the board of our condo complex. Monday we did our monthly walk-through. A resident had complained that the grass by her front door looked awful. We trooped over to look at it. Shrugged. Decided it didn’t look any worse than all the other grass in the complex where dogs pee.

As we walked away, Mary Lou asked me if there weren’t products dogs could take to keep their urine from yellowing the grass. There are, I told her, but I’ve never tried any of them. Then we got silly.

I suggested we post people by the grass 24/7 to hose it down every time a dog pees on it.

Our landscape manager proposed a sprinkler system that would automatically sense when and where dogs pee and come on to rinse the area.

Mary Lou had the best idea. “We could teach the dogs to turn on the sprinklers after they’re finished.”

Now there’s a plan.

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