Update on Molly the Dog

My parent's went out to dinner last night; she ate two trees.
Hmmmm.........

Ignore the elephant in the room...

Visiting my parents’ house on Easter weekend we had our second experience with Molly the Saint Bernard. Last time we were there she was a bouncy puppy of about 35 pounds with sharp puppy teeth. She ate my husband’s glasses and left several holes in various clothing pieces. A couple of months later she was as big as me and weighed 70 pounds with the biggest head you’ve ever seen. I was afraid of what she might eat this time.

My parents are very good with animals and have been working very hard to get Molly trained and under control. After all, she will be about 200 pounds by the time she is full-grown. You just have to have a dog like that in control. My dad walks her, well marches her, everyday after work. She goes to the dog park several times a week with my niece and takes obedience classes. She was still having some issues with biting so they invited a dog whisperer over. Someone they ran into recommended him who had heard about his great successes with animals. He was connected with the Humane Society.

He came over and just wanted to observe how the family reacted with the dog. They wanted to find out if the biting was a puppy thing or something else. The trainer observed and basically said they were doing everything right. The dog was basically jealous when she wasn’t getting the attention.

About that time the cat saunters up to the dog. A little history on this cat is needed. This cat found my parents house and moved in. She belonged to a neighbor down the street that had passed away. She came over and decided she wasn’t leaving. So mom and dad asked the relatives if they could keep her. They agreed and the cat happily took over the then petless house. The cat lived an amazing life of leisure and then the dog moved in. Not just a dog, a Saint Bernard puppy. Molly really just wanted to be friends, but the cat would have none of it.

The cat pulls its ears back, bares her teeth and hisses at the dog. The dog will not touch the cat and is completely buffaloed by her. The cat provokes most of the encounters just to let Molly know who is in charge. The dog whisperer loves the cat and tells my parents that’s how you handle this dog. The cat knows what she’s doing. She may be small but she is in charge. He gave them some advice on what to do and left them with their new training regimen.

Molly has now had several weeks of training with the new techniques by the time we show up for Easter. This is a different dog. She’s huge and slobbery, but under much more control. We were all mulling around in the kitchen at breakfast trying to get our breakfast together and Molly walked in. She just wants to be in the middle of everyone, she’s very social. But it’s a small kitchen and when you add a 70-pound Saint Bernard puppy to the mix it’s hard to move. Mom says to just ignore the dog. Right. We all juggle our food and try not to spill it as Molly leans up against us trying to get our attention, I pronounce, “It’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room.”

Looks like Molly will eventually get over her puppiness if she doesn’t completely exhaust and slime everyone in the process. She’s a handful albeit very sweet. It’s a good thing she’s cute!

Wine Words

My husband, Boyd loves to describe how the wine tastes when we are imbibing. Sometimes he overuses a term or two like chewy and legs.

We went to Napa for our 27th wedding anniversary to tour the wineries. At the first winery I grabbed a mailing list card and a pen as we started tasting. We took the first sip and Boyd said, "robust." I wrote it down. My first mistake was telling him what I was doing. When I explained I was going to write down all the descriptive wine words he said on our trip, he may have been a little annoyed and was oddly quiet about the first few wines. I had to pry it out of him. It actually became quite hilarious by the end of the trip and six wineries later. Some quotes are from Boyd, some from me, some from our wine hosts. Enjoy, we did!

Black Stallion:

Robust

Thin

Not very pleasing

No taste

Smokey

Liquored up on the first four

Clos du Val:

It's vanilla!

Tannin finish

yeah

I prefer a wine you can pour and drink now

Folie a Deux/Napa Cellars:

Very drinkable

This is kinda growin' on me

Let's switch

But I haven't tasted it yet

I know that smell

This has cinnamon

A little spice

St. Supery's (Clearly we had too much wine by the time we got here):

Grapefruit

She looks professional

Fuller

Mouthier

Taste is still growing

It's awesome

Bolder

Let's switch

I haven't tasted it yet

As Randy Jackson would say, "It's all right dude."

It's awesome

Mark that one

Kicks it

Made for lamb chops

Something gamey

Hella good wine

I think when you quote Randy Jackson or describe wine as "hella good" you should stop tasting, but oh no, not us.

V. Suttui: We didn't wine taste here. We shopped for lunch in their deli and bought wine cork candles in their gift shop and then ate lunch on the lawn. We were in desperate need of food. Great cheeses and deli food there and a lovely area to eat your lunch in.

Franciscan:

Creamy

Sweet

Huh

Oh dear that's really good

Now she's snorting

I'm at a loss of words

Embraceable

Bastards (This is a very descriptive word for I have to buy this really expensive wine!)

I think we bought two bottles of wine at Franciscan. It wasn't even one of our planned stops. It put us way over budget.

We were done, the wineries were closing. We bought almost a case of wine. We had consumed too much wine, lunch, a bag of fritos and a can of bean dip and we had spent way too much money but we had a lot of fun in the process and made many people laugh at the wineries.

Gopher Boy

It was late. I spent the day at AT&T Park for the opening day of the Giant’s. We had a great time, the Giant’s won and the rain cleared for the game. I came home and unfortunately had to work on my taxes, the appointment to get them done is on Thursday. I’m cutting it a little short this year. By about midnight I crawled into bed and tried to go to sleep. I was just drifting off when Darryl the cat appeared at the open slider. There’s no screen so he bounded in and as always announced himself. There was a fair amount of commotion when he came in. I thought his sister had followed him in and they were tussling on the floor.

She can be a real hisser sometimes. Literally, she hisses at everyone when she is trying to make her point, especially her brother. Apparently she has some Abyssinian in her that makes her very vocal. She doesn’t bite, just hisses.

Well the tussling stopped for a bit and I drifted off to sleep.

About fifteen minutes later Darryl was chasing something through the room. I woke up to him half under our bed with his paw on top of something. I was sure he had another lizard. I shined a flashlight under the bed and couldn’t see anything and Darryl wasn’t moving and I wasn’t putting my feet on the floor. My husband, who was sound asleep and didn’t respond to my comment of, “Honey the cat has another animal in the room and is chasing it around” was finally awakened by my insistence that the cat had something other than a lizard under the bed and he better wake up and remove it immediately. Begrudgingly he got up and looked under the bed. He stated rather too calmly, I thought, that the cat had a live gopher under the bed. At about that time the cat let the gopher go and it darted across the room. I may have screamed, the cat bolted and my husband said he didn’t see where it went. Great, so much for sleep.

The cat ran towards my boots that were lined up on the floor under my shoetree, hot on the trail of the rogue gopher. My husband flung all the shoes out of the way as the two of them hunted for the rodent. Darryl, we'll call him gopher boy now, sniffed it out with his tail twitching. My husband had it cornered. I asked him if he wanted a glass or something to put it in. But to my horror he just picked up the live gopher with the cat clawing at him and threw it off the balcony and shut the door. The cat continued looking through the room for another fifteen minutes trying to find his prey. My husband proceeded to get back in bed. I said, “Not before you wash you’re hands.” Grumble, grumble, sigh. Needless to say I didn’t get a very good night’s sleep last night.

By Candlelight

Last week we went out to dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant, Cafe Gibraltar in El Granada. The atmosphere was wonderful. I've always loved everything I've eaten there. That night it was rabbit and duck, superb dishes. We were celebrating our anniversary and shared a bottle of wine. After dinner we had a Greek Float. It had Ouzo gelato with a fig compote, an original and savory dessert.

Our dinner was almost over, we had enjoyed the live music, an upright bass and electric piano, the atmosphere, the food and the company. The couple behind us was much older, in their 80's or 90's. He had a walker and struggled with his reading glasses. When the bill came, he pulled out his American Express and tried to read the bill. You could tell they were both having problems seeing the writing on the receipt. They finally held up the candle to try to read it. Now remember Boyd and I had shared a bottle of wine. Boyd said, "When I can't read the bill, you take over and pay it." We laughed. Our bill came and Boyd couldn't read it...he brought the candle closer. Thermal paper burns really fast...