If by chance one looks to the right and sees the two tiny webcam image thumbnails there, one might wonder with absolute validity why oh why are we contributing to the clogging the internest with an image of some hardwood floor and a rug.
Well, the situation is this. Our beloved Ranger has returned to her old anxious and stressed-out ways of getting bored during her long time alone at home and subsequently filling that time by finding things to chew up and destroy. Last week it was some magazines we had left on the coffee table (that we knew we should’ve moved out of reach but didn’t, so our fault). She ripped those up all around the livingroom and even took one into the backyard and tore that one up out there. On Saturday morning while we were away for barely an hour rescuing that bench from its uncertain future, she was shredding that day’s newspaper. And then Monday night when I got home ahead of Susan I found a woven basket — a gift for herbrought back by a coworker from Africa — entirely unwoven and destroyed pretty much in the space pictured above.
She’s done the same thing in the same place to pillows, towels, socks, shoes. And the most contradictory thing of all is that she knows she’s gonna be in trouble for it, but she does it anyway. Because she’s a dawg. When I got home and discover the descimation, she’s either at the backdoor all “My bad!” or in the backyard to uptight to come in. Of course, I don’t hit her. Sure, I may throw at her whatever it is she’s chewed up but the worst I’ll do is yell “bad dog” or hold her nose to the destruction and sternly tell her “no!”
And then there are the glorious nights like last night when I got home to find Ranger hadn’t ventured to the dark side this once. I praise her like she’s just about the bestest dawg in the whole world -which she just about is.
But I still haven’t answered your question: why point a camera at the scene of so many crimes? And the answer is in the hopes of perhaps nipping the next time in the bud. And the way we’re proposing to do that is totally hit-and-miss with a little goofy and lame and some ineffective thrown in as well. See, if we chance upon an image that shows her in the midst of mangling something what I plan to do is call home and through the answering machine speaker basically call her name and tell her to stop.
Will it work? If I had a Magic 8-Ball I’m pretty sure the answer that would come up is “My Sources Say No,” but I’m still willing to give it a try. Or two.
UPDATED (9.27): As you can see today we’ve panned around the corner and we’re spotlighting Buster our Russian tortoise on the BusterCam. Faaaaaaaascinating. Yes she’s real. Yes she’s not dead. Yes her name is Buster because I thought she was a he when me mom found her in her backyard back in October 2001 — no doubt an escapee from some unknown neighbor. For years I’ve been wanting to rename her the Russian word for “miracle” (for entirely valid reasons to be looked up in and linked to from the archives later) but pleas for someone to phonetically sound it out so I know how to pronounce it have fallen on silent keyboards.
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