Lamb and Pigeons

The lamb thing worked. Theo had a complete panic attack meltdown in the kitchen the minute I took the lamb chops out of the broiler. I can't say I blame him - they smelled godawful to me too and tasted just as creepy. Apparently, there is some weird ass chemical compound in lamb that might be producing this effect? The whole thing was kind of unsettling and I feel bad for subjecting my poor, neurotic Theo to 15 minutes of hell. He's already nervous enough without cooking lamb chops being added to the list of Things That Bug Theo - I mean, my god, there are floating sticks and hunks of foam in the river that might well be ducks, other people and dogs are constantly trying to sit on his couch as it is, not to mention the completely insensitive way Django occasionally tries to walk around him. And M stepped near his hair on Friday, too. The horror, when will it cease?

I went out to smoke a cigarette this afternoon at work. It was raining and generally miserable and one fat pigeon was enjoying the remnants of an ice cream cone on the ground by the Marble Slab. Well, he was enjoying it until I showed up and started smoking right by it. I stood very still, though, and the pigeon slowly decided I was probably just another tree and walked back over to his feast. All in another day's work for your basic urban wildlife observer but what got me was how picky this pigeon was. To my uneducated eyes, all the broken pieces of cone scattered around were more or less the same, except that some still had ice cream (vanilla, I hypothesize) on them and some didn't. This particular pigeon would peck at one piece, sort of huff, and move over to the next, which he would eat greedily. Some pieces were good and some were not-good, and I totally can't figure out why, unless he was just spoiled, which is possible, I bet, for a pigeon who lives next to an ice cream store. In my head, I could imagine the shrieks that no doubt accompanied the fall and breakage of the ice cream cone. Not only am I an urban wildlife observer, I am also a mother, which makes me wonder if the local pigeons start flocking around when they hear screaming coming from the Marble Slab. Conditioned response!