when daffodils attack

when daffodils attack
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is officially spring, right on time. I know that it's right on time because whenever I start to freak out about global warming and the End of the World I search my flickr pictures to find the daffodils and, inevitably, it's early March. Maybe there has been tremendous warming and daffodils bloomed and were photographed in early April before there was Flickr; yeah, that is possible, but since life before Flickr is all a dim blur to me now, how would I know?

At any rate, I am happy to announce that the daffodils in my front yard, which I did not plant, are going great guns and they inspired me to even go out there and rake the yard lackadaisically for a half hour or so, which has made the whole house look much more like someone decent and pleasant lives there and less like the Unabomber is about to come out of the garage. That's probably why the girl scouts came by later selling cookies. Has anyone but me noticed that there seem to be a lot more girl scouts and a lot more cookies this year than ever before? I'm beginning to get suspicious. Girl scouts with cookies, sure, uh huh, yeah right. Clearly they are agents of some interstellar invasion force, lulling us into sweet, sweet submission with their fiendish cookie devices.

So I didn't buy any. That was totally dumb and right after I closed the door I yelled at myself for a long time about it. I did buy some (thin mints. That's my poison and I'm sticking to it.) a couple weeks ago in Charleston and so I feel like I've had my yearly fix, although by my I think I actually mean young M and his friends', since I had two or three cookies, left them in the kitchen and then, a few hours later, the box suddenly appeared completely empty by the TV set. I notice this tends to happen with cookies in my house, see also, chips, frozen pizza, chicken nuggets or anything, really, that takes minimal effort to eat.

In other news, the lost dog up at Pack Square to whom I fed half my Loretta's bread (god, I'm a kind, thoughtful, generous person. I mean, Loretta's bread, possibly my favorite food on the planet, better than thin mints, and it was right there with my salad so I could have soaked it in balsamic vinegar and olive oil, making it into the food of the gods for real and I gave it away. I must have accrued some decent karma here.) has gone off to the pound. Don't freak that he's going to get gassed: it gets better. And, frankly, he's way better off at the pound than he was when I just walked by there and saw him, a cute little terrier type small mutty yellow dog running terrified in the traffic on Biltmore Avenue. So I sat on the sidewalk by Pack Place and called him and fed him bread for a while but he wouldn't let me close enough to read his tag: he had his tail tucked firmly between his legs and kept barking in that "I'm scared, I'm mean, I'm scared, I'm mean" way. Then someone else came out and tried to coax him in closer as well. I had to get back to work so I gave her the rest of the bread and left her to it.

The Pack Place grapevine, always efficient, has now reported that she finally got him closer and they called the number on his tag but it was disconnected. This makes me sad. However, it also turns out that she's the owner of Bistro 1896 (she's very nice and I like her restaurant better now) and that she says if his owner doesn't come forward she will go and get him and keep him. So, happy ending!

And it reminds me that I need to get Django another tag forthwith - for a while there he kept taking off his collar and eating it, and in exasperation after the third or fourth lost forever tag I gave up and just wrote his phone number on his collar in sharpie, but I think he's growing out of that phase now. Or so I hope.