"Now Give Me Back That Chocolate!"
by Jill Arnel
AT PRESENT: I await my son Noah's arrival from Eugene. Knowing that he will pull in momentarily, I scramble to perform some culinary hocus pocus due to my not having planned any meal at all. After all, I had no ETA until he called me from the road, and Eugene is about 90 miles from here.
Lately, my creative cooking options have been limited because I have all but given up shopping due to the emergence of Larry's new favorite hobby: impulse buying at the grocery store. So I sit back and wait until we run out of the essentials before sallying forth to hunt and gather ingredients from which to conjure up gourmet meals. Otherwise, it's a Boca Burger night.
I blame Maggie and Geordie's hasty and rather sucky walk through the neighborhood today on my own lack of motivation. I just couldn't venture any farther today-- too many distractions, both genuine and "synthesized."
It's sultry out, even at 7:30 in the evening. Tonight, it seems that almost everyone has let their dogs run free, making it a minefield for Maggie, Geordie, and me. I constantly yank M and G away from verboten lawns and from disobedient at-large dogs with lackadaisical owners who "ask" their dogs to come.
One large dog, who'd once attacked Maggie unprovoked heads our way. In a state of panic, I yell at the woman whose dog is fixing to make mine dessert,
"Will you please get your dog?!" She reacts phlegmatically, but my screams keep the dog at bay until she lumbers forth to get the would-be assailant.
Gawd, I hate sounding so incredibly crazy, but some people act like such irresponsible cretins!
TIP OF THE DAY: Always keep a fresh unopened bottle of hydrogen peroxide in your medicine chest.
Last week Larry, while doing his recreational shopping, picked up a treat for himself-- a bulk bag of semisweet chocolate covered raisins.
"Not a lot," he insisted, although it looked like at least a pound and a half to me.
The bag fed Larry and me (I probably ate about twenty of them) one DVDs-worth before he stored them in a kitchen drawer-- one that Geordie, the Jean Valjean of Cairn terriers could not reach and open.
******
The next day, Larry again had a hankering for the confections and took them out again. We were watching The Colbert Report when last they were seen, and I paid no attention to Larry's habitual after-dinner snacking and had no desire for any at the time.
Suddenly, a few minutes after turning off the TV, Larry noticed that the bag with the remaining candy was missing.
"I wonder if someone (i.e. one of the dogs) got them," mused Larry.
"I sure hope not-- dark chocolate, in particular-- not to mention raisins can be lethal to dogs.” I was dreading what I already intuitively knew.
"Oh, but there were only a few left," he assured me.
"How many?" I was annoyed and impatient just the same.
"Really, just a few."
"How many ounces? Two? Three?" The pitch of my voice rose a bit, approaching Munchkin-on-Helium.
"Honestly, there were hardly any left!" he insisted. “Where’s Maggie?”
(For a change, Geordie didn't have them. In fact, opportunist that he is, he missed his chance, a very rare thing indeed.)
"Where is she?" I began to freak out and started calling for her. No response. Certain that she was nowhere in the house, I found her in the backyard, an empty plastic bag within a foot of her, more visible in the dark than she was.
"Oh no!" I picked her up, grabbed the bag, and opened her mouth. Sure enough, her breath smelled chocolate-y with fruity undertones.
"CRAP! She ate them." I was miffed. "These things can kill them. How much was left? Come on. You have some idea, don't you?"
"Just a few," Larry insisted.
"How am I supposed to believe that? You've got this totally skewed idea of quantities and measurements."
EXAMPLE: With Larry, a little ice cream is most of a half gallon with just enough remaining to store in the freezer, maybe about five tablespoons. The container is usually light enough to FLY OUT if anyone shuffles around just one other item.
"It's almost all air." I think he really believed it!
Back to the situation at hand: I did not buy the "just a few" explanation and headed toward the kitchen cabinet apothecary to grab a new bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It hissed-- a reassuring sound-- as I twisted off the cap.
"She doesn't need that! Don't."
I ignored his plea, grabbed Maggie, and poured about an eight of a cup straight into her mouth, clamping her jaw to make sure she swallowed it. I carried her outside so she to "surrender" the contents of her stomach.
Thank goodness it didn’t take long. Within three minutes, a sizeable pile of chocolate and raisin goulash appeared on the deck.
"Oh, thank GOD! That's a few? It looks like about three ounces at least!"
"I'm glad you did it," Larry admitted.
"Me, too." We rushed to wipe it up and Larry turned on the hose to rinse the deck.
Crisis averted! Or so we believed.
Apparently, the proverbial fat lady had not yet sung because ten minutes after we thought we had possibly saved her life-- or at least prevented a major gastric upset-- the HP continued to do its job-- on the bedroom carpet, no less. And this pile was bigger than the first.
Well, just by eyeballing the mess, I estimated that Maggie had ingested about six ounces of the stuff, if you were to measure it on this planet. I was grateful that she suffered no further consequences and was truly surprised that Geordie hadn’t beaten her to the cache, as he has so many times.
Again we clean up the mess-- quickly because Maggie and Geordie seem determined to respectively re-eat or eat the puréed mess.
I have less faith than ever in Larry's ability to estimate measurements but am thankful to let it go-- except for publicly humiliating him in this entry . But I know that he can take it because his "best Cairn girl" is all right.
So ends this "cautionary tale."
If you have dogs who like to munch, always keep a fresh bottle of HP on hand.
Semisweet Dreams,
Jill, Maglicious, Geode (Hey, that's what the spellchecker likes to call him!)
