Animal Insting

Some people have been asking my mom how I am doing, after my adventure with swallowing the blanket and then getting pneumonia, and I would like to thank everybody for being worried about me.  Also I would like to say that I am now back to my regular, perfect self.  I still have just a few antibiotics left to take, and then I have to get one more x-ray, just to make sure that all the bad stuff is gone out of my lungs.   But it feels to me like it is all gone, so I'm sure everything is fine.

Okay, well, here's something random I wanted to talk about.  Last week while Mom was out walking Mel and Barry, an old man in an old car stopped in the street by where they were walking, and he gave Mom a piece of paper with some words printed on it.  The man didn't say anything.  He just smiled and gave Mom the paper.  So she said "thank you," and went on walking.  And what the paper said was this:

Your Dog


He is your friend
Your partner, your defender,
Your dog -- you are his life,
his love, his leader.


He will be yours,
faithful and true
To the last beat of his heart.
You owe it to him to be
worthy of such devotion.

Then after Mom read the words on the paper, she remembered that a man had given her something like this once before when she was out walking dogs, and she thought it was probably the same man and the same message on the paper.  We don't know why this man doesn't say anything.  Maybe he can't talk, for some reason.  And we don't know if he has a dog of his own, but even if he doesn't, he must have had dogs before in his life because it is clear that he loves dogs.  Anyway, I think it's sweet that he goes around and gives people this important message about being worthy of their dogs.

And speaking of pieces of paper with messages on them, Nicky forgot to tell you that when he was at Barks in the Park last week, he got a doggy fortune cookie.  Mom broke it open for him and pulled out the fortune.  Nicky did not like the fortune cookie, so he didn't eat it and Mom gave it to one of the Humane Society dogs to eat.

But here's the fortune that was in the cookie:  Confucius say, dog who run behind car get exhausted.  Get it?  Exhausted?  Hahahaha!  I think this is a very funny fortune.

Okay, so here's one more random thing.  You know how when people are mad about something, they say, "That really gets my goat"?  Well, I started wondering what being angry has to do with goats.  So I researched this question, and what I learned was that, as usual, nobody knows absolutely for sure where the phrase came from.  But the best guess is that it's about how people sometimes use goats as buddies for race horses, because the horses are really high-strung and skittish, and goats are calm.

So if some mean person wanted to make some other person's horse less likely to win a race, he would steal the goat from the other person's horse.  Then the horse would be all upset and would not run well.  This seems like a pretty good way to explain the phrase, and at least it's an interesting story that mostly makes sense.

Anyway, to wrap up all my random thoughts, I hope you will remember that if you have a nervous horse, you should get a goat to calm it down.  And if you chase a car, you'll get exhausted.  And if you have a dog, you should do everything you can to be worthy of his trust and devotion.  Oh, and if you get pneumonia, be sure to take all your antibiotics!