Animal Insting

It's time to tell you about our latest Adventures While Walking with Mom.  On the day after Halloween, we can always count on having a special adventure because of all the candy and stuff that the trick-or-treaters dropped.  Mom likes to look for candy that hasn't been opened.  She doesn't care about the empty wrappers, for some reason, although we dogs like to sniff the wrappers because they smell yummy.

So when we went out walking on Sunday morning, we looked for candy, and we saw several kinds that Mom doesn't like, so she didn't pick them up.  Finally, we found a Butterfingers and a Milky Way, so Mom took them home and ate them, even though they are not her very favorite kinds of candy.  Then yesterday Mom found a package of PEANUT M&Ms, which she loves, so she was very happy!


We had lots of small Good Adventures on the day after Halloween because we found so many candy wrappers.  Also Gabe found an ACTUAL CANDY BAR that was only partly eaten, but then he dropped it and I picked it up, but then I dropped it, too.  So Mom told us "Leave it!" and she dragged us away from the candy.  Mom thinks it was probably a Snickers bar because it had peanuts and chocolate (which is POISONOUS to dogs!).  It smelled good, but it was very weird and different from the regular dog treats like we are used to eating, and when you bit down on it, your teeth kind of got stuck.  So that's why Gabe and I both dropped the candy bar.

Another thing we saw on the day after Halloween was a hat that used to be part of somebody's costume.  It was orange with a black-and-white polka-dot hat band.  We don't know what kind of costume it was part of, but we're pretty sure that it wasn't a witch.

Anyway, that's enough about candy wrappers.  Here's something else we see when we walk by a certain yard.  We call it "St. Francis and the Gnomes."  I think this would be a great name for a Christian rock band that plays music about gardening.  If you know of any bands like this that need a name, just tell them about this one!



Here's a picture of a woolly worm on our driveway.  People say that woolly worms can predict what type of winter we will have.  I did some research on this, and I found that some people say the black stripes mean there will be a bad winter, and other people say it's the brown stripe.  But more people seem to think it's the black stripes, so if we go by that, we can see that the brown stripe is at least as long as the two black stripes put together.  Which means we will have a fairly mild winter here in Missouri, according to this woolly worm.  One of my sources said that woolly worms are correct 85% of the time, so you can be pretty confident that this prediction will come true.

Mom told me that when she was a kid, she used to capture woolly worms and put them in jars.  She hoped they would make a cocoon and then in the spring they would come out of the cocoon as a beautiful butterfly or something.  But the one woolly worm Mom had that made a cocoon never came out in the spring, so she didn't know what a woolly worm would actually turn into if it survived the winter.  Well, I have done some research, and I learned that woolly worms turn into something called the Isabella Tiger Moth.  They are prettier than most moths I've seen, but I'll bet they would still eat your clothes, if they got the chance!

Oh, and here's one last Walking Adventure I had yesterday:  I got to go for a walk all by myself with Mom!  This happened because Gabe had to get a bunch of x-rays at Dr. Patricia's office.  Mom was surprised that I walked so nicely and fast, too, and I hardly balked at all.  Maybe, since I was such a good little walker, Mom and I can go walking all by ourselves again sometime.

And before I quit writing, I have to tell you what we found out about Gabe from his x-rays.  It turns out that in Gabe's neck there are two disc things that are all kind of crunched together, and in his back there are three disc things that are the same way.  So this explains why Gabe has trouble going up the stairs sometimes.  He doesn't complain much, but I can tell that it hurts him.  Of course, Gabe blames the horrible, vicious greyhounds for his neck and back problems, and Dr. Patricia said that maybe the greyhounds were to blame, but maybe not, either.  Anyway, Gabe has to get more prednisone for two weeks, and Mom is supposed to walk him more, but Mom doesn't know for sure when she will find time to do that!

Yesterday was the first day that we changed back to Standard Time after being on Daylight Saving Time all summer.  So I got to thinking about Time, and I decided I would write in my blog about it, but Mom said that Time was too big and too deep a subject for a little dog like me to write about.  She said I could not possibly wax as philosophical as a writer should do when talking about Time.  Well, I told Mom I would just say what I knew about Time from a dog's point of view, and I would not use any wax at all.  So  finally Mom said okay.

Anyway, first I will talk about DST, which stands for Daylight Saving Time.  Most people say Daylight Savings Time, with an "s" on the end of Saving, but I have learned in my research that the proper name is Daylight Saving Time.  Mom does not like having to change back and forth from Standard Time to DST.  She finds it annoying to reset all the clocks and watches twice a year.  We dogs don't have any clocks or watches.  We just tell time by where the sun is in the sky and other secret methods that only dogs know about, so I can't reveal them here.

When humans change their time schedule, it's confusing for dogs.  For instance, the last two mornings, Mom made us sleep an hour later, which we were mostly willing to do, but Barry was kind of moving around and shaking himself and otherwise politely hinting to Mom that maybe she had forgotten to get out of bed.  This situation could be avoided completely if we just stayed on either Standard Time or Daylight Saving time all year round.  If we did this, Mom would be happy, and all of us dogs would be happy also.

A lot of people have different opinions about Daylight Saving Time.  Some people like it, and other people don't like it.  Some people don't even do it at all.  Here is an interesting map I found which shows the countries that have DST.  These countries are BLUE on the map.  The places that are ORANGE are where they used to have DST, but now they don't have it, maybe because they decided they didn't like it.  And the RED shows where there has never been any Daylight Saving Time at all.  You will see that in much of Africa, there has never ever been DST, which means that my cousins, the basenjis who live in Africa, don't need to put up with having their moms and dads change the clocks twice a year and make them get out of bed an hour early or an hour late.

Today is another sort of a holiday, and it's called The Day of the Dead.  This holiday mostly started out in Mexico, so Mom taught me the name of it in Spanish.  The Day of the Dead is really TWO days long.  It is always on November 1 and 2.  This makes it come right after Halloween, which is not a coincidence, because "Halloween" is actually short for "All Hallows' Even."  In ordinary English, this means "The Evening Before the Day of All the Saints."  But since that's a whole lot of words to have to say, it's probably best that the name got shortened to "Halloween."

Anyway, in America and Canada and such places, November 1 is called All Saints' Day, and November 2 is called All Souls' Day.  In Mexico, though, November 1 is called The Day of the Innocents or The Day of the Little Angels, and it's when you remember children who have died.  Then on November 2, you remember the grown-ups, and that is called The Day of the Dead.  Are you confused yet?  If you are, I know how you feel because I got sort of confused learning about this holiday because it has so many names!

In doing my research, I found out that people way back in ancient history were already celebrating The Day of the Dead.  Except that in those days it was probably a day dedicated to the Aztec goddess Mictecacihuatl.  This goddess had such a long name that it took a whole month for the Aztecs to honor her properly.  She was also known as "The Lady of the Dead," and so while people were honoring her, they also thought about their loved ones who had died.

Eventually, the month of celebration got shortened to just two days, probably because nobody wanted to give a whole month of paid holidays to their employees.  Anyway, during the two Days of the Dead, people go to the cemetery to visit graves, and they take all the favorite food that the dead person used to like to eat.  And they decorate the graves with marigolds, which are supposed to bring the souls of the dead people back so that the living people can talk to them.

Another popular thing to do is make skulls out of sugar and frosting.  Mom says these are yummy, because she has eaten them, but that was a long, long time ago when she went to school in Mexico.  I wish she had saved a sugar skull for me to eat, but she says it wouldn't have tasted very good after more than 30 years.  I don't really care about that.  I would have eaten it anyway!

And here's a very yummy-looking food which is called pan de muerto.  This means "bread of the dead," which rhymes, so it could be a poem, except it's kind of short for a poem.  I wish I had one of these dead bread things to eat.  If I look at the photo long enough, I can almost smell how good it tastes!

Well, now my mouth is watering, so I think I will go ask Mom if I can have a dog treat.