A Puzzling Diet

It seems like it’s been days since I wrote about my dog, Farley.  It also seems like I’ve strayed from my goal of writing short posts.  I shall try to remedy that.

This is about Farley’s eating habits.  They’re odd.

One thing Farley loves to eat is a good ice cube.  He hears the ice dispenser on the refrigerator door and immediately appears by my side.  He stares.  He stares some more.  I finally hand him an ice cube.  He chomps noisily, crushing the cube in his powerful jaws.  Then drops the crushed pieces on the fool.  They’re slippery.  He finishes chewing (noisily) and stares again.

Another thing Farley enjoys are the things that deer leave behind in the backyard.  They are Farley’s milk duds.  It appears that they make him sick.  He’s had giardia twice.  He still likes them.  Apparently they are his guilty pleasure.  

This leads to other things that Farley eats:  the rice and chicken that my wife makes for him when he has giardia.  He enjoys it with a little chicken stock drizzled over it.  Thank you very much.

But, what is a chicken-and-rice-eating dog going to have for dessert?  This leads to his last odd habit.

In February, I had a vacation.  I thought it might be nice to do another jigsaw puzzle. We had finished one during the December break, and it had been a lot of fun. So, when we got a new one for Valentine’s Day, we set it up on the card table in the basement.    It looked very challenging.  1000 pieces.  It was a picture of a large tray of doughnuts with a whole rainbow of different-colored icing and sprinkles.  We set out all of the pieces and worked on establishing the border.  That was about as far as we got on the first night.  On the second day, we made very little progress.   On the third day, it actually looked like we were going backward with our progress.  Was that my imagination?  The puzzle seemed even less complete than the day before.  On the fourth day, I came downstairs to find Farley brazenly sniffing at the card table.  When I investigated further, I discovered that he had several bites of sprinkled doughnuts in his cavernous mouth.  Good news. This was no longer a 1000-piece challenge.  Bad news, we had no idea how many bites Farley had taken over the past few days.

We disposed of the half-eaten puzzle.  Farley stared in disbelief.

At the buffet. “I’ll just take a nibble.”

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