Category Archives: doggy diarrhea

I fucking love Miss Carol.

Last week while she was out of town we started talking about the blinis I’d seen on one of the foodie shows. Russian blinis are kinda like French crepes or Mexican tortillas. They’re warm, soft, thin little pancakes of gentle goodness wrapped around melted cheeses and tender meats.

I chub up just thinking about them, and the more we talked last week, the more Miss Carol ramped up her cooking verve ’til Friday night was gonna be blinis’ night in oceandoggy land. Get the fuck out of the way.

So she got home and charged into the kitchen and she tried. Over and over again. And each light little blini obstinately stuck to the pan until Miss Carol finally scraped each tired little burned blini-mess into the trash.

At one point I tried to help. I said- hopefully helpfully- I don’t think you’re doing it right.

Then.

On Sunday Miss Carol soaked a turkey in brine. It’s supposed to guarantee succulent, moist meaty meat and it’s something we’d been meaning and wanting to do and try before Thanksgiving but maybe not quite this close. Two turkeys in a week is probably gonna ensure we never eat it again.

Kinda like the leg of lamb from hell. But that’s another story for another time.

Anyway.

So Miss Carol brined him and then we cooked Mr. Turkey spread eagle on the grill, carefully basting him with a spicy lime tequila marinade. And after a couple of hours he tasted just like any other turkey I’ve ever eaten.

Like whatever.

Miss Carol blamed the blandness on me for making her put Mr. Turkey in the oven for a little bit while we went up to the hot tub, but I don’t think so, and besides, the hot tub was WAY more fun than eating turkey twice in four days will ever be.

Happy Thanksgiving, right?

Sunday marks the end of Daylight Savings Time- that vain, collectively narcissisitic attempt by Congress to control time and daylight- so according to the gently hugging, overly maternalistic, government controlled news media we’re all supposed to set our clocks back one hour tonight before we put on our ‘jammies and go nighty night.

We here at oceandoggy.com say fuck that.

Don’t fritter your hour away and waste it sleeping. Hoard that hour, cling to it like a teen-agers first Playboy or a winos last sip. Be a rebel. Don’t set your clock back like the rest of the human cattle. Be different.

You’ve got 24 hours before Monday’s cold hard slap of meetings and schedules force you back into timely concurrence- take advantage of it and exert some control over your destiny. Relax. Leave time where it is for a little bit longer.

Then, on Sunday, when you and you alone decide you need a little more time or when you’re doing something you’d really like to have another hour doing or if you feel you’ve wasted an hour and want a do-over- that’s when you set your clocks back and enjoy your stolen hour.

You’ll still arrive bright and early on Monday morning chronologically insync with the rest of the planet but you’ll have bent time and the universe to YOUR schedule.

If only for an hour.

I’m not an expert. But I did have creds, you know, before I left the industry.

And I’m not basing any of this on hard fact or statistics, mostly because I’m too lazy and busy with other shit to gather it or them.

So call all of this woolgathering. It’s an old word meaning an indulgence in aimless thought.

Which is what this is. Aimless thought- so indulge me.

IT. Information Technology.

Over the last several years, I’ve been working and thinking and listening to people and watching the news and reading stuff and today it all kinda coalesced into this-

I think we’re at the BEGINNING of a new age. A technological revolution. Call it the IT AGE, call it the March of Technology, call it whatever you want. I realize, I know, we’ve had computers and IT for years but the paradigm has shifted and grown ominous.

This isn’t about the happily texting and sexting.

It’s more about the Industrial Revolution that shoved us as a people from agrarian farm folk into towns and factories and office cubicles.

I think the IT AGE revolution is gonna completely strip the gears and bitch-slap our lives as we used to know them.

And I think it’s gonna hurt more than we know.

Smaller, faster, and more portable means no reason for a fixed address. Why have an office building when all your employees can work from wherever via laptop and internet teleconferencing? And let’s don’t forget IM and tweeting.

If you think the residential collapse was bad, wait for commercial real estate to tank. That’ll be a fun ride.

Anyway.

Besides office buildings standing empty, think about the way you shop. Amazon and the everything stores online, self checkout at the grocery store. They all add up to more for less. More shopping and less employees.

And as those jobs go away, they ain’t comin’ back. Not never.

So what’s the answer?

There isn’t one. Like the farmers generations ago standing in their fields and staring at the factories and cities they didn’t want to live in and wondering what was gonna happen, we’re caught up in something way bigger and massively more generational than we could possibly hope to alter or change.

So anyway.

Aimless thoughts, woolgathering really, on a really pretty day working outside building a deck.

Forgive me

I wasn’t gonna write anything about Hurricane Earl.

I wasn’t gonna write about how hurricanes in general and Earl in particular consume so much time and effort.

I wasn’t gonna write about how hurricanes force you to suddenly see how much stuff you have that needs protecting.

I wasn’t gonna write about how hurricanes necessitate spending countless hours watching Cantore and Company at The Weather Channel and their gleefully dire predictions.

I wasn’t gonna write about how hurricanes make you make decisions you’d rather not make.

I wasn’t gonna write about how hurricanes make you re-think your reasons for living at the beach.

And I certainly wasn’t gonna write about how you feel about a hurricane when, AFTER you’ve second guessed your reasons for living at the beach, and AFTER making decisions you didn’t want to make, and AFTER spending countless hours watching Cantore and The Weather Channel, and AFTER protecting all the stuff you’ve suddenly found needs protecting, and AFTER all the time and effort preparing and worrying about a hurricane, the hurricane ends up being as big a turd as Earl was.

I just wasn’t gonna.

Dog On It by Spencer Quinn is, in a word, cute.

Miss Carol brought this book home from the hospital she works at saying that one of the staff had given it to her to read. Since I was between books I got to read it first.

After the first page I was ready to throw in the towel. Or maybe just throw up. I imagined the person at the hospital that had given Miss Carol Dog On It must’ve been one of those little old ladies that volunteer and answer the phones and stuff and probably think that EVERYbody likes the same little books that her little granddaughter likes.

It was that bad.

But I was too lazy to get up and go find something else to read so I opened up another beer and condescendingly kept plowing along, positive that I was wasting my time.

And ya know what?

I’m kinda glad I did. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Dog On It will never be mistaken for literature but it’s cute and honestly? Spencer Quinn does a really good job of getting inside of Chet the dog’s head and giving us a dog’s thoughts and viewpoint.

The story is the first(??) of the Chet and Bernie mysteries and is totally predictable but it’s fast and easy to read and you don’t have to think too much and did I mention it’s cute? Also, at the very end,

Whoops, hold it, hold on a sec-

What’s that sweethoneybabychile? No, nothin’, just messin’ around on my goofy little blog. Why?

You wanna do what?

NOW???

I’m ON IT!

Gotta go, gotta run, Miss Carol wants to go get nekkid in the hot tub. seeya.

Next in the pile- Tinkers by Paul Harding

Holy effin’ jaysus,  it’s that time of year again.

Today Hooper delivered our firewood for the winter. We burn through roughly two cords a year and every year when he dumps it I swear the pile is bigger.

I stare at it and then try not to think too much about how many times I’m gonna have to handle each and every log.

But then I do.

First I gotta stack it so the neighbors won’t laugh and point at me. Next, I move it one wheelbarrow load at a time during the winter into the garage so I always have dry firewood. Then I carry it an armload at a time from the garage to the stack on the hearth where I finally put it on the pretty fire that Miss Carol enjoys each and every night while the cold northeast winds howl and skirl outside.

And somehow that last part makes it all worth it.

It the not too distant past, I would not have gone near a Walmart. Waaaay too low brow for someone with the taste and refinement of an oceandoggy. Wally’s World was reserved for the inbred and the uneducated. People that had only a drive-by acquaintance with personal hygiene and that watched TV with their mouths open.  

Life’s little losers.

I did my shopping in specialty stores convinced that, even though I was paying top dollar, I was purchasing the best quality whatever for my money. If I HAD to visit a big box store I would drive the extra ten miles or so and go to a Target where I felt more at home buying my underwear.

But then about a year ago, something happened. Actually a bunch of somethings happened, the end result being that I was picking up more things on a daily basis than Miss Carol was. I got tired of making a dozen stops when I left the island in the morning and so, one day, I found myself in the Walmart parking lot. It was early, so I felt there was a chance I could get in and out without catching any inbredness.

I’m sure that there are people reading this that have shopped in Walmarts forever and are thinking to themselves-  whatever dude, you’re a dumbass, Walmart is great. And you know what? They’re right. I can honestly say that I am a new disciple of Walmart. I’m not sure if you pass through a sinister force field when you enter the store that lowers your expectations and IQ, but whatever it is, it works. I loves my Walmart.

And even though I’m mouth breathing when I read now, I’m pretty sure it’s just my allergies.

So anyway.

This is how Cutter and Tug spent most of their first months with us- little furry bundles with damp noses constantly napping. They were as inseparable as they were indistinguishable.

They would always sleep huddled up against one another as, I imagine, the entire litter had. Now that it was just the two of them, they seemed to cling to that closeness. Still do, as a matter of fact.

Early on their personalities began to emerge and diverge. Cutter was clearly the alpha male, constantly curious and always underfoot. Tug was happy sitting on the sidelines and watching, needing all sorts of patient coercion to try anything new. Tug seemed openly surprised by any act of kindness while Cutter took it as his due. Cutter reveled in his puppy cuteness, Tug was dismayed by it. Cutter pranced and Tug warily trudged. 

I think a big reason for their diverseness was that Cutter was one of the first puppies chosen from the litter and Tug was the last, silently watching as his brothers and sisters disappeared and as the plywood box they lived in got bigger and colder and lonelier.

Every time I tell Miss Carol about Tug sitting alone in the plywood box she cries which proves she has a heart.

So I tell it to her a LOT.

What a day.

Firstly, and really, this is it for the weather, NO SNOW. Loser weatherdudes had it all wrong. As late as this morning they were predicting 3-5″, which is pretty much unheard of in this neck of the woods, er, beach. The schools closed, the city closed, folks at the market this morning were talking about staying on the island and hunkerin’ down, drinkin’ beer and hangin’ out. And nothing. Not nada. Kinda’ like my striper fishing.

Dos. I’m finally letting Cutter and Tug run the beach. This is huge for me. I don’t know why it is but I’ve been really leery about letting these guys roll. Even though Tug has taken off a few times Cutter has always stayed close so I don’t know why I worry so much but I do. Maybe I’m becoming a pussy. When Boca and Largo were alive I thought nothing of running a couple of miles on the beach, knowing they were following me somewhere up in the dunes. Cutter and Tug get out of sight and I freak like a little girl. I’m such a sally, but I’m getting better.

Tres. Like anyone cares. I weighed myself tonight and after two weeks of no carbs I’ve gone from 195 to 188. Not svelte by any measure but certainly closer to something Miss Carol wants to see in a thong.

Fourthly. Our new President was sworn in today. Having lived in the DC area years and years and years ago, I was amazed to see the turnout for the inauguration. I only hope he’s different. You have to realize, I’m just a little jaundiced with the whole election thing. I voted for Clinton and hated him by his second term. I voted for Bush and likewise hated him.

Obama? C’mon buddy. Be superfine.

It appears Global Warming will be sweeping through our island again. According to the weather reports, we will have SNOW tonight. And SNOW tomorrow. And SNOW tomorrow night.

Did I mention it’s supposed to effing SNOW? Little frozen white fluffy reminders of my hellish childhood.

Being southern born and bred but forced to live with my family as a youngun’ on the Canadian border I am horribly snow scarred. Having lived at the beach for decades and centuries I’ve become grudgingly accustomed to the crispy cold nor’easters but SNOW is a hole nother thing. And I’m not likin’ it one bit.

I told Miss Carol to start packing but she just giggles and tells me to stop it.