6:00 a.m. - 2007-12-07
no running here
I just wanted to try out some podcast thingie on here. Even if this actually works it won't become a regular feature. Remember, this is only a test!I did this yesterday but it took me til just now to figure out how to change my WAV file to an mp3 file. The podcast thingie only takes mp3 files. Anyway, without further ado, me:
The parakeet at the heart of it all:
I'm sure none have you have ever heard this story before so I'll go ahead and put it out there. I have no pets. It's not that I don't like animals. I love animals! They're nice to have around, hell, some of them are even nice to eat. But I have a long and sordid history of accidental animal deaths to my credit.
The first I can recall involved me petsitting for my parents. This would be maybe 25 years ago. They were heading for Canada for a couple weeks. My mom had this pomeranian fresh off some oral surgery. I was supposed to feed it, let it out, give it antibiotics etc. It was a pain in the ass but, hey, sometimes you've got to absorb that kind of pain for your ma. So this dog used to bark at everything. You know how these yappy dogs are. People walk in the front door, from room to room or look at him cross-eyed, 'Sonny' would go bananas. He come running up to you with his chest all puffed up, barking his wheezy bark. So one morning I walk into the house after a night at work. The dog doesn't bark. I kick this little basket he slept in to rouse him and got no response. So I grab one of his rear legs and lift. His whole body lifts with the leg. He's stiff as a board...rigor mortis. Oh great! So I bury the dog and get the opening credit on my resume.
A few years later, little sister is living with me after she gets out of college. She's leaving with her boyfriend for the weekend. She asks if I can make sure these pet hamsters she has have food and water. Sure I can! While she's gone, one of them checks out. That figures! Now I'm kind of not liking the idea of this petsitting thing. Nothing good can come of it and the worst that can happen has now happened a couple times.
One boyfriend later, same sister goes for anther weekend. The last thing she says as she walks out the door, "Don't kill my other hamster!". We both laughed. That little sonofabitch was dead the next day. I mean he was hard as a goddam rock.
Now you'd think she'd have learned her lesson. A few years later she goes on her honeymoon and she leaves her welsh corgi with me. So one day after she's left, I head out the front door to get the mail. A jogger is going by the front of my house. The dog bursts from between my legs and goes running after the jogger. Not to bite him or anything. He just wanted to say "Hi!". So I'm yelling after him and he's following after the jogger when I yell "Bumpus, get your hairy ass back here!". The dog stops, turns around, and runs straight in front of a car. A silver Chevy Citation. It hit him perfectly. Squared him right up with the front license plate. He made a sound like a lawn mower running over a clump of really tall grass. But it didn't kill him. Those dogs are so short that it just rolled him. He would have come out of it more or less unscathed if one of his rear legs hadn't got caught between the rear brake cable and the rear axle. As it was, he was drug a little bit on his belly and skinned up his front paws a little bit. He was howling horrifically. The kid who ran him down stopped the car and I got under it to free up the dog. The kid was a little shook up about it all. After assuring him it wasn't his fault he offered to drive me to the U of I vet hospital a couple miles down the road. So we went and got Bumpus checked out. They shaved him where he got hit by the bumper and painted that spot and his paws with some yellow stuff. He was a little shook up to but seemed to have snapped out of it before we left the hospital. Later that day, new brother-in-law calls from Hawaii to say they arrived safely and jokingly asks if the dogs was still alive. I admitted that while I'd gotten him run over by a car that afternoon, he was very much alive. Uh... that was the last time anybody ever asked me to take care of their pets.
Then yesterday the parakeet is laying dead at my door. I guess it's not enough for them to die under my care. Other people's pets are now seeking my house as a final resting place. And as Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.
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