Dogged Day Afternoon ©

The silence is deafening.
With my aunts passing I can’t play music for forty days as is custom, a year if it’s a parent.
I listen to music for 12 hours a day and not being able to makes the day drag on slower but hey, it's tradition and a small price to pay.

Yesterday my Sil called me up in the morning and said she had to go out of town and asked me if I would take care of Biggie while she was gone.
I figured if there was the distinct possibility that I will be ending up with him that this was the perfect time for us, me Frick and Biggie to get used to living together.
Ok we know he’s cute and all and he just loves to play but the little fucker is wild.
I mean WILD WILD.

My 3-year-old niece has been using him like a living toy and petting him is like a battle.
You reach out your hand and he eats it.
OH, he eats everything that he can get his mouth around, except Frick.
Frick and Biggie met upstairs when I wasn’t looking and Biggie lost that one.
In a previous life, Frick was Bruce Lee.

Biggie has another big problem which because a HUGE problem this afternoon.
You see, where Biggie lives there is anarchy.
Where Walker lives there is order or at least you come when you are called but Biggie doesn’t know what come here means.
He thinks come here and sit means chase me around all over the fucken park because that’s what the little fucker did to one today when his leash came unhooked.

No matter what I said or did, he would run up to me and then run away beckoning me to chase him.
Yeah right, me chase a dog. NOT, but there are big blocks of ice laying around and chucking a couple at the little fucker after 30 minutes out in sub zero weather trying to coax him back was really tempting.

It wasn’t until I walked away and sat by myself that he came to me after he realized I wasn’t going to play.
I was out there for one hour freezing because of that dog.
We both learned something today.
I learned that I have to train the little bastard to come when I call him.
He learned that if you make me freeze out in the cold you will, get a boot in the tail when I get the leash back on.
All the way home he walked next to me looking up periodically with his tail between his legs for the three blocks home.

Other than that little incident things have been going good with him here.
I do lock him up in his crate at night but during the day he gets the run of the house, something he doesn’t get at home.
He did learn what a cactus is too.

Tomorrow I go out to pick up the pain for this weekend.
The boys are coming over in shifts over two days to help me paint.
They are all professional painters so it should go smoothly and it beats paying a company $7000 to paint the house.
I will be supplying the beer, dinner and all the smokables they like, AFTER they are done painting of course.
Who knows what they will paint if I let them get stoned and drunk first but with their help I should be able to get most of the house painted this weekend if not all.
I have a guest coming in two weeks Saturday from Manchester UK so I would like the place to be done before she gets here.
Why is it every time you have guests coming, that’s when you have work to do?

My parents asked me if I could tear down their back porch and built them a new one in the spring.
There is nothing wrong with it as I only built it 8 years ago and its covered but they now want a bigger one.
When I said bigger the first time my father said his car wouldn’t fit.
The year after I built the porch he bought a smaller car so now he wants a bigger porch.
I wonder if he wants a ceiling fan on it to?

I told him I could just tear out at floor and roof and just extend it for about two hundred dollars plus my labour, which comes out to two hundred dollars.
It beats the Two thousand the guy who built the porch next door asked for.
My parents don’t trust me to do things around the house because they never seen me do stuff like that because I don’t want people to know I can because then they will bug you to fix everything for them but while I was gone to New Zealand my father unblocked the barricaded door to my basement and went down there to see what I was hiding and found my workshop and my tools.
I don’t have that many tools but there is a small fortune’s worth down there. More than my father has seen and some things he drools all over at Home Depot.

So now I get the call before the repair guy does because I work for free, which is fine they have done a lot for me but I hate when they lend me out to other old people.
It’s not that I don’t like helping, it’s the milk and cookies that bother my stomach but I do appreciate the quarter they give me after.
I just hope when I am old and feeble that some young person helps me out and I hope she is cute.

Have a nice day

Walker