Dog's Plot Restaurant

 DOGS PLOT RESTAURANT

 

Here at our tiny Dog’s Plot Mom and Pop Up Restaurant (once the cats have been fed) our staff of two spends  most of the morning conferring over coffee -  first about the coffee, then about the day's menu -  after which  we move on to other food related subjects,  like today, for instance:
    Learning that  a camel hump is not actually a sort of water bag, but that it is mostly FAT; what good is a bag of camel fat when you are crossing the desert? 
    Which brings us to a lot of other questions we can't answer.
    By the time the questioning petered out this morning,  we had just about finished the coffee, so Georgia started to put together some of her famous banana-oatmeal- raisin-date-nut breakfast cookies and then chopped up the resulting  banana skins for me to take down to the chicken house with some spilled dry cat food from the kitchen floor for the chickens to breakfast on..
    Now that the hens have started noticing that the days are getting longer so that they have started laying again, one of the hens was on the nest yet, and missing out on the scratch, and, after  I put some layer ration in all the regular containers, I lingered to pile little on the rim of her nest box so she would miss out on the eats.
     I had left the orchard ladder standing down there under a pear tree I had not finished pruning yesterday, so I took care of some of it with the clippers I carry on my belt, then went back to get the pole handled pruner for some I couldn't reach with the ladder, then I had to check to see if the chickens had water, and by  the time I got back it well past most peoples lunch time, and I hadn't had what most would call a breakfast even:  only my usual oatmeal cookie, which is plenty the first thing in the day for me, and so good and healthy that I always carry them as s travel food. We could sell those cookies, they are so practical, and good but we don’t. 
    But of course it is not practical or even possible for us to serve breakfast or lunch to others here.
         And supper or dinner or whatever you call  the one meal one has if one is having only one, is a big deal for us: an intimate family function, not a commercial operation,.  In short, we are NOT your orfdanary sort of restaurant that serves the public. Dog's Plot Restaurant is  mostly a conceptual thing; you know. As a matter of fact, we don't even know what we are going to have now

When I returned from pruning in the orchard this afternoon, Georgia wanted to know what adventures I had out there, but all is chilled and still, and anyway, when I walk, or work, or just stand among the trees I have planted and the wild seedlings I have grafted on to out back here - some of them big as a house now - instead of just feeling kind of proud, I feel like my own grandfather, or my own grandson, or an ancestral ghost, or all at once, and nobody in particular at all. It is cold up on the orchard ladder and I came in early, to avoid turning into a tree, though it was very close. That would be quite an adventure and a tale I could never be able to tell, but it would be a good way to go.

Chickens in Snow Mode

The snow fell in rafts of flakes, and Gerald Rooster saw no reason to
stay out in it, but the hens persisted and sweetly accepted their snow
coats.

Alarm, Flock Chaos, and an Unfortunate Misunderstanding:

I was in the car and ready to pull out of the driveway, when Georgia got
in and said there was a general alarm among the chickens, so I ran down
to the chicken house, burt I have poor hearing in one ear as a result
of a recent infection, so I had to run around the plot,,,, a
lot...before I found the rooster Coperanicus up on the Sumach ridge
squalling, and in the grape vine tangle behind him, two hens: One was
squawking loudy with both wings hooked over vine crotches, and another
hen screaching and trying either to free her or peck her to death. I
broke through the tangle to them, and removed the hung-up hen from her
imprisonment, after which the other hen snuggled her, as you see here,
but after a short snuggling session the freed hen attacked her
comforter, if that is what she was; so then I pulled the freed hen away
by the feet, took her under my arm to the dog house, and left her in its
attic with some bread. As far as I can see down at the chicken house,
all is well enough with the hens, but I have not yet gotten over it.

ice fishing cat

The feral cat we called Snowbell went ice fishing but couldn't  figure out how to get through to the fish.

Warning Squall Warning Squall

It was a crunchy snow squall for sure:

So What do YOU Do?”

At the memorial service for a freind recently, a fellow I didn’t recognize, with a steel-grey, handlebar moustash I admired, stood alone in the middle of the crowded room holding onto one handle of his stash, like a biker idling at a stop light. Coming from the buffet with a spiked egg nog in my hand, I saluted him with my cup of nog and stopped to stand beside him looking at the crowd which was mostly a mix of academics and builders I knew. “Lots of Proffs”I observed (taking him to be something more outdoorsy) He moved his finger grip from his mustash to the earlobe and looked at me sideways. Then he let go of his ear lobe; and studied the ceiling. “Well … in the morning I drink coffee, and in the afternoon I drink wine.” “Right, I said.” “ Of course I eat too, but after dinner it’s rum,” “ what do you do …do. I mean, work at?” I asked, pretending not to get the joke. Or maybe I DIDN’T get the joke, or maybe he wasn’t quite joking. “ Well, I’m retired, and there’s no work more serious than getting my clothes on, which at my age and in my condition, is quite work enough, exhaustausting really,” he explained, looking at his feet. “I could make it easier, but I prefer to make it FUN, as the struggle with getting up and dressed, specially when you consider the demands of the cooking, eating, drinking and personal hygine cycle (which I won’t get into here) so I try to have as much fun as I can just getting dressed in the morning.” “How fun is THAT?” “First of all, I balance on one foot while putting a sock on the other, and usually imagine that I’ve been asked to step out of my car take a sobriety test.” “Not to say THAT would be fun itself. I can hardly do the finger on my nose part while putting socks on anyway, and I usualy fail the test but I always do it near the dresser so I can catch myself when I need to. No … after that or skipping that If I can get right into it, I practice perfecting a routine I once saw Fred Astair do in an old movie set in Paris. He is singing happilly in some Paris garret while dressing for a party of some sort. I can’t remember which movie or f “ Well I guess you wear shoes and eventually get out of the bathroom…do you GO anywhere or DO anything. I mean like for Sport even?” “ Oh yeah sure, that, I go to the lake shore and look for turd shaped rocks, to use as key hiders and paper weights. Trouble is I never found a REAL coprolite, though a lot of look alikes and more than a few real turds.” “ I suppose that isn’t exactly a TEAM sport. “Oh, but a good elder work out, slow attentive walking and occasional downward dogging to pick up a pseudo turd. But if its socializing you mean, I do Facebook under several names with different faces. Also I go to funerals and memorial services of people I don’t know. Fascinating the people you meet there because somehow you never see them again, anymore than you do the guy who died. Do you mind if I take your picture?” “How do I know you aren’t a Russian bot? “ I asked. He laughed. And he took my picture. I Haven’t seen him since, but of course I had never seen him BEFORE; and maybe even that he was a man who wasn’t there. Anyway,I AM going to look up that Fred Astair movie. Anybody remember what it was? By the way: be very wary of accepting any friend requests from people who appear to look a lot like me.