I am the world's most cheerful neurotic
With age comes wisdom, mostly in the realm of energy extraction
My name is Rosie, and my prohounds are “she,” “hers,” and “good girl.”
It has been a while since I last guest-posted. Whelp, as of yesterday, according to paperwork generated when I arrived at the regional humane jail in 2018, I am now eight years old.
With advancing age comes the obligation to share whatever wisdom I have accumulated with the next generation. Now obviously, when it comes to spoken communication, I am hampered by the absence of the fine laryngeal and pharyngeal musculature required to articulate “words”—a problem compounded by an IQ far too low to measure or even assign any meaning to. But my sounds do typically correlate with my emotions and intentions, and these may be opaque to human observers naive to my particular charms.
For example, I express pleasant anticipation, as when arriving at a training site, almost entirely by what you recognize as “whining.”
And when greeting a known and trusted friend, this “whining” often devolves into a spastic display of ecstatic chattering easily mistaken for “distress,” “confusion,” or “intoxication” by those listening from elsewhere in the yard.
I may operate from a platform of considerable anxiety, but I do so with nearly untrammeled joy.
In other developments, I have made surprisingly few adjustments to my activity level in my encroaching dotage; this is not the long-ago 2010s, and eight has become the new five. Still, the evenings do grow brisk at times in northern Colorado—the other night, despite the beckoning of the vernal equinox, it was 6 degrees American—and so I have been limiting my running to about 30 to 40 minutes once a day. Sometimes, I will participate in aspects of the afternoon training session with MAIN MAN, if one is scheduled. We did celebrate my birthday with a total of 70 minutes of running.
More often, during these me-dormant close-to-sundown times, I will monitor the street traffic from my post in the bedroom sentry station. I admit that I have been known to rest my eyes while on duty, as well as disregard the state of the health science when it comes to exposure to ultraviolet rays.
Since my last bout of dogged reportage, MAIN MAN and I have taken one extensive trip in the motor chariot to the some of the farthest known reaches of the property—portions extending into Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. I was not surprised recently to see that no small number of escaped prairie dogs, squirrels, and bunnyrabbits have been loitering in fringe places like these, perhaps plotting a return to the main segment of the yard, perhaps too enlightened by previous experience to even try.
Closer to the sleeping quarters, MAIN MAN has been inviting me to detail the ecology. It is not complicated. This meadow just yonder is where most of the squirrels in the United States are believed to originate.
Meanwhile, this plateau just east of town proper, as I understand the folklore, once offered an unspoiled view of the XCel Power Plant. Sometime after the college was installed, a 14,000’-foot eyesore called Longs Peak was erected in the northwestern reaches of the county. Yet the grandeur of the smokestacks is still largely intact from this perspective.
The plateau itself is ultra-rich in prairie dogs. Whoever decided to call these callow, chittering fellows “dogs” must also have overseen the designation of curdling as an Olympic sport.
Lately, the creeks have been warming to more reasonable wading temperatures, though I annually mourn the loss of snow cover once the ugly heat of March rears its head. But older though I may be getting, and grayer in the muzzle though I may appear, my eyesight remains perfectly intact, and I look forward to the arboreal springtime antics of my fellow quadrupeds in and around the People’s Republic of Boulder (whatever that means).
Finally, I have been working very hard on my diet. By this, I mean that when my kibble is introduced into the bowl, I simply wait until MAIN MAN introduces some kind of meat or cheese into the dish. This period is often rife with idle threats like “That’s all you’re getting” and “No chicken tonight…all gone,” which essentially serve as signals of an impending kibble enrichment. I still got it, kiddoes.
Enjoy what is coming soon, and conduct yourselves accordingly out there.