Take Me Out....

That's meant several different things this week.

Take me out.... with the dog.

Not just "out "as in playing or Parp!  It's taken this entire week to re-educate this poor Pepper on what "out" is all about.

This puppy, going on three years old, came to us completely housebroken. Yet somehow in her third week, we managed to confuse the shit out of her. Literally.  Our evil older cat has had a long history of protest pees. She let one loose last week, on a table in the kitchen.  The next day, we found a major pee bomb of hers in Eleanor's studio area, which is also where she does her twice-daily Buddhist chanting (this will be important later). It was cleaned, but then repeated the next morning when I was at work.  I thought quickly and decisively about how to contain the damage from the cat and texted Eleanor the Plan: Put puppy pads down where she's doing it. Put the crate (not Pepper's, which we had never even unfolded, but Ebony's old one) on top of the pads, put the small catbox in the crate and ground Michelle in there when you leave. All seemed logical. We came home and found the evil cat had managed to get pee outside the crate.

Finally, though, the mystery was solved, when poop also started appearing in that area. Not cat poop, either. Unlike with pee, you can tell.  Honey, I broke the dog:(

Then it occurred to me: when she moved here, her previous owner told us that she'd been trained to ring a bell at the back door if she needed to go out. We installed one, but never saw her try it- then I realized, though, that we were probably confusing her further because Eleanor's twice-daily gongyo ceremony begins and ends with her ringing, what else? a bell. (It sounds gong-like, but that's not what the gong in the word means.) 

Time to retreat.  We blocked off that whole area, removed the pads and crate and everything else hinting at it being a poopy place, and doubled our efforts to re-train her at what she was perfectly capable of the first two weeks. And, three full days in and going on a fourth? Dog's smarter than I look.  No further incidents or accidents.  It's also encouraging me to be regular and prompt about getting her out on walkies every morning, which is also a good thing for me:)  And to be sure, we did put her in her own (much bigger) crate for the first afternoon we were both out, and she not only kept it clean, she seemed downright mellow about being left in there when I got home.

We got this.

----

Take me out.... to the ballgame. Food coma. Whatever.

This weekend brought the much-anticipated first half of the rivalry series between Western New York's two celebrated AAA baseball franchises, both having sold their souls to the Devil Dog for some quick merch sales by temporarily renaming themselves after their cities' most historic foods.  The Rochester Red Wings first did it last August, rebranding as the (Garbage) Plates; it was long speculated that the Buffalo Bisons would also get in on the action, following the Trenton Pork Rolls, the Staten Island Pizza Rats, the Albuquerque Green Chile Cheeseburgers and the Syracuse Salt Potatoes. (No word yet on Binghamton, having already gone total silly with the permanent name Rumble Ponies, but they missed a chance during a Met player's rehab last week to rebrand as the Ces-Speidies;)  And sure enough, the team announced earlier this spring that they would be joining the parade of tacky.

So which classic Queen City food would be facing the usually-named Wings in downtown Buffalo this weekend? Why, the Wings, of course.



The appetizer of the hour, who would later go on to win the post-game food race.  I got a last-minute offer to go with a couple of Garbage Plate supporters from the 585, and once we got there, we knew it was for realz: Conehead was in Buffalo Wings gear:



The one oddity of this event? No garbage plates were to be had; the official purveyor of the highly ™ ® ©-protected Rochester original delicacy, Nick Tahou's, has a food truck, but apparently the grease all drained through the floor boards before Batavia and he had to turn back. Even odder, not a single regular concession stand at the Buffalo Wings' venue actually sells wings!  I've had them at Frontier Field and at Citi Field, and will check Toronto next month, and there's a pizza stand run by the Mafia which sells the delicacy at their other crime family locations but not at the ballpark. Fortunately, anticipating the crowd, they did set up a temporary stand with four wings, a slab of celery and a side of Ken's (thank gods not ranch but) Blue Cheese dressing for three bucks:



Wings. Beer. Sports. Wow. Could be a slogan.

Unlike the Plates' debut last summer, there were no wingy-dingy variants on other favorites. The beer was beer, the ice cream was ice cream. Oh, and the temporary Wings beat the permanent ones; we saw a Buffalo player bunt for a triple, another Not Bison hit a home run (I think we won a bottle of hot sauce when he did that, but I don't know how to claim it), and we Arrived Home Safely, although I did have nightmares and indigestion from that large hunk of protein in section 111.

----

Take me out.... to the yard.

This my first Father's Day with the daughter now living Far Far Away. I'm fine with it- we did a good job making her the amazing woman she's become.

On a side note, I mentioned to a coworker a couple of weeks ago how much I've enjoyed seeing a younger family starting out in the house next door to us. I specifically mentioned seeing Mom and Dad (and the dog) playing ball on the lawn with their son, or him in his little red wagon. She asked if I missed having a little red wagon around. I said, "Are you kidding? We still have it!"

I can't remember which of us got this for Emily when she was little, but it was quickly appropriated for its True Purpose before she was even out of kindergarten. Here it is, having hauled five bags of sand from the car to the garage and ready to haul it again on its final journey to the patio extension.

Who'd have guessed, when I was pulling a two-year around in this all those years ago, that it would still be giving us good and faithful service all these years later?

Yet this wasn't what I spent the day playing at. I traded off from the job Eleanor began last week- getting our crappily-attached gutters reattached.    Here are her before-and-after pictures of the section I worked on today:



No, those nails are not supposed to stick out that far. And really, they shouldn't have been nails at all but rather screwed into the frame of the house. A few bucks brought home about a dozen of the latter kind, each wrapped in its own condom-like casing (called a ferrule- Will, who knew?;). The mission was to remove the old nail (most of which required simply breathing on them to detach them), lining up the screw in  the existing or the replacement ferrule, and then drilling away.  It took some getting used to, and by the time I got to the far end of the gutter closest to the downspout, the existing nails were still secure enough to leave alone, but behold the afterage:



Those bad boys should damn outlive us:) (And that's shrubbery sticking out on the one next to the wood prop she put up to keep the gutter from bowing while we worked. I don't leave loose ends like that;)

There's more on other sides of the house. The sand and gravel will go in. But for now, we're accomplished and happy. And I'll take that- out or in.