ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So the dog has this fixation with us preparing dinner every night.  She can be fast asleep in a padded chamber three miles away, yet the instant she hears one of us place knife to cutting board, a magical animal instinct tells her that we have food.  And a magical crazy instinct that is usually totally wrong tells her that she may get some of it if she goes into the kitchen and jumps up and down enough.  While it’s annoying and she’s constantly underfoot when she does this, we still tolerate this behavior because it is also hilarious.

What makes this just about the funniest is the fact that no matter what we are doing up on the counter, if a cutting board is involved she won’t believe us that it is not meat.  Specifically, she believes the only valid use of a cutting board or a knife is to cut up ham into small pieces for her to eat.  So it’s hard for her to understand when we cut up something else, like onions or celery or carrots.  In her mind, the cutting board is a magical tool that dispenses salty cured meats.  She cannot be dissuaded from this no matter how many times we actually show her the thing that we are really cutting up.

And she does this thing where she stands on her hind legs and bounces up and down with her front legs pointing up.  And when that doesn’t work she assumes the traditional “begging” position.  I don’t know where she learned that, but it was probably taught to her long ago by someone who was really sloppy with a cutting board.  And this is a picture of my husband after I asked him to let me take a picture of him imitating what the dog does when she wants ham.

But rest assured, her stupidity is really funny.  Tonight she was worse than usual for some reason.  Usually after a while she gives up and goes away, but she waited patiently as we cut up a slough of vegetables for the soup and then watched my husband with an eagle eye as he sliced up sage leaves and pulled thyme leaves off their twigs.  Finally he got fed up with all the bouncing and begging and offered her a piece of carrot.

“HERE,” he said.  The dog excitedly raced for the carrot, and as soon as she realized it wasn’t meat, abandoned it on the floor and resumed bouncing.  Because, you know, if we caved on this, there is DEFINITELY meat up there.  I was making soup dumplings up on the counter, but I stopped to address her behavior.  And what I did was standard in all canine behavioral manuals.

I gave the dog the finger.  “Do you understand that you are an idiot and I can’t respect you?” I demanded.

“That’s mean,” my husband said. “You flipped her off.”

The dog bounced up and down again, landed on the carrot, lost her balance, and fell.

“Okay,” he said.  “She is an idiot.”

“Dog,” he said.  “If you eat that carrot, you can have some of our food.”

The dog sat there and looked confused.  Then the bouncing again.

“Dog,” I said.  “If you eat that carrot, you can have all the dumplings and we’ll eat our soup without.”

Bounce.  Bounce.

“If you eat the carrot, you can have our whole dinner, meat included, and we’ll go hungry.  I just want to see you eat it.”

Despite the fact that this was basically the best offer she could ever get, short of us leaving a Honeybaked Ham on a sheet of plastic in the living room, she failed to take us up on our wager.  So, whatever, dog.  That one’s not coming back on the table.

This is what we had for supper.