Deer George

Meet George, our incorrigible puppy. He was to be a faithful indoor soul mate for my son, but he is quite the pup and we are nearly ready to give up on the indoor part. Right now he is back in the kitchen in his crate because it seems to still be important to him to sleep in his accustomed place. He spent nearly the whole day out of doors.

Soon after he went out he had this leg of deer which he worked on all day. He is less than 25 lb. and has a small build so there is no reason to think he brought this deer down himself. I'm not sure where he found the leg.

I spent the day chasing my tail. Our phone did not work this morning so I biked to our neighbor's and spent 20 minutes working my way through the automated system you have to go through before talking with a real person at the phone company. The real person told me that I probably did not hang up one of my phones well enough and that the solution was to go back home, unplug all phones, wait 5 minutes, and plug them each back in. The plugging back in included checking for dial tone as each phone was hooked up.

I biked back home and unplugged everything, plugged in the first phone and had...NO dial tone. I biked back to the neighbor's house and called again. After working my way through the automated system AGAIN, which informed me that my problem was already fixed and I should not worry about it anymore, I got another real person who confirmed that I did indeed still have a problem. Someone would be sent out by 6 p.m.

I had an essential phone call to make at 2:00 p.m. so I biked back to the neighbor's one more time and checked my messages before making the call. My son had been trying to reach me all day because he forgot his algebra homework and needed it to avoid detention. It was too late to take it to him. I had to make the essential phone call.

The repair person arrived at my house soon after I did. He discovered there was a problem inside my house. We tried one phone jack. It worked. We tried the other. It worked. We tried each of the phones and the computer. All of them worked. Now we had a dial tone and nothing had been fixed yet. The repairman was puzzled and kept looking for what could cause a problem that would spontaneously disappear.

George could cause a problem that would spontaneously disappear. The cord that runs from the computer to the kitchen phone jack hangs down to the floor under the computer desk. It had some breaks in the insulation. The repairman would wiggle the cord and we would listen to the dial tone start and stop and start again. A chewing puppy was the culprit. The repairman fixed the wire and also installed a new phone jack next to the computer.