Fear of the blue

Freya doesn’t really have many faults. Unlike Emma with her high pitched, annoying yap. Freya generally just grumbles gremlin-like rather than giving full voice. And when she does it isn’t as piercing as Emma’s. She has some sort of issue with the puppy door but she will use it in an emergency. No, Freya is generally pretty good.

She does have one huge fault though. The potency of her repulsive farts. How such a small creature can create such disgusting smells is beyond me.

Sue decided that it’s because she gobbles her food (Freya, not Sue) and it’s true. The time between putting the food down and her eating it is almost impossible to accurately measure. Well, not without some pretty high tech, time measuring equipment rarely seen outside science fiction. I’m thinking approximately one hundredth of a nano second. Sometimes she’ll eat her food so fast that it almost instantly comes back up, undigested.

And so Sue bought a gobble bowl for when she stays. Or, more accurately, an anti-gobble bowl. Rather than being smooth and round, they have little bumps and spikes on the bottom forcing the dog to lick around rather than gobble. And it’s taken me a while to get my act in gear but, finally I bought one this week.

For the first few days, Freya was fine and dandy. She licked and slurped her dinner and lunch. But then came tonight.

Fear the bowl

I’d put the food on the floor in the laundry with the usual cry of “Positions!” and they both dived in. Except very quickly Freya changed her mind and went and stood behind Emma, not taking her eyes off the gobble bowl. It was like the bowl had threatened her.

She couldn’t be tempted out from behind Emma and definitely not to go anywhere near the new bowl. I tried picking her up and placing her near it but she’d just scamper away, tail down and unhappy.

Freya is pretty much obsessed with food. It’s how I’ve trained her to do everything she does. It makes life very easy…if you ignore the puppy door thing. Conversely, Emma does what Emma wants which sometimes is the same thing as I want her to do. So it’s very odd that Freya would ignore a bowl of food put down in front of her.

I then had the idea of taking the bowl out of the laundry and putting it in front of her while I sat on the floor with her. She very sheepishly reached out then started to eat. Her neck was fully stretched out and her back legs ready to spring away if the bowl suddenly turned vicious but at least she was eating.

I had to turn the bowl around a few times and move it completely out of the laundry at one stage but, she ended up eating everything and trotted happily away as if nothing had happened. I’m thinking that maybe she had a bad dream about the bowl gobbling her during one of her extensive sleep periods and, being Freya, thought it was real.

Weird dog.

Meanwhile in Castle Street, the phone box outside the almshouses has had a new coat of paint. It looks delightfully, unmistakably, bright, telephone box red.

The brightness of the box is in sharp contrast to the day which was dull and gloomy though, thankfully, dry. Well, until after dinner when the rain lashed down outside the extension while we sat and watched an episode of a Spanish drama of a made up town where it seems never to rain.

Gloomy alley
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