Baby Friday's Safari Planet

Anyone who knows me knows that I get pretty weird around animals. I thought I’d blog about it, for your amusement. Here is another one of my encounters with a random animal.

All right you lucky devils, time for another installment of Baby Friday’s Safari Planet. Since the focus thus far has been heavily on kitties, I thought I’d mix it up a little bit and delve into…PARANORMAL DOGGIE ACTIVITY!

No, this isn’t an article about Skeledog (sorry, LBT). This is an article that may challenge your very belief system about the universe and its many wonders. You may feel shaken, unseated, as though right had suddenly become left and up had sudden switched with down. That’s okay. It’s normal. For what I am about to tell you defies even scientific explanation. I will now inculcate you into the mysteries of the Picnic Table Dogs.

At the edge of our neighborhood there is a house with a fenced-in backyard. Within this yard dwell two dogs: a large red bloodhound that we call “Roofus” (due to his call of “Roof! Roof!” when we pass); and “Sergeant Pepper”, so called because he is the color of pepper (i.e., black). In this same backyard is a picnic table, and sometimes the dogs are on top of the picnic table. Sometimes just Sgt. Pepper, sometimes just Roofus, sometimes lying, sometimes standing…this is NOT the mystery. The mystery is this: when Teach or I drive past, if one or both of the dogs is on the picnic table, then the VERY NEXT DAY will be guaranteed to be good. If they are not, the next day will tend to be average to crappy.

HOW DO THEY KNOW? It would seem these dogs have some sort of cosmic wisdom that allows them to divine what the following day will be like for two people who live in their neighborhood, and they adjust their position vis-à-vis the picnic table to give us the appropriate sign. There are varying degrees. Roofus trumps Sgt. Pepper, while both on signals extraordinary things to come. Standing is always better than sitting. It takes a keen mind to be able to decipher these cues, but since the dogs have clearly devoted their energy to making the signs available to me, the least I can do is pay attention.

And there you have it. The mystery of the picnic table dogs revealed. Will science ever have an explanation? What else do the picnic table dogs have to tell us about the world? Only time will tell.

This has been a brief insight into the madness that is Baby Friday’s animal obsession. Tune in next time for the true (and scandalous!) story of the origins of Handsomedog.