The weather today in the Tampa Bay area is awesome. And so when I technically should have been cooking, I took a few minutes of my afternoon to sit in the backyard with my dog.
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| Meet Rudy. |
My plan to bask in backyard silence was foiled when I realized I was sitting amid a swarm of grasshoppers.
“Aww, geeze,” I said. Then, I noticed it: a grasshopper sitting on my dog.
Grasshoppers, to my knowledge and in my experience, are harmless. But in the heat of the moment, I projected my irrational fear of them onto my dog. My hunch is that if my dog acted more like he acted in the picture pasted above, I likely would have let him fend for himself. But most days, he acts more like this:
So, with literally zero forethought, the following really happened:
Me: “HEY. GET OFF MY DOG!” [Insert me, flicking a grasshopper off my dog.]
It’s good to know I can do this. And I’m equal parts proud and alarmed to report it. (Proud, because I clearly subconsciously dug deep if I touched a bug on purpose. Alarmed, because it’s the second time in slightly more than a month that I’ve spoken to a bug.)