On 1/12/2011 7:49 PM, David Nereson wrote: ------------- stuff --------------------- Yea, that's the stuff. An unaccompanied tuning with two parakeets (budgies) in a covered cage next to the piano. Into the treble, the squarbling (budgies) began to escalate beyond the point of being able to get around it. So I stood up, leaned into the cage cover, and growled softly. Silence. I resumed tuning. Slowly, the tentative cheeping escalated into squarbling and ultimately downright raucousness. So I leaned into the cover again and growled more convincingly, by my estimation. Silence, possibly profound. I finished the tuning without another peep, cheep, squarble, or squawk. Since they hadn't seen what growled at them, I presume that the consensus was that silence was preferable to meeting the boojum, as the better part of discretion. I can certainly relate. I inquired later, and the budgies were apparently unharmed by the trauma, and chose not to press charges. Whacking away at a piano, the lady of the house heard the noise stop and came to investigate. She found me with the house cat on my lap, on her back, head drooped over my knees, having her belly vigorously scrubbed down, kneading the air overhead in ecstasy. She watched for a moment, and said that no one, as long as that cat had lived there, had ever been able to lay a hand on "it". She wanted to know what I had done. When the cat had walked past and noticed me, I said hi and patted the bench next to me. She jumped up and introduced herself, and I grabbed her. The difference, I think, was greeting her as an equal rather than an "it. I haven't been back since, and really feel bad about leaving a perfectly good cat in the hands of Trolls who don't know how to run her. Pulling up to a generic farmhouse, I got out of the truck and walked past the row of compulsory generic vehicles parked in the yard. As I passed the front of the last pickup, I found myself in the presence of a very impressive, and very intensely WIRED specimen of the female Doberman. Dobermans are spooky, because I can't read them. They could be thinking ANYTHING. So I stopped, set my tool case down, leaned toward the dog and said "You must be the killer dog". I instantly had an upside down killer dog wriggling on my feet for a belly rub, which she got, and a bunch of therapeutic pounding, after which my new best friend saw me to the door and introduced me to her person. Then there's the time I came out after the tuning and found that the family Lamas had licked my truck from hub cap to roof, and left a layer of slime that took two rounds at the car wash to blast off. Ugh... Ron N
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