Shortly after moving in to our humble abode, my family purchased and installed a high-tech home security system to protect us from the lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). We live in the middle of nowhere (actually 40 minutes outside of Forks) so we need some kind of security system. His name is Tucker and he’s a year-old lab-mixed with goodness knows what else.
He has the worst case of Little Man Syndrome that I’ve ever seen and to be honest, I’m surprised he doesn’t walk around asking, “Which way to the gun show?” Though I don’t speak dog so who knows?
Anyway, Tucker does a good job at alerting us to the many potential dangers we face out here. For example, when a leaf falls from a tree, I can always count on Tucker to bark at it for a half an hour. Clearly he is warning us of the life-threatening situation we are in.
Also, when my hair is up in a towel, he goes berserk. It’s pretty obvious that Tucker is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but I sleep well at night knowing that my family will never be massacred by crazed, towel-wearing, maple leaves.
Lately, my little security system has been working overtime. We’ve had a bear hanging out in the fields around my house. Between barking at leaves, warning me of the towel on my head and tracking the scent of Winnie the Pooh, Tucker barks day and night.
This is very annoying, but thanks to him, no member of the Ford family has been eaten by a leaf … or a bear either.
Because we haven’t been eaten by the bear yet, we don’t mind him around. Despite this, we still have an endless supply of helpful neighbors who drop by on a regular basis, offering to rid us of the animal. My husband told one person at work about the bear and suddenly every Tom, Dick, Harry and Tim (my dad), came knocking at my door with shotgun in hand, saying, “Heard you have a bear you need gone.”
They all literally use these same words. One guy even came from Rochester. I’m not making that up. I have no idea who he was, but he heard that we had a bear problem and came right over.
Listen gentlemen (and Dad), we don’t have a bear problem. We have a bear hanging around. We do however, have a spider problem.
Tucker doesn’t warn us of those. To be fair to him, spiders technically fall under the cat’s job description but she’s not very useful beyond cleaning her food bowl. Hunters, if you really want to help, you’ll set up camp in my house and shoot every single spider that you see with your shotgun. I don’t even care about the holes, I just want the spiders gone. My landlords will be OK with this … I think.
So hurry and get your spider license from Thrifty and then head out to my house. For directions, or other comments/questions, e-mail me at christyrasmussen@yahoo.com.
