A tater in the eye and a dog with dementia

So I was peeling a potato the other night and I somehow managed to get potato in my eye.

“What’s wrong?” my daughter, Sophia said.

“I got a little piece of potato in my eye,” I said.

“Potato in your eye? How did you manage that?” she said.

“I dunno. It just flew up and went in my eye. A little piece of potato,” I said.

“Well don’t rub it. STOP rubbing it,” she said.

My daughter works in an eye clinic. She’s all about eyes. Rubbing eyes is a high crime.

She told me to put my eye under the faucet and keep it open. I did the best I could.

Then she took a cotton swab and cleaned the chunk of tater out of the corner of my eye.

“There it is,” she said.

Relief! There isn’t anything worse than a Russet Burbank in your cornea.

I do all of the cooking at our house at Thanksgiving and the days thereafter. Normally I eat stuff like stir-fries, which are low in fat and good for you.

But on Thanksgiving, it’s full-on fat. The turkey was basted in butter. I made Hollandaise for the asparagus and the gravy was made with cream. The chocolate cake is made with buttermilk and the buttercream frosting is butter and melted chocolate.

The next night we had a slow roasted pork shoulder with gravy and broccoli with Hollandaise and the night after that we had huge marbled sirloin steaks. I ate more saturated fat in three days than I did the entire month of August.

The only thing was wasn’t dripping in fat was a cioppino made with shrimp and fish and we fed that to the dog! (Just kidding).

It was a busy house, to say the least. There were three dogs, four cats and 10 people.

Mako, the puppy, peed on the floor about 10 times in the first 10 minutes. Alice, the cat, attacked Mako at least once a day, embedding a sharp claw into the pup’s ear if she got too close. Gus, another cat, somehow found a petrified mouse and brought it in the living room for everyone to see. The rodent looked like it had died during the Bush Administration.

Rico, yet another cat, watched the mayhem from the dog bed next to the door, without a concern in the world. The dog never lays on the bed, but the cat’s on it all the time. He didn’t earn the spot by accident. He has a missing tooth and three notches in his left ear. He didn’t get them through kindness and patience with his four-footed friends.

Anyone comes close to the bed and he growls.

And then there’s Ginger the dog. Ginger sheds roughly five pounds of hair a day and we’re pretty sure she has early onset dementia. Which is to say we let her out to go to the bathroom and two minutes later she’ll want to go again. Then she just stands on the porch, wondering why she’s out there. She can’t hear hardly at all and she can’t see too great either. Still, she’s part of the family, and that’s what it’s all about.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.