Faulty Canine

The wife had a very long day yesterday courtesy of Buddy the Wonder Pooch. His terrors associated with thunderstorms, rain, fireworks, trains, and brass bands are well chronicled in this blog.  Yesterday he added battery failing smoke alarms to the list of things that send him into spasmodic hyper-pain in the ass mode.  As with most newer houses our house is liberally festooned with smoke alarms which start beeping when the batteries fail even though they’re connected to the power supply.

Buddy Hovering Over His Tormentor

My wife was trying to figure out what was causing the chaotic behavior until she heard the faint beep going off.  Buddy was liberally dosed with the medication we give him for thunderstorms but that only quelled him for a little bit.  My wife was at the end of her rope (and conceivably Buddy’s continued existence) when I got home to find various barricades erected to corral the psychotic canine.  I tracked down the offending alarm which continued to beep even after I removed the battery.  I started to wonder if I needed a wooden stake to shut the damned thing off.  It spent the rest of the day out on the back deck and Buddy came in for a soft landing.

My wife, in serious need of some R&R, and in an effort to reduce the planned assassination attempts against my favorite black dog, I took one for the team and saw a chick flick for date night.  We saw The Fault in Our Stars which told the story of a young gal with terminal cancer who meets the love of her life, another cancer survivor.  I was prepared for a serious deluge of female tears and life affirming catch phrases but this came at me from a different direction.

Tear Jerking But Life Affirming

I give almost the entire credit to the two young stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort.  There is electric chemistry between these two actors and this is the first movie in a long time where I left totally fascinated by the craft of two actors playing off each other.  Woodley has already impressed in a number of movies but Elgort was a revelation as the cocky but sweet male lead.  The plot doesn’t sugar coat the reality the characters deal with and doesn’t succumb to the Hollywood need to over dramatize.  The quiet courage of the characters and the poignant love story even had this grizzled old movie goer a little misty eyed by the end; a really, really good movie.  My wife was crying buckets of course and this hopefully distracted her from any calculated executions.