Lately, my mother has been sending me lots of short little emails, which, times being what they are, is probably what everyone’s mom is doing these days.  Cut off from playing Scrabble with her friends, going to movies with her friends, eating in restaurants with her friends, and walking along the beach with all the dog-walkers and exercisers, she has been taking a daily walk in her neighborhood, more or less along the same route, more or less at the same time each day.  It is the sort of neighborhood that, if you do this, even under ordinary circumstances, you also end up to running into the same people also out for their daily constitutional.  My mother has discovered that in these most unordinary circumstances, this includes a family of five- mom, dad, babe-in-arms, small dog, and mid-sized dog sized pot-bellied pig.  Apparently it is white with pink and black spots (which I think means it is not a true pot-bellied pig).  Many questions spring immediately to mind (how big is that thing going to get?!), not the least of which is: aren’t there ordinances against the keeping of pigs within city limits?

Anyway, I guess you can feed them just about anything.

Speaking of which, oh. my. god.  Dogs really do eat just about everything.  I did not grasp this before becoming the proud owner of a fast moving working terrier mix.  Have I mentioned this already?  If you’re not careful when you open the fridge, a little snout will stick itself in and pluck a carrot off of the shelf.  But our little Ru-Ru doesn’t like carrots even a tenth as much as he loves ice-cold, crisp slices of kohlrabi.  Apples are the bomb, too.  And eggs, potatoes, rice, stir-fried zucchini, sausages (duh.), lettuce, cornbread, bread bread, the wet mix of pulverized breadcrumbs and minerals I give to the chickens every afternoon (because otherwise I just can’t get them to take their vitamins*) {*sensu super latissimo}, all walks of cardboard, all important pieces of paper** {**and here I used to think that ‘the dog age my homework’ was a joke}, used tissues from the bathroom garbage pail, hand towels, bath towels, anything small and plastic enough to require surgery if it lodges itself into any gastrointestinal nook or cranny, clean socks, dirty socks, my underwear (and my underwear only) out of the dirty clothes basket, cat food in all of its forms (wet, dry, chucked up, pooped out), horse apples, cow pies, deer pellets, chicken shit, mummified rats, and, as of 24 hours ago, single-use rubber gloves chucked out someone’s car window as they drove down a country lane not far from our house (assholes).

Schlucked down whole, even, before the horrified eyes of Spouse.  When they got home from their walk, we called the vet, expecting to hear a Thank god you caught it so quickly!  Come right in and for a mere couple of hundred euros, we can put him under general anasthesia and endoscope that thing right out of him.  But she just laughed and said, it happens (read the internet; generally it’s not single gloves but boxes of them).  Feed him sauerkraut.  That’ll help it slide out.

The sauerkraut was another big hit.

Anyway, thanks to the 12 hour average gut transit time of your typical small dog, it all came out, ahem, in the end this morning before breakfast.  Although apparently Spouse had to provide the final tug.  (It is at times like these when little Ru-Ru is not our dog but his dog.)

The only other news from here that’s fit to print is that German tv is full of montages of celebrities of various flavors (actors, moderators, sports stars, musicians) thanking the overworked and underpaid hospital workers and exhorting people to stay at home.  The new one I saw last night actually included a guy in a bright shiny new t-shirt that said FUCK THE VIRUS.  Because only in Germany could you show that on prime time tv during a public service announcement.