Pet Peeve

My pet peeve is poop. Particularly, pet poop. More particularly, my peeve is the pet's person who permits poop in public places. Please, pick up your pet's poop!

One such person perpetually permits its pet to poop near a perimeter gate. The person scoops the poop in a bag and places it purposefully in a pile. With persistence, the pile grows each passing day. Until another person - me - personally picks up the pile and puts it in its proper place. This is quite unpleasant.

There is a pause in the pattern when the person, and, presumably, the pet, pass from this place making my performance somewhat non-permanent. But when the perpetual pooper, from whatever place they perchance visit, returns to this place their pet's perpetual pooping pattern persists.

Please! If a person is permitted to own a pet, said person should be prepared to scoop its pet's poop and place it in its proper receptacle. If said person cannot be personally responsible for its pet they should not be permitted to be a pet person, in my personal opinion. Without opposable thumbs, pets cannot be responsible for their own poop. Therefore, the onus is placed on the pet's person to perform this unpleasant duty.

While I perform this perfunctory duty on behalf of keeping this place pretty, I do so under perpetual and petulant protest.

Portland is Sustainably Weird

You know you've landed somewhere weird when people take pictures of the airport carpet. That's just what they do in Portland.

The carpet pictured here is the new airport carpet. The one it replaced, the old carpet, was famous. Go ahead, look up Portland Airport Carpet. Among other things, it has its own Wikipedia page. 

I digress. What makes Portland weird is not the carpet. That's just the introduction to what makes Portland weird. In fact, if you were flying in to Portland from another country, the test at Customs is whether or not you take a picture of your feet on the carpet. If you don't, then you can't come in.

The last time I was at the Portland airport, I saw an emotional support duck. It was a Mallard, to be precise. It was being pushed in a dog stroller (much like this one) only instead of a dog, it was a duck. It was zipped into its stroller but I could see through the mesh. It was definitely a duck. It quacked. 

I wondered if it had been on my flight*. Or, if it had taken a different flight. Did it fly with other ducks? Were they in formation? Did they have humans, too?

Don't laugh. While ducks aren't recognized by the ADA as service animals, ducks can provide emotional support. Well, not to me. But they can to Carla Fitzgerald. She traveled with her duck, Daniel, and became an overnight sensation. 

That was a few years ago. Carla and Daniel are both older now. Maybe Daniel needs more support now than Carla. Maybe it was Daniel in the stroller.

That was weird enough. I didn't even bother to go into the city of Portland. I crossed the river into Washington. It's a little less weird there. 

To be clear, we were in Washington State, not Washington DC. 'Cuz it's really weird there!

*It was not. I checked the website for Southwest Airlines. They only allow dogs and cats on their flights. (And humans.)

True Enough

I read this blog post on 76003.1414 about people walking backward and how it could improve one's mental and physical health. To his delight, he imagined that if this caught on, people would be walking backwards everywhere.

The article behind the blog post, Could walking backwards be the secret to physical and cognitive health?, recommended "that people walk backwards for shorter periods of time and that they create resistance by dragging something while they walk." 

For me, this evokes a vision of people dragging unknown heavy objects rolled up in carpet. The blogger's idea that it could simply be a shopping cart may be a better idea.

While it may not have caught on with the population at large, if you were to stop by my house just before bedtime you would find its occupants indeed walking backwards. For exactly two minutes and again in the morning while we brush our teeth.

We've gotten quite good at it. The challenge - and the cognitive benefit, I would assume - increases significantly when we are both walking backwards around the house at the same time. Knocking on wood, we have yet to trip over furniture or the edge of a rug and fallen to smash our skulls resulting in more of a physical detriment than an improvement. On the other hand, if one of us fell, the other one could drag the first one's body to even things out but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

I grin each night to think someone - perhaps this blogger - might spy in a window and catch a glimpse of our evening routine. Anyway, that should scare any potential intruders away.

In fact, they might back away improving their own cognitive abilities. Then, who knows? Maybe it will catch on.