Prewash
We moved out of The City a few years ago to a community that used to be a sleepy little vacation hamlet with ticky tacky lake cottages , bait shops and antique stores but has been transformed into a bedroom suburb over the past 10 years or so.
Living in the city was a bittersweet experience. I loved being close to Devon Avenue where you can eat your way through waves of emigration as you travel east to west from Lake Michigan. Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani(on Saturdays areas of Devon become a mini New Delhi when people from neighboring states arrive to get hard-to-find ingredients), Jamaican, kosher fish shops, Russian, Polish, halal meat shops, a Croatian Cultural Center, all interspersed with Mexican bodegas. We bought cinnamon, peppercorns, cardomom, turmeric, garam masala, red pepper flakes, cumin seed, mustard seed in various colors, red lentils, green lentils, brown lentils, lentils, lentils, lentils and rice in bulk for really low prices. We'd duck into one of the restaurants for spicy hot samosas and then into the produce section for things I'd never heard of before like Opo squash, or mangoes by the case, or frozen Naan to heat up when we got home. I'm making myself hungry.
On the other hand, I got really tired of being screamed at every time I took too long to park, and of being wakened at 2 a.m. (when people saw light inside because I had fallen asleep reading, as usual) with some lame story about needing jumper cables or something, and of being battered at the Dominic's when I evidently got too close to a woman who thought I was a T. Rex invading her space.
We moved to a beautiful conservation community with miles of trails and large expanses of resurrected prairie. I felt my soul expanding from the burnt little Grinched-like nugget it had become.
And the first thing we did was to look for a dog. We looked at Lab Rescue places first - have you ever gone through the process? it's an awful lot like adopting a baby - not that I'm complaining; there are unfortunately a ton of people out there who aren't good pet owners. The Rescue folks are looking to find you a great match, of course, but I was very impatient. So I started visiting the local Save- a-Pet, a no-kill animal shelter. You know what those places are like - every time I go I feel like I have to fill the car with those poor homeless cats and dogs. But I managed to maintain my perspective and we ended up adopting Weezie, also known as Prewash. She keeps our dishwasher loads few and our garbage clean-smelling.(Heh, heh, heh)
Man, it's a good think I caught you before this went in the garbage.
(slurp, slurp, slurp)
Uh, hi, you uh, didn't want any, did you?
Living in the city was a bittersweet experience. I loved being close to Devon Avenue where you can eat your way through waves of emigration as you travel east to west from Lake Michigan. Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani(on Saturdays areas of Devon become a mini New Delhi when people from neighboring states arrive to get hard-to-find ingredients), Jamaican, kosher fish shops, Russian, Polish, halal meat shops, a Croatian Cultural Center, all interspersed with Mexican bodegas. We bought cinnamon, peppercorns, cardomom, turmeric, garam masala, red pepper flakes, cumin seed, mustard seed in various colors, red lentils, green lentils, brown lentils, lentils, lentils, lentils and rice in bulk for really low prices. We'd duck into one of the restaurants for spicy hot samosas and then into the produce section for things I'd never heard of before like Opo squash, or mangoes by the case, or frozen Naan to heat up when we got home. I'm making myself hungry.
On the other hand, I got really tired of being screamed at every time I took too long to park, and of being wakened at 2 a.m. (when people saw light inside because I had fallen asleep reading, as usual) with some lame story about needing jumper cables or something, and of being battered at the Dominic's when I evidently got too close to a woman who thought I was a T. Rex invading her space.
We moved to a beautiful conservation community with miles of trails and large expanses of resurrected prairie. I felt my soul expanding from the burnt little Grinched-like nugget it had become.
And the first thing we did was to look for a dog. We looked at Lab Rescue places first - have you ever gone through the process? it's an awful lot like adopting a baby - not that I'm complaining; there are unfortunately a ton of people out there who aren't good pet owners. The Rescue folks are looking to find you a great match, of course, but I was very impatient. So I started visiting the local Save- a-Pet, a no-kill animal shelter. You know what those places are like - every time I go I feel like I have to fill the car with those poor homeless cats and dogs. But I managed to maintain my perspective and we ended up adopting Weezie, also known as Prewash. She keeps our dishwasher loads few and our garbage clean-smelling.(Heh, heh, heh)
Man, it's a good think I caught you before this went in the garbage.
(slurp, slurp, slurp)
Uh, hi, you uh, didn't want any, did you?
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