Learning (Or Remembering) Something New Every Day

Please allow me to introduce you to Breezy.

Breezy is an 8 1/2 year old Shar-Pei/American Bulldog mix, who still in many ways acts like a puppy.  She's no lap dog, but will climb up into Becca's lap.  She also has bad doggy habits that just won't be broken, as many dogs do.  If given the opportunity to get outside unleashed, she will take off running and evade you until you bring a car to her and open the door.  She pees when excited, so we learned quickly to take her outside as soon as we come home, and as soon as guests appear.

Breezy is also a chow-hound.  She will eat nearly anything, especially if it's human food.  She is a living garbage disposal, though most of what she eats is not garbage.  I've left a 10-pound-bag of apples in the kitchen while going out to the store, and come home to find them all gone.  Tomatoes, chips, especially butter, anything, although I've found she does leave whole onions alone.  Becca is also a child who can honestly use the excuse that her dog ate her homework.  Breezy has yet to tear apart homework before it's turned in, but she recently demolished a sketch book and daily planner that she pulled from Becca's unzipped backpack.

Last week I was soooo excited to have made my first batch of awesome cream cheese from our goat's milk.  I'd been enjoying it and we were about halfway through the batch when we left in a rush Saturday morning and came home to find that Breezy had eaten the rest of it.  I'd forgotten to put it back in the fridge, and even though it was in a sealed Glad-brand storage container, it was gone.  Breezy hadn't been able to get the seal off the top, but that didn't stop her from chewing through the corner of the container to get to the scrumptious cheese inside.

The obvious lesson learned was to double-check the counter tops when leaving the house.  The next lesson hit me like a bolt of lightning.  If I had put the cream cheese in a glass container, Breezy would not have been able to chew through it.

A friend on Facebook recently posted a link to an article, "What's Really Making Us Fat?" that contained a lot of food for thought.  Many of these things I'd already known about and had been taking steps to address in our own food consumption.  What hit home for me while reading this was that I had to wean myself off of plastic ware.  I've long been uncomfortable using it to store food, but it's everywhere, and as a child of the Tupperware Generation, it was as commonplace at home as a carton of milk in the fridge.  Petroleum is used in the manufacture of plastic.  Do I really want to surround my carefully-made organic food essentially with gasoline?  No.  And I have to stop cold turkey, now.  I'd previously decided to use up what I had and slowly replace it with glass, but Breezy showed me that there's no time like the present to get this stuff out of the kitchen.

She might be a dumb dog sometimes, but she taught me a lesson! Now to make more of that cream cheese...