The Glass Pheasant

I was walking past our local Oxfam charity shop on Wednesday evening when this item in the window caught my eye. It's a faceted glass pheasant bowl, not especially fine or exotic -- in fact, kind of grannyish -- but I loved it. So I took a picture to show Dave, and he agreed it was pretty cool. The next morning I was at Oxfam's door when the shop opened and bought it right away -- only £15, which I thought was very reasonable!

I hand-washed it and put it in our front window. There's not a knick or chip on it. I'm not sure we'll ever use it as a functional bowl but you never know. It's pretty great standing on its own.

I spent yesterday finishing "The Hotel Avocado," which I enjoyed, and doing some other stuff around the house. I helped our new upstairs neighbor break down and bale a bunch of cardboard boxes for recycling, which is supposed to come today. The neighbor apparently decided not to move his stuff here from Israel, where he's from, and instead bought all-new stuff so he has loads of packaging to discard. I have a feeling the bin men (are they still called that?) are going to balk at collecting all these boxes, but we'll see.

I thought I was going to get through the day with no tears, which would be a first since Olga died a week ago. But I felt a heaviness in my chest all day, and finally in the afternoon -- when my book was finished and I'd read everything online and I'd already taken a walk and Dave was napping and I had nothing to do -- I let the sadness wash over me once again.

And then I just wallowed in it a bit, watching recent Olga videos like this one, marveling that she looked so good just days before we put her to sleep. But her condition was so wildly up and down -- the morning after I took that video she was panting and could barely stand, and it's those low moments that I couldn't bear to watch.

So, anyway, I'm still adjusting, and reminding myself that there are people in this world with real, critical problems -- like in Gaza where they're literally starving. Or like the parents of those poor girls from Camp Mystic in Texas. As I said to Dave, marveling at my own paralysis, "How do people lose a child?" I'm trying to keep some perspective -- not that my mourning is invalid, but Olga was, after all, a 15-year-old dog.

It's the responsibility I still struggle with most. Will I ever stop asking myself if I did the right thing? If she'd died naturally I'd be sad but I'd also feel that it was out of my hands. That would be a relief for me but it would undoubtedly have been worse for her. So, yadda yadda, my brain is still thinking it all through.

Our friends Lisa and Natalie sent us a beautiful bouquet of flowers to brighten up the flat. We really appreciated their generosity and thoughtfulness.

The night before she died, I fed Olga half a can of dog food, which she would not eat. The other half was left behind in the refrigerator, covered with cling film. On Tuesday evening I took it out, put the food in a plastic take-out container and set it in the garden for the foxes. I rigged up the garden camera to catch them in action. On Wednesday morning, alas, the food was still there. I left it all day thinking I'd throw it out if they didn't come that following night, but on Thursday morning the bowl was empty.

I got some really good footage of a fox eating. It's a rather delicate eater -- it seems a bit perplexed and uncertain about what it has found -- and yet, those teeth! I would not want to have to fight a fox.