Stare Down

Eating is a concentrated effort.

You must keep your eyes open and your mind engaged at all times. The body likewise must be subdued, with all its muscles and members working together to maintain poise and readiness.

While this mealtime mindset is required all day, it is especially necessary as dinner becomes imminent.


Always count the bowls and containers and, most important, never let them out of your sight.


Now, this kind of concentration is not gained through osmosis. Which is a good thing, because lately it's been kinda hard to get much sleep. The new human seems to have been programmed wrong because he talks all night long! Not that I can actually understand him, all I can say is there's a lot of noise coming from his crate. (No fair that his crate has a sunroof, by the way.)

Then again, maybe he's not defective. Now that I think about it, one of the other humans talks in his sleep too... I've actually lost plenty of hours of sleep as I've had to listen to him babble on and on, and then I stay up even longer transcribing what he said. You never know when that may come in handy, after all: Some day I plan to publish these late night monologues... But first I have to figure out what "mom make me another bowl of smurfberry crunch" refers to exactly. Certainly I didn't miss something that was put into our bowls, did I? Impossible!

Anyway, you learn to sleep through the chatter. You have to, if you're going to keep alert when it most matters.

Scoche has had trouble sleeping through all this, though...


...which clearly affects her concentration at mealtime.

And that's why I'm always happy to help her finish!


Ahh yes... now I can sleep!