July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.

Shop early and hope you choose the right gift (10/23/06)

As I See It

By By DIANA DOLECKI-

He had the audacity to growl at me after eating the treat I tossed to him. So I gave him another one and he growled at me again after he ate the thing in one bite. Granted, I have never given this particular brown dog a doggie goody before as he is usually tied up in the backyard with one of his friends or is somewhere in the house so he probably didn't know it was poor etiquette to growl and bark after accepting my handout. The other dogs I encounter have learned not complain at all when I hold up a wedge-shaped morsel of whatever those treats are made out of. The package has a picture of a happy, non-growling animal so I assume they are supposed to taste good, that is if one is of the canine persuasion.

Then again, I have known people who are never pleased with any gift they are given. I knew one woman who threw a birdhouse at the givers with the comment, "What the %@&* am I supposed to do with this?" She had been given the birdhouse because she enjoyed watching the birds outside her window. Needless to say nobody ever gave her a birdhouse again.

Other people are tickled with anything anybody gives them. I have a nephew who will exclaim over even the most mundane presents and wear the ugliest things just because someone took the time to make them for him. He does have his limits as he couldn't figure out why I recently sent him a pair of used socks. His father realized the socks were the ones that had been left at our house a month or so earlier. He did like the sticky eyeballs that I included with the socks. That way he could keep an eye on his homework and have eyes on the back of his head at the same time. I think at one time he even had a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The last I heard the extra eyeballs adorned a pumpkin at a campground Halloween party. I thought the tongue tattoo candy I put in the package would be a hit. Wrong again.

All this thinking about gifts and gratitude are in preparation for the scary thought of beginning my Christmas shopping. Halloween is the prelude to the frenzy that overtakes me sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I realize that I have no clue what to get for that hard-to-buy-for person on my list and time is running out.

Everybody has those people on their lists. There are those who are easy to shop for and those who aren't. I can buy anything for my daughter and it will be something she likes or if she doesn't like it then she has courtesy enough not to say so. Other people smile politely but it is obvious they have no idea what I was thinking. Then there are those who react like the dog. They will gobble up anything given to them then growl and bark, held back only by the leash of propriety. No amount is satisfactory and nothing is ever good enough.

Maybe I should stock up on sticky eyeballs for those people. I don't think extra dog treats are going to do any good. Or perhaps I should buy Halloween decorations for them. There seem to be plastic ghosts and ghouls everywhere this year. Maybe that is what the dog was growling about. Perhaps he saw a ghost behind me and was barking at that and not me!

I guess he will get a treat again next week and if I get lucky he will realize I'm mostly harmless even if I do send sticky eyeballs through the mail.[[In-content Ad]]
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