Sunday, October 7, 2012

Max's Night of Gastronomic Delight

This is a photo of how Max-the-Dog looked most all of Saturday.  We referred to it as a 'doggy hangover' or a 'gastronomic-induced coma'.  
It all started on Friday evening.  In a moment of madness, Jamey and I thought it would be a fun idea to host this year's Junior-Senior Overnighter at our house.  Our staff team wanted to appreciate our junior and senior students for all of the work they do, so we decided to give them a free tri-tip dinner and a movie, followed by a campout and some breakfast burritos.  Now, normally, we have about 75 people show up for dinner, with about 20 or so spending the night at the camp ground.  This year, however, the word spread (thank you Facebook events!!) and as of Friday afternoon, exactly 140 people had rsvp'd.  
In the chaos of feeding and enjoying the company of all of these students, we didn't keep a close eye on Max.  At one point early on, I caught him, in an act of desperation, licking up the tri-tip juice that had dripped off the table and onto our gravel driveway. You have to really want meat juice to resort to licking it off of the rocks.  I am not sure how many plates he snuck food off of - he got more and more brazen as the night went on.  I do know that he ate about a third of someone's paper plate when they set it on the deck (in his defense, the plate was soaked with tri-tip juice, barbecue sauce and salad dressing, rendering it delicious and therefore irresistable).  I heard that he took an entire piece of pizza right out of a girl's hand (his rudeness knew no bounds at this point), and later on grabbed an apple core away from another girl.
After we started the movie ('Sandlot', outside, just like the drive-in but without cars!), Max made it his duty to wander around eating all of the popcorn that students dropped onto the grass.  And probably some right out of their hands, too.  He also helped himself to a crumbly granola bar that a boy spilled onto the ground.
At about midnight, I put earplugs in and went to bed and left about 60 students out in the yard.  
Max faithfully keeps watch over the campers....and their food
At 6 a.m., I got up to feed the cats (they did not reappear until the afternoon - they wanted no part of this whole thing!) and looked out the window and saw Max, snuggled up between a couple of students on their blankets.  He looked like he had had the night of his life.  He is quite an extrovert, after all.  Upon going outside, I also noticed that one of the many bags of trash had been opened, and several more paper plates had been nibbled, along with some napkins.  
And finally, while we were preparing breakfast, Max somehow found a large roasting tray with some leftover cooking oil in it and proceeded to lick it up happily.  Oh, and he ate a few eggshells that dropped out of the bag while I was taking the trash outside (we cooked over 200 eggs that morning - all outside on the grill!)
The students left at ten that morning, and Max proceeded to crawl up onto the porch, where he remained for the entire rest of the day with a sad, slightly embarrassed look on his face.  I also think he was a little depressed that all of his new friends had gone away.  It did get rather quiet.  
It took his stomach the rest of the day to recover (I myself actually took a nap on the couch and spent most of the afternoon watching baseball and football.  In other words, just another fall Saturday for me!) but I am happy to report that he is back to normal today, eating dog food out of his bowl and chicken poop wherever he can find it.