Back to Christmas Eve. Schuster wasn't the only villain, we discovered, though my neighbor suggests that given his name it should be no surprise that he goes for books. Hmm. In fact, we came home from Mass Saturday night, having run late and not had time to crate him, only to discover that he had gotten on my big dad chair where I had put my Spanish dictionary, my notebooks, and TV Guides. Schuster had not held back. He got up on my chair, gnawed the binding of the dictionary, chewed (he is called Chewie, too) the "estar" page of my Spanish verb book, and tore a number of pages out of a brand new blank TV notebook. Interesting that he did the most damage to the empty notebook. How do their minds work?
(While I remember, there are pictures of Schuster and his Tio Dexter on my Facebook page; well, Simon is there on the sofa with them but he is as usual under the blanket.)
I write like Tristram Shandy. It took him 300 pages to get to the description of his birth in his autobiography.
Okay. Our daughter-in-law made delicious cookies for Christmas Eve. I put them on the dining-room table before we left because I knew Schuster would climb on the back of the sofa to get to them on the table behind the sofa. That's where he grabs the napkins. In any case, overwhelmed by the chaos of presents unwrapped, we didn't notice the great cookie disaster. There were two on the plate. I asked Katie if they had all been eaten before we left for Mass. She said no. I looked again and saw toenail scratches on the edge of the table. Dexter, I yelled! The neurotic beagle had evidently almost cleaned off the cookie plate while we were gone. Dexter didn't even have the courtesy to look guilty. He just meekly walked over to me to get his ears scratched. So I did. It was Christmas Eve.