Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and pets of all makes and models, allow me to introduce “Leica,” our almost 3-year-old Labradoodle. She is full of beans, lots of energy, chases anything that moves, smells everything, plays tennis ball retrieving with a vengeance and is completely food motivated! Aside from these attributes, she is  pretty “normal” but is very attuned to her feeding times, both morning and evening. You can set your clock by her attentiveness as meal time approaches. And herein lies our dilemma.

As we all know by now, not only are we moving over to the dark side season of less-lighted days, we are also required to adjust our clocks and, supposedly, preserve daylight during winter mornings. Not without consequences, the one-hour clock setback also means that we power up earlier in the late afternoon. This process, as Daylight Saving Time has concluded for this year, may be annoying for us, but really sends our pup into hunger overdrive because her clock is not synchronized to the time change.

We have discussed this process with Leica to no avail. She still lines up at the feed trough at around 7:30 a.m. and then for her evening dish at precisely 6 p.m. To be perfectly honest, I identify with her desire for food at a relatively similar time. I believe I am programmed by my growing up days when dinner was served at 5 o’clock. We four children had little doubt that our evening meal would be prepared for prompt delivery with little fanfare, unless some one of us happened to be late! To this day I can detect digestive rumblings at 5 o’clock, regardless of my proximity to food. Leica did not react to my attempt to explain how it was for me as a child. She just wanted to eat at the time her internal clock alarmed.

Now, as for this week’s attached photo: Sometimes our aging refrigerator-freezer doors do not “latch” completely and can drift open without warning. I believe, in this instance, that I, in a preemptive attempt at thawing some frozen items for our evening meal, did not, in fact properly secure the freezer door. This did not go undetected by her majesty the Queen. Her nose works overtime, all the time, and I suspect some frozen item may have set her nose on fire. Fortunately for all of us, Leica approached the open door with caution just shy of pulling out a packet of frozen veggie burgers. 

So, my solution to Leica’s inability to delay her gratification was to trick us all by readjusting our clocks to half an hour back instead of a full hour. Admittedly this has created some confusion with appointments but Leica has been a little less anxious about her meals, and I get to start munching a bit earlier, which helps me adjust to the new time. After all, in the words of a famous musician, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!”