I was headed to bed, but this is so funny that I just had to stop and post it before I forget:
Ron went to lunch at Napoli’s with some of the Tulsa Now folks today and came home with a present for me: A friend of his, who works with Tulsa’s awesome Metropolitan Environmental Trust, had given him a cool flashlight/radio/emergency siren/cell phone charger that works off a dynamo. You wind it up, and it charges the built-in batteries. It works a lot like a Freeplay.
Anyway, I have been talking about using an LED headlamp at night to save power, so it seemed worthwhile to carry this LED flashlight/radio contraption around this evening and see if it was bright enough to get me from computer to refrigerator and back without tripping over any dogs.
It worked just fine and is, I think, a marvelous renewable-energy alternative to keeping umpteen power-sucking lights on all night. (Yes, we use CFLs, but a 13-watt spiral bulb still can’t compare to a zero-energy flashlight.)
As far as I can tell, it has just one down side:
Songdog is terrified of it.
I have no idea what he thinks it is going to do to him, but he runs away from it every time I turn it on.
At first, I thought maybe the light was hurting his eyes, but even when I stand behind him and shine the light out ahead of us, so it just illuminates our path, he runs and hides in another room. The first time I turned the flashlight on, he ran and hid in his crate and refused to come out until I sat on the floor and invited him onto my lap, which is his favorite place in the whole world. He came out of his crate and immediately buried his face in my chest, trying to hide from the bad, scary flashlight. If I so much as touched it, he would look away and hang his head.
I shouldn’t laugh at him — the poor dog is obviously terribly frightened of this light — but honestly, his reaction was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Very few things scare Song, but that flashlight has him totally cowed.
June 9, 2007 at 7:31 am |
I wonder if somebody hurt him with a flashlight when he was on his own? Sounds like a gut-response to something that was significant in his past. Poor Song…
June 11, 2007 at 1:55 am |
Could be. Or it could just be a twitchy dog thing. Scout hates white trucks and white vans. I adopted her when she was five weeks old, and to my knowledge, she had never seen a white truck or van until after she came to live with me. Nothing bad has ever happened to her involving a white vehicle. She just hates them for no apparent reason.
Song seems more scared of the light itself than the device emitting it. I’m not sure what that’s about. Maybe someone was carrying a flashlight and came after him.
June 11, 2007 at 7:37 am |
I dunno, but Dezi was a neglect rescue, and nothing terrifies him more than camera flashes. He thinks Geoff has a lightning machine and freaks out every time we take photos of The Boy. That’s why there are no pictures of Dezi loving on his baby. He just can’t bear it. He won’t leave the room if we’re taking Jamie’s picture, because he knows it is his duty alone to protect Jamie, but he just looks so miserable because the camera terrifies him so much but he can’t leave his baby to battle it alone.