It’s Saturday morning here in the Rocky Mountain State and I woke up after a night of reasonably decent sleep. The Airbnb we are staying in has a master bedroom which Kim and I occupy on the main floor and then all the other bedrooms are one floor below. The benefit of being the patriarch of the family and the one who pays the bills is that I don’t have to fight for the best room. I am simply given the best room. In deference to my children, they also know that having me climb an extra set of stairs several times a day is not likely to improve my mood. We have a perfectly reasonable room with a king size bed, although my side of the bed has very little space between the wall and the bed… just enough for me to get in and out. It has a unnecessarily large master bathroom with double sinks, a tub and a shower. Far more than we need, but it also makes sharing the bathroom with Kim a fairly easy affair compared to what one finds in a typical travel hotel these days. I woke up at about 6 am feeling fine. I went about my morning ablutions, including a shower, to start the day. After getting dressed, I went into the great room where Kim was already making herself some coffee. The rest of the gang was downstairs and not quite up and about yet.
Kim and I are not in the habit of rushing to get breakfast first thing in the morning, We tend to take our time, Kim to drink her coffee and do her Wordle and puzzles and me to catch up on my emails and perhaps start writing a new story. So I sat at the counter in the kitchen while Kim fussed with the coffee and I read her the story I had written last night in the middle of the night. For various reasons that you will have to simply wait and discover later in the week, I have chosen not to publish that story for a few days. Eventually, I moved my act to the dining room table and proceeded to get myself some breakfast, still well in advance of the arrival of the rest of the downstairs crew.
Our gang had purchased all manner of breakfast foods, ranging from eggs and bacon to breakfast pastries and various forms of bread to toast. I settled on a King’s Hawaiian bagel, knowing that I like bagels and that I like Kings Hawaiian rolls, so what could go wrong? When I’m at home, my normal breakfast would be an English muffin with crunchy peanut butter. I occasionally have a bowl of cereal and since I noticed the Cheerios on the counter, I thought perhaps a bagel with butter and a bowl of Cheerios would suit me. As I brought the bowl down from the cupboard, my oldest son, Roger, came into the room and said to me “what are you getting for yourself?” I was surprised by the question but I said, “cereal?” He told me that wasn’t a good idea because he felt we should throw out the milk because it sat in the car the whole day yesterday. I will admit to being a finicky old person who always sniffs the open bottle of milk before I pour it onto my cereal. I have taken a first bite of cereal with less than perfect milk enough times in my life to know that that is not something I want to repeat. So I put the bowl back and began looking for an alternative, while Roger tossed the milk. No one had thought to buy jam or jelly, but I did see a jar of Skippy creamy peanut butter at the far end of the counter. As I said before, my peanut butter of choice is crunchy, but in a pinch, creamy peanut butter can suffice. So I spread the creamy peanut butter on my toasted Kings Hawaiian bagel and sat down with my usual CranGrape juice and started going through my emails.
I was 2/3 of the way through my bagel when my daughter Carolyn came into the kitchen and asked me if I was eating dog peanut butter. I asked, “what do you mean?” and she explained that there was a reason the Skippy creamy peanut butter was at the end of the counter next to Hank’s kibble. Hank is my son Tom & Jenna‘s dog, who has been with us on this weekend in the mountains. It seems that besides kibble, his favorite treat is a Kong filled with creamy peanut butter. That would explain why Hank had been sitting at my side at the dining room table for the past 15 minutes, looking up at me questioningly as I ate my bagel with his Skippy creamy peanut butter on it. I’m not sure that I suddenly disliked the peanut butter or that I was put off by knowing that it was dog peanut butter, but I do think I felt guilty about eating Hank‘s favorite treat while he stared up at me. Therefore, I fed Hank what was left of my bagel with peanut butter and his only reaction, besides gobbling it down, was to look at me as though to say that wasn’t enough. Carolyn, who only rarely cracks a joke, suggested that I had actually had a dog’s breakfast that morning.
I’ve used that expression for years. “Dog’s breakfast” is a British and Commonwealth English idiom meaning something that’s a complete mess, badly organized, or poorly executed. It’s similar to saying something is a “mess,” “disaster,” or “shambles.” The expression comes from the idea that a dog’s breakfast is typically just scraps thrown together in a bowl – not particularly appetizing or well-arranged. It’s often used to describe situations like a poorly planned project: “The whole event was a dog’s breakfast”, a messy appearance: “Your hair looks like a dog’s breakfast”, or disorganized work: “This report is a complete dog’s breakfast”. It’s a fairly mild, somewhat humorous way to express that something is in a sorry state without being too harsh about it. I had turned what promised to be a lovely breakfast into a dog’s breakfast.
Once Tom & Jenna got in the kitchen, the real breakfast began with fresh fruit, pastries, crisp bacon and scrambled eggs. While Tom was preparing the eggs, he reached for the milk and found none in the fridge. He asked the room where the milk was and I said, “ I think it got thrown out.” He asked who threw out the milk? Roger and I looked at each other and both shrugged, figuring that discretion was the better part of valor. Everyone enjoyed the breakfast, including me with my dog’s breakfast and Hank with his bootleg breakfast (I also rewarded his silence with a few pieces of crispy bacon).