As we left Janet's I couldn't resist teasing Eddie. "I half expected you to get out of your car and pee on that guy's tires."

He grinned.

Eddie is just about the best friend you could have. He has a rottweiler's loyalty and protectiveness towards his friends, so when we saw a truck we didn't recognize in Janet's driveway as we were coming back from lunch, he didn't hesitate. He pulled right up in her driveway behind them and asked them their business.

The guys gave their names and said they were surveyors, doing some work for the owner. The side of their truck said they were surveyors. They opened their truck and there were surveyor tools. I would have let the situation go, but not Eddie. Eddie is a very methodical person. He asked the surveyor for the owner's name.

The guy was still smiling with his mouth, but the smile had left his eyes. He asked if that was necessary and Eddie said it was. The guy went back into the truck and pulled out a file folder.

If we put this situation in dog terms, Eddie would be Dog#1 trying to sniff Dog#2's butt. Both dogs were stiff-legged, wary.

The guy came back with the folder, read off Janet's name and the name of the previous owner of the house.

Although I have very few social skills myself, I could see a little fur smoothing was in order. I leaned over Eddie and mentioned to the surveyor that there have been some break-ins in the valley this fall, and that this being a small place and all, we all try to look out for each other a bit.

The surveyor relaxed. He said that was one of the things he liked about small places like this and then joked that when he stole DVD's he only took current ones. That broke the ice. "Now it's my turn," he said, asking Eddie just exactly who HE was and where he lived.

Ah, now Dog #2 was trying to sniff Dog #1's butt.

Eddie explained who he was. Then he tried to find out what the point of the survey was. The surveyor said that was confidential. Then he said they had to start work and walked away. As we pulled out of Janet's drive, I scored that Dog#2 gets deep butt sniff AND blocks Dog#1 from a reciprocal sniff.

This dog-like behaviour extends beyond this valley. It turns out Eddie's also been marking his territory in foreign bathrooms, too.

"Well, I see my address is still up above the urinal," he reported earlier as we were leaving the lovely Vermont restaurant where we'd lunched.

It's a good thing I wasn't drinking a beverage when he said that, because I would have sprayed half of it on to his windshield. "So when did you start writing 'For A Good Time Call Eddie' in bathrooms?"

He started to laugh. It turned out that someone had peeled away part of the wallpaper above one of the urinals in the restaurant bathroom a while back and as a joke Eddie had written the URL of his web site on the bare wall, expecting it to be covered up by new wallpaper.

Only it hadn't been because the owners hadn't bothered to repair the wallpaper. Apparently Eddie's address has been there for quite some time.

So if you happen to be visiting the urinal in a small Vermont village restaurant and see a URL above it leading to a web site about nutrition and heart disease, I hope you'll drop by and say hi to Eddie.

Feel free to tell him Marn says that the other guy won the butt sniffing contest.

That will make him laugh, I promise.

--Marn

P.S.--If you're doing any of your Christmas shopping at Amazon this year, why not do it through Blue Sphere? Five per cent of what you spend will be donated by Amazon to Blue Sphere, and will be given to the Foster Parents Plan of Canada.

Yep, you get to make a large corporation cough up five per cent of its profits AND at no cost to yourself you get to help some poor kids out. What's not to love about that, eh?