And then Mouse ate the turkey carcass, twice …

That actually is my only funny Christmas story, and the fact that she got to it twice tells you more about me than her.  But we have already discussed my lazy imperturbable character and in my defence, when you live in a cold climate you tend to treat the outside like a fridge, and many a pot gets put outside when the temperature warrants.  It has been so cold lately that I actually worried it was too cold for food, a balmy -5° C being apparently appropriate for our freezer, but -27° C being appropriate for the home our ancestors sought.

I should mention that our freezer is a chest freezer and before I go further it is my moral imperative to warn you away from ever possessing such a beast.  It has become one of my life missions to convince all and sundry, especially the young, newly-wed (or whatever passes for wed in these new and interesting days) and vertically challenged, to resist all calls from the horizontal freezer.  Yes, they are energy efficient when full of frozen food. Yes, they are photogenic.  But one day [many days, ed. [most days, Xty!]] you will curse the fowl impulse that led you to that purchase.

Imagine a stack of frozen food, 3 feet deep, and then imagine that the one thing you want is always at the bottom of that stack.  Now if the freezer you mistakenly bought is 3’6″ tall, and the stack of frozen food inside is 3′ deep, and you are 5’4″ on a good day, [oh I could have been an evil Grade 9 math teacher] you can see how one might need rappelling devices to get to that last lb of bacon, after hauling out an ice drill, and could in fact get stuck, arse over tea-kettle, in need of rescue.

The approach to Xty’s freezer

And when I tell you what we found in the bottom  … but no, there is no need to talk of what we found in the freezer on the last great defrosting.  Suffice it to say, I once owned a breast pump, my youngest child is 18, you have been warned, and I have discharged my moral obligation.

Which kind of brings me back to the point I was going to make [you had a point, ed.? [yarp, Xty!]]

Apparently a frozen, but nonetheless astonishingly juicy, if I do say so myself [you do, ed.] turkey was too much for the usually circumspect Mouse to resist.  But the question really does arise: was it her fault or ours that she ate the carcass?  And given that we are completely lame in the brain lately, the corollary question is even more interesting: was it her fault or ours that she ate the carcass a second time?  Avoiding the question of how three ostensibly intelligent humans could let this happen twice, what intrigues me is the question of when it is appropriate to dangle what I recently called ‘moral bait’ in front of someone.

I have mentioned in passing my plight with my neighbour to the north shovelling his driveway snow onto my flower garden, like a metaphor for itself, and the different options for addressing the issue, now that a simple request has been found insufficient.  So back to Mouse.  The first foray into the inadequately secured roasting pan can be looked on as an almost innocent mistake.  I mean given that we often offer her entire roasted animals, served on platters with warming lids, why wouldn’t she think it was all for her?

But after a scolding that was as severe as Mouse gets [maybe that’s the problem in a nutshell, and someone is over-thinking things, ed.?  Hey, get your own blog. I’m already in trouble for not addressing more earth-shattering issues, as if there were any, Xty]] somehow we put her out back with that frozen turkey edible toy and she was right back at it.  Maybe we have created a monster, as I worried feeding leftover lamb to a sheep dog the previous morning.  But at least I will now know what she is thinking as she tosses her favourite frozen log in the air and settles in for a good chew: I wish this was a turkey!

So I am asking a lot from Mouse, to choose to do the right thing just because she has been told, when the temptation is a turkey that I have cooked.  But what about the humans around us?  How often are we setting behaviour traps for people?  How often just giving them the opportunity to grow and learn for themselves?  How about leashing a toddler? How does one learn to do the right thing?  Shame is an unfortunate choice it seems to me, but what to do when the natural consequences of an action are in the unforeseeable future but should be borne now to stop an unpleasant behaviour?  In this case, we leashed the toddler, so to speak, and what was left of the turkey is in the bbq.   Where I promise it won’t stay until spring.

But it is something to think about.  Not that I would feel a need to promise to remove the carcass before spring, but about the choices we want to allow people to make and the choices we would constrain.  And that is the problem of governance, in a nutshell.