When the dogs are home with me on a workday I usually turn the TV on as a distraction from the type of neighborhood noises that are likely to set them off (chipmunk whispering two houses over, bird landing on a branch down the street, person thinking about food several blocks away). I pick something like an old season of House Hunters that I can easily ignore and which will play uninterrupted for a while.
Another show in this genre is The West Wing, mostly because I have seen it so often that I don’t need to watch it, although of course I would/can at any time. West Wing is brain comfort food and at a low enough volume it is like the pleasant hum of coworkers. A lot of times I’ll settle in with the dogs and say “Let’s visit a while with our friends in the West Wing!” and they don’t really care, but I like it.
My husband has never sat down to intentionally watch a complete episode of West Wing (evidence of personality disorder IMHO) and in fact he makes fun of it as “that show where they walk around and talk too fast.” This is of course accurate but I also refuse to take any guff off of someone who doesn’t want to take the time to understand the DELICATE INTERPLAY OF PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS SET AGAINST WORLD EVENTS that takes place in each episode. I will not have this show disrespected in my house!!!! unless of course you want to talk shit about all the season three Amy Gardner episodes, which I mostly just skip, as she is enduringly the worst.
Anyway, I can’t watch West Wing in perpetuity (I can), so I also recently started the second season of Big Little Lies. Laura Dern in this show is…a masterpiece, really. Laura Dern is among those performers who are basically the same in every show or movie but truly, all roads have led to Renata. I don’t really “like” Renata but I definitely enjoy watching her be Maximum Renata in pretty much any scene.
I couldn’t watch Big Little Lies most of this weekend, though, because my four-year-old niece stayed with us on Saturday night. I am now mostly caught up on Paw Patrol, however, and some show about cargo airplanes that deliver packages and help children around the world. It seems a little too “brought to you by Amazon” but the planes are cute, although in the Hawaii episode the helpful airplane tried to stop a volcanic eruption by first pouring seawater into the volcano and then dropping a giant boulder on top of it. Okay that doesn’t seem scientifically sound but as long as Keilani gets to her hula dance competition I guess!!
One thing that’s nice about little kids is how reliably weird they can be – during her visit, my niece expressed a sincere desire to sleep in one of the dog crates, and her favorite thing to play with was the air purifier in the kitchen. We also did quite a bit with Play-Doh (does anything trip olfactory nostalgia like the smell of Play-Doh?) and a remote control car that I very quickly “lost” the batteries to. When we dropped her off at her parents’ house the next day she tried to march out the door with us so I guess her Yelp review of our house will be very positive.