Three Beautiful Things 10/11/15: Sick Dogs Recover, Casserole Improv, Looking Deeper Into Anakin Skywalker

1. It turned out that Maggie and Charly are fine. But they had a rough night -- and so did I.  Maggie was agitated, pacing, wanting to go out to do her business, sometimes every ten minutes. Maggie seemed ravenously hungry, obsessed with the kitchen, barking at her food on top of the fridge. One pain pill dosage remained from when she had a UTI in August. I gave it to her. By about 2 a.m. she settled down and Charly hurled. I took care of the mess and we all slept for about three hours. The dogs wanted to eat at 5 a.m. and I drew a line in the sand and ordered them to stop it. They obeyed -- for an hour -- and we all got up, I fed them, and decided I would stay in with them all day and monitor them. I'm glad I did and I'm happy to report that whatever ailed them (the chicken innards I boiled and fed them?) cleared up.  In fact, after they ate their morning meal, they both went back to bed until 11 a.m.  They never do that.

2.  Well, I boiled chicken innards as part of boiling a whole chicken Saturday evening, taking the meat off the bones, saving the broth. Today, I used four cups of the broth to make rice, put the rice in a casserole dish, added some of the chicken, poured a little more broth over it, cooked green beans and mixed it in, added leftover kale to the mix, sprinkled some red pepper flakes over it, topped it with grated sharp cheddar cheese, heated it up, and my efforts resulted in a very good casserole.

3.  I went back and looked at passages from The Attack of the Clones and, with the help of the DVD's audio commentary, it's coming to me: because Anakin Skywalker began his Jedi training as an older child, he had developed attachments, especially to his mother. The Jedi lives free of attachments as a way of maintaining a clear mind. Anakin's attachments fog his mind and his judgment. He misused his Jedi powers when he slaughtered the Tuskens who had captured his mother and caused her death. What you and I might admire in Anakin -- love for his mother and a quick avenging of her death -- looks to be what makes him vulnerable to dark side of the Force -- that and, I imagine, his expressed desire to gain control over all things so that he never experiences again the depth of suffering his mother's death caused him.