If you’ve never heard of Giardia before, think Kryptonite. It is an intestinal parasite common to dogs THAT CAN LIVE IN ENVIRONMENTS FOR TWO TO THREE MONTHS after a dog excretes its cysts. Yes, this would have been a useful piece of information to tell me when I was leaving Olive’s lawn cigars and cow pies scattered about the lawn like Bingo chips this past Summer. Had I known they required delicate hazmat handling, I would have been obsessive about picking them up right away. Because when you have an acre of property, what’s a few brown trout dotting the lawn? The drawback to having an acre of property as a canvas for Olive’s fecal artwork is that contrary to what one might think, it’s actually not so easy to find these deposits. I couldn’t pick them up right away while I had Olive on the leash because she would try to tear the flimsy plastic bag out of my hands as if we were playing tug of war with a delectable rotting fox carcass. So I’d put her back in the kitchen and arm myself with a gardening shovel, plastic bag and…surgical gloves. Just call me “Scatologist.” Then, I’d be faced with trying to recall the coordinates of precisely where the event occurred. Standing in the yard looking hopelessly perplexed as if I were lost, I’d mutter to myself out loud, “I think it was about 10 feet from the 8^th pole in the split rail fence opposite the middle hemlock bush.” It was like playing “Battleship.” And rarely, did I sink the battleship. Then, I have a brainstorm. Why not get those tiny red anti-litigation flags that companies plant on lawns to warn people that pesticides have been sprayed? I go to the first place I think might have them. Yes, Amazon.com. They have EVERYTHING. Including 50 miniature red flags attached to the end of foot-long wire poles…for about $5. Now my lawn looks like a miniature golf course in the summer. I’m sure my neighbors think I’m batshit when out there planting little red flags in the lawn while Olive is in the undignified “pooping position.” I don’t care. It’s genius. Except I didn’t anticipate how hard they’d be to jam into the frozen ground in the winter, resulting in bent poles hanging and twirling in the wind like psychotic pinwheels, while leaving my knuckles bloodied. Now, it looks like a miniature golf course at an insane asylum from which a serial killer just escaped. The alternative is feeding Olive sweet potatoes which when consumed, digested and released, resemble orange glow-in-the-dark cylinders. You can see them from space.