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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Pooch becomes the victim of a bath

Most people carry around an internal to-do list. I do, as well. It’s always got stuff on it like going the dishes and dusting and vacuuming and all those domestic things that make me angry and impossible to be around. That’s why I find it best to put these things off. But I digress.

There are certain to-do things that gradually sneak up on you, until they become inevitable truths. That happened to me last week.

Pooch needed a bath.

There are several problems that occur when I try to bathe Pooch, all of which stem from the fact that Pooch hates bathing. Pooch won’t even go outside when it rains. But I’d much rather have a wet’n whiny dog than a stinky sticky dog, so the job had to be done. I didn’t have much trouble tricking her into the bathroom. A little bit of sausage was all that it took. ‘Course once I closed the door behind us, Doggie Doodle started getting suspicious.

I turned the shower on.

Pooch hid in the corner and did her best impression of laundry.

I wasn’t tricked by her sneaky disguise, got her out of there and into the shower, accompanied by loud objections from my bath-victim. Earlier that day, I’d been to the pet shop to buy her a shampoo which I had snuck into the bathroom cupboard when Wonderpooch wasn’t looking. Doggie can tell pet shampoo from any other bottle of product. That is her superpower. And once the identification has been made, you’ll never get her out from underneath the sofa.

This whole thing was carefully planned in advance, you see. You can’t just spring this kinda thing on Pooch without planning it out first. If I did that, I would be the Ed D. Wood of animal trainers.

“For removal of coat build-up,” said the label on my chosen shampoo bottle. Boy o boy does Poochiebaby have coat build-up. And you know it’s gonna fall off eventually, giving room to new coat build-up, in what seems like an endless cycle of fur. In fact, Doggie Woggie’s got so much coat build-up, sometimes when I wake up in the morning it’s as if she’s given birth to puppies during the night. I was so focused on the labels intriguing message, I didn’t even notice the fact that it was bright red and strawberry scented. Hell, not even strawberries are as strawberry scented as Pooch’s new shampoo.

That whole day I didn’t need eyesight to tell Doggie’s whereabouts, I could just sniff around for the smell of strawberries.

Now I not a bit more about what it must be like to be a dog.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

True joy and all that crap

My internet connection is gone. Vanished. I don’t know where it went. Maybe it’s off skiing in the mountains along with all the good, little Hellholians. It’s what people do around here. I’ve never been able to understand why.

Anyways, I am now hoping for a little man to come fix my connection. I’m just not sure on when he plans on showing up. Then yesterday morning, the doorbell rang. I knew immediately that it couldn’t be the upstairs-people. They’ve never figured out the intricate workings of my doorbell. It’s complicated. A button on a wall. Oooh. The upstairs-people just knock. Which I figure is a good reason to pretend I don’t hear them.

But I digress.

The doorbell rang, and I thought it had to be the internet-fixer-man. Who else could it be? So I hurried to answer the door, completely forgetting that I had make-up on only one – 1 – eye. That eye did look damn good, but still…

As the door swung open, I expected to see your standard, run-of-the-mill handyman type of a person standing outside. Instead I found myself staring straigt at the latest issue of The Watchtower. An overly cheery woman with a strangely far-away look in her eyes was peeking out from behind it. “Would you like to learn the path to true joy?” the lady asked.

“No, not really,” I said and closed the door in her face. I know the path to true joy already. It’s for me to get my internet connection back and waste some time surfing.