Suzanne's Law

Do you remember Murphy’s Law? It went something like, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I have invented my own law, called Suzanne’s law. This is a law of the universe that says, anytime you want someone to do something, they will either: not do it, do it but not do it well, or do it but not when you want them to.

This law is proved by my daughter on a regular basis. Here’s an example. I asked her for weeks to get the oil changed in her car. When she finally did, she brought the receipt in the house to show me all the add-on things they talked her into adding on. After I looked it over and heard her explanations (this was her very first oil change), I said, “Put that oil receipt in you glove box to show you’ve been maintaining the car.”

“I will mom.”

“Today?”

“Yes, I just don’t want to walk out there right now.”

If you apply Suzanne’s Law, you know that the oil receipt is still laying in the bonus room floor days later, and will continue to stay there unless ants carry it off or I plant myself in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips, tapping my toe, and watch her pick it up and take it out to her car, at which time she’ll come back into the house scowling and go straight to her room, slamming the bedroom door to let me know how unreasonable I’m being.

My dog has Suzanne’s Law down to a science. If she does something really cute, like cock her head to one side and look up with the whites of her little black eyes showing, and it’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life so you want to share it with someone, it’s guaranteed that she’ll cease doing it the second the other person looks at her, no matter how fast they turn their head.

Another version of this same thing is when she sits or rolls over on demand all day long, but if someone says, “Does your dog do tricks?” and you say, “Yes, watch this,” and then say, “Roll over,” she will just look at your like she’s deaf and not even acknowledge that you are speaking to her. If you say it again and again, she waits patiently, looking at you and maybe cocking her head as if to say, “What up, dog?”

Now that I’ve discovered this new law, which is akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in its scope and application, I see it happening all the time. We had a leak in our roof and the roofing contractor was supposed to call this morning by 7:30 to say when he was coming. I called him at 8:00. He said he was coming at 9:30. I called him at 9:45. He got there eventually, but not when he was supposed to – again proving Suzanne’s Law.

Curiously, now that I’ve coined this law, I feel more forgiving toward my daughter. She’s only following a pre-ordained, scientific model of teenage behavior patterns that are consistent with 99.9% of the teenage population.

I feel so much better. I’m going to get a lot of use out of that law until she goes to college. Feel free to use it as well. It may save you from pulling all your hair out.

Dog vs. Vacuum

Yesterday was a gorgeous day so I decided to take my camera out and get some shots of spring flowers. I took my little Yorkie Poo along, and on the way to the park we passed a carwash, so I decided to give my car a bath.

My dog doesn’t like the carwash. She freaks out when the giant shammy cloth starts slapping against the car. I have to hold her and reassure her that the blue monsters are not going to get her, but she still shakes like a vibrator the whole time.

Yorkie Poos shake for any number of reasons. If they’re happy, they shake. If they’re nervous, they shake. My dog will shake if she needs to do #2 and no one’s jumping off the couch quick enough to suit her.

“Oh your poor little doggy must be cold,” people will say. It can be 90 degrees outside, but people see a vibrating dog and they think it’s shivering. Once my daughter’s friends were over and someone made a loud popping noise. Did I mention the dog shakes whenever anyone bounces a ball or pops a piece of bubble wrap or slams a door?

“Or your poor little doggy is scared,” one of the friends said, sounding like she was heartbroken. I wanted to cheer her up. “She shakes all the time. Do you have any aches and pains? I’ll press her against your back and you can get a free massage.” All the girls giggled about that, and I pressed my dog against one to show I was serious.

The dog shaking has nothing to do with the story I’m telling about the carwash, I just thought you might find it interesting.

So before I went through the wash I decided to vacuum the car. My dog is not nuts about vacuuming, either. At home she tries to bite the vacuum cleaner. You’d think she’d just go to another room, but instead she plops right in the middle of the rug and waits for the vacuum to come close. She stands her ground, and when it gets inches away she lunges at it, baring little teeth that look like rice stuck into bubble gum, and tries to bite it. Of course the vacuum is too big but that doesn’t stop her. She would rip the thing like Henry the VIII tearing at a turkey leg if her mouth was bigger.

At the car wash, they had a really nice vacuum hose with a wide, narrow end that you can get into tight places between the seats. I love those things. This baby knew how to suck, too. Pine needles held on like leeches but they were no match.

I was really getting into vacuuming the driver’s side floor while my dog was on the passenger seat eyeing the vacuum like it was some alien beast encroaching on her territory. When I went to vacuum the passenger side, she dove onto the floor and attacked the thing. Because the nozzle was narrow, she could get it in her mouth and she clamped down like an alligator. I tried to wrench it away but she held on like it was a juicy bone and wouldn’t let go. Meantime seconds were ticking away on the timer and I didn’t have any more quarters. I kept trying to wrestle it out of her mouth but she hung on like it was one of her tug of war rags. The vacuum was sucking up her ear but she didn’t care. All those years of attacking the giant vacuum at home and getting nowhere – she wasn’t about to let this thing get the best of her.

Desperate to finish before my time ran out, I forced the nozzle down onto the carpet and moved it back and forth, dragging the dog along, back and forth, back and forth, until I got the passenger floor done. I jerked the hose out of her mouth and was headed for the back seat when she pounced on it again, teeth bared like a piranha. I got her tucked under my arm and freed the vacuum again and lunged for the back seat. I worked like a dervish on those little back seat squares, trying to beat the timer. When I got done, the thing was still sucking so I let the dog have another go at it. She sprang forward like she’d been catapulted and clamped down, tugging with all nine pounds of her might. The motor gave four or five warning beeps and the vacuum stopped. The dog let go immediately. She’d killed it. I guess there’s no sport in gnawing a dead vacuum.

I checked the nozzle for damage and, I’m sad to say, there wasn’t even a scratch. The pitiful little dog chewed and tugged with all her might and didn’t even make a dent. But she didn’t know that. She thought she’d killed the hissing beast.

When we went through the carwash, little Miss Mighty Dog didn’t shake. Not even once.

A Squirrelly Character

My brother was over today and I was telling him about my dog getting the canine version of a torn ACL and needing to be on bed rest for 3 weeks.

“How do you put a dog on bed rest?” he inquired. “And how did it happen?”

“She was chasing a squirrel and came in limping.”

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll catch the squirrel and get hurt?” he wanted to know.

I wasn’t. “Squirrels are pretty fast.”

“Squirrels are pretty fierce,” he said.

Which I totally agree with. We had this squirrel one time that the kids befriended by feeding it nuts. It was a very fast squirrel. When it saw the kids come outside, it would outrun a Ferrari to get over to the nut. They decided to name him Rocket.

We all became great friends with Rocket. We have big windows down to the patio on the back of our house and he used to come up to the window, stand on his hind legs, and look cute until someone came out with a nut. What a charming little rascal he was.

Between the three of us, Rocket was getting nuts about every half hour. If someone was over, and there were always kids over, it was probably more because the new people wanted to see what the squirrel would do. Rocket stood on his hind legs and let you hand him a nut. At first he’d scurry away with it, but he got to where he’d just sit there and eat hoping for another one.

After a couple of months of this, we went on vacation for a week, and when we got back home, Rocket was out front waiting on us. He had his arms crossed over his chest and was thumping his leg, saying, “Where the heck have you been? I’ve been starving around here.” We have a rock wall, and my daughter, who was about 6 or 7, saw Rocket on the wall when we drove up. She jumped out of the car and ran over to say hi to him. He reached out, apparently thinking she was going to give him a treat. She reached her hand out like you’d do to pet a kitty, and Rocket, seeing the hand was empty, bit her hard on the finger.

She screamed one of those high-pitched little girls’ screams that can break glass. Blood started running down her hand, and she started sobbing, Rocket was at a little distance chattering his disdain, and I was freaking out thinking about rabies. Friggin’ squirrel.

I washed her up, called the pediatrician, and found out that there was nothing to worry about. “Kids get bitten by squirrels all the time. Just put some Neosporin and a Band-Aid on it and she’ll be fine.”

I took a stand that day. No snot nosed squirrel was going to bite my child and get away with it. I told the children, “From now on, no more nuts for Rocket. It’s made him mean.” My daughter was fine with it, the throbbing finger a reminder of the violence of Mother Nature. My son didn’t think it was fair because he loved entertaining his friends, but he gave in. From then on Rocket got nothing from this family, in spite of his cute little begging.

A few days later I walked out on my patio to do something. It was summer and I was barefoot – maybe I was dashing out to take out the trash. Rocket zoomed out of the tree and ran down on the patio right in front of me.

“You can forget about the nuts, mister,” I said. “You shouldn’t have bit one of us. No more nuts for you.” I felt like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld, and it was a good feeling.

I didn’t realize the squirrel could speak English. I started walking back toward the house, and he ran up behind me and bit me on the heel. Hung on, too. I’m shaking the friggin’ thing and it’s got me by it’s beaver teeth, clamped on like a leech and not about to turn loose. I screamed and gave one good shake, which sent him flying. I dashed through the patio door before he could regroup and strike again.

When I calmed down I was livid. Friggin squirrel. I had blood on my heel. The thing had drawn blood! If I could have caught it I would have strangled it until, well never mind.

Instead, I got a broom and went after him. He met my charge, coming right up to the end of the broom as if to say, “C’mon bitch. Bring it.”

“You better GET your ass up to the woods,” I said. Truth be told, I was a little intimidated. Those were sharp teeth, and the little crap was fearless. I feinted like I was going to poke him with the broom, and eventually he backed down, or more likely got bored. He headed to the grass. I followed, feeling brave. “And don’t come back either,” I shouted. He turned around and stood up like a grizzly bear, and I took a few steps backward. You never know how volatile a squirrel is going to be.

I didn’t go outside without the broom for days. Finally he figured he’d milked our gravy train as long as he could. It was getting to be Fall and he started doing the decent squirrel thing - collecting his own nuts. Crazy thing is, when his winter coat came in, it was all splotchy – like he had the mange. I secretly hoped that it was all those rich nuts we gave him that caused the problem. He was around all winter and spring, then I lost track of him. Now we have one million squirrels, all of them his offspring, I suppose. They come up to the window and taunt the dog. And now they’ve caused my dog to walk on 3 legs and probably require $2,000 worth of surgery. I see them out there laughing, and I bet their grandfather is up in a tree egging them on.

My Funny Dog

This dog of mine has some pretty interesting behaviors. For one, she tries to bury her food, especially if she doesn’t like it. Since there’s no dirt in the house, she pushes imaginary dirt in the direction of her food. Her head goes back and forth, the nose dipping down toward the floor then rising up as she pushes the “dirt” toward her dog bowl. If she doesn’t like what I’ve given her that day, she’ll push the dirt so hard that her nose bangs into the dog bowl and lifts it up off the tiles. It bangs back down just in time for her to raise it up again. This goes on for about a minute. Anywhere I am in the house, I hear this clomp clomp clomp sound and know what she’s up to. The more she hates the food, the longer and louder the bowl clomps. She wants that thing six feet under.

We have floor to ceiling windows in the back of our house, and we live in a wooded area, so there are deer, raccoons, crows, cats, and lots of squirrels tromping through the yard at any given time. The squirrels come down on the concrete patio and sidle right up to the window, teasing the poor dog, whose name is Shelley. She gets this high-pitched, excited bark and starts running around the window, which delights the squirrels. They come closer. When I hear the commotion, I come out of my office and sneak over to the front door so as not to tip off the squirrel, then whisper Shelley’s name. She darts over and I open the door as quietly as I can. She races out the door, around the side of the house, and tears across the patio after the squirrel, looking like a black bullet flying over the ground without legs because they’re moving too fast to be detected by the human eye. The squirrel flicks his tail in the air and heads for the trees, which are close enough that the squirrel always gets away. We have a giant maple tree with a crotch that she jumps into so she can stretch up the trunk and bark at the squirrel, which is flicking its tail just out of range. This happens several times a day. Those squirrels are having the time of their lives!

Another thing Shelley does is hide behind my legs when the kids want to pick her up. If they go to one side, she goes to the other. So they try that side, and she goes back to the other. “Mom, make her be still,” they say. Actually I’m on Shelley’s side, because they’ll just torment her. My son blows in her face to make her snap, and my daughter holds her on her back like a baby and talks to her, which she doesn’t like. So I stay out of it and make them catch her on their own. After a little while Shelley gets tired of going back and forth and starts barking ferociously, which delights my son because the dog is a black, 9 pound dust mop, and when she barks and snarls her white teeth look about as scary as grains of rice. It’s ludicrous that she acts like a tough character. My son will finally catch her, she’ll bite him, he’ll get mad and put her down, and life returns to normal.

Dogs are always leaving their scent everywhere. Luckily Shelley doesn’t do this in the house, but outside she’s like a water pistol, soaking everything in sight. I read once that dogs try to one up each other by making a squirt a little higher on the tree than the last dog. This is a definite disadvantage for small dogs like Shelley. She can’t possibly get a squirt as high as a German shepherd with legs that aren’t even six inches long. So she goes up to a tree and stands on her front legs like she’s doing a handstand and fires her shot off. It’s the silliest thing you’ve ever seen with those back legs up in the air. When she gets done she scratches the ground with all four legs like she’s trying to throw dirt on the other guy’s scent just in case she didn’t get high enough. She does it with such vengeance – really digging in and spraying little tufts of grass behind her several times, making sure she’s got the job done.

This dog is a delight to our home, and we love her. Right now she’s sitting on the chair beside me, patiently hoping that I’ll remember to toss the little yellow tennis ball that’s about the size of a golf ball so she can try to catch it on a bounce. Normal tennis balls are too big. Maybe I’d better go do that right now.

My Moaning Mutt

I like alliteration almost as much as puns. My dog isn't really a mutt. She's a Yorkie Poo, so that makes her only a half-breed and not a Heinz 57. But I couldn't resist the title.

When my dog wants something, she comes into the room and moans. I find this pretty entertaining. The first time she moans, the sound is low pitched, almost inaudible. If you don’t respond right away, the moans get higher until they reach a soulful whine. Even though I don’t understand dog language, but that dog makes it very clear what she wants.

There are two places she moans the most. In the kitchen and in my office. She can be in the furthest reaches of the house when I sit down at my computer, and just like she’s got computer chair radar, she’ll come on the fly, as if she’s saying to herself, “What? What? She’s snuck off to the computer room? I’d better leave the back bedroom closet and get right in there.” When she comes in, she moans until I put her in my lap.

What she’s doing in the back bedroom closet is burying cheese cubes that she gets from us when she starts moaning in the kitchen. She gets practically under your feet and then moans to remind you that she’s down there, starving to death, and you’re a selfish oaf if you don’t share something with her RIGHT NOW. These escalate in pitch and volume, and can accelerate right up to barks if left unattended. To hush her up, we give her little chunks of cheese.

Did you know that’s where the name hush puppy came from? In the South, from which I hail, people would be frying up the leftover corn meal mush from breakfast, because everything gets fried down there sooner or later, and the puppy dogs would hang around the kitchen barking and begging and making a nuisance of themselves, so the women would throw them a wad of that fried up mush and say, “Hush puppy, hush.” Being dogs, they’d snatch it into their mouths and have it swallowed before they realized it just came out of a scalding frying pan, and it would burn their whole insides as it went on it’s steaming way to their stomachs, and they’d let out a baying yelp that could be heard three farms away and race like cats with their tails on fire to the livestock pond and dive in, trying to lower their internal temperature by 20º as quick as possible. Back in the kitchen it would be real nice and quiet, and you can trust this story because it’s mostly a true piece of fictitious folklore from the south.

We trained our dog on cheese. We make her go through her whole routine - sit, bark, roll-over, shake, stand on her hind legs, turn in a circle, and stay. Then we give her a piece of cheese after each. That’s all the tricks she knows, and we feel it’s important for her development to practice them all, you know, the old “use it or lose it” theory. But that adds up to seven cubes of cheese. She only weighs nine pounds, so she fills up and sometimes takes the remaining cubes and buries them in the clothes on the floor in the back bedroom closet.

She goes back there a few times during the day, checking on her chunks, We’ll find her lurking around in there for no good reason, and if we look under a pair of jeans, we’ll find a hard orange cube. If she suspects we’re hunting for her dried up stash, she’ll take the cheese and go into another room and hide it.

My daughter has been reading in bed and the dog will slink in and walk around her bed slowly. There are plenty of clothes on the floor in there. “Mom, this dog’s acting weird,” she’ll yell. I’ll come in and see a little telltale orange color in her mouth – the dog’s, not my daughter. She looks up at you and the whites of her eyes show underneath like little hammocks, and she’ll mosey out of the room, looking back over her shoulder, as if to say, “I’m just having an innocent look around, don’t mind me.” She’ll go off and try to find another place to hide the cheese.

What’s odd is, she didn’t start moaning until the last year or two. She’d just look at you and you were supposed to know what she wanted. To get out so she could go piddle, she’d make eye contact with you and just stare. No bark, no standing by the door, no indication whatsoever that she needed to go outside. So you’d say, “What is it? What do you want?” and she’d continue to stare. “Are you hungry? Do you want some food?” Stare. “Do you need to go outside?” At the word “outside” she’d turn her head toward the door, and that’s how you found out she was going to wet the carpet any second if you didn’t get up quick.

I don’t mind the moaning. Or finding chunks of cheese whenever I lift anything off the floor. I think it’s cute. But I think everything this dog does is cute. She’s a nine pound black curly dust mop of cuteness, and I’m easily entertained.

Writing Christmas Letters Is for the Dogs

I talked a little yesterday about how hard it is to write Christmas letters. But not as hard as it is to read some of them. I can’t understand why people write them in the 3rd person. You know the person who is writing them is someone in the family. They didn’t hire someone else to do a one-page history of the last year.

For example, if there are four people in the family, the writer will say, “Joe decided to get chickens, Lucy is in 9th grade, Jamie broke her leg, and Rebecca has been busy with her new company.” So who’s writing the fricking letter? If it’s some third party, there should be a by-line somewhere, like: “2009 Christmas Letter About the Jones Family” by Bob Smith.

Some of these letters go off the deep end. Pam, who must be the writer of one letter because she’s a single mom and you know good and well the 3 year old didn’t write it, says, “Pam has been busy with her job and a toddler. She is hoping to get a promotion so that she can work fewer hours and be able to afford to stay home more. Pam gets very tired sometimes, but she wants to be a good mom and do a great job so she just keeps plugging along. Pam would like to win the lottery or at least find a rich husband, ha ha.”

If you’re writing the Christmas letter for your family, please just say, “I have been busy.” It’s so much easier to plow through.

Here’s something else, but I know if I write it I’ll make some big stupid typo here, but it can’t be helped. Why won’t people read their own letters? They must just pump them out and stuff them in the envelope without a second glance. When I read through their letters I feel like taking a red pen and circling all the errors.

This doesn’t really bother me that much; I’m just struggling to find something to write about. I could mention a TV show I saw yesterday called, “The Science of Dogs.” It really was interesting. Assuming that dogs come from wolves, you’d think they’d have similar behavior, but they’re different in one important way. Dogs use humans to get what they want. When I saw this, I realized just how smart my dog is.

They had a dog and a wolf, and the wolf was raised as a pet so it had always lived with people and wasn’t wild. They tied a piece of meat on a string and put it in a cage, and both the dog and the wolf figured out how to pull the meat out of the cage by tugging on the string. Then they tied the meat down inside the cage but still put the string on it so it looked just like before. The wolf went straight to the string and started tugging, and when the meat didn’t come, it kept tugging, dragging the cage around and getting frustrated. Then they brought the dog in. It tugged on the string exactly twice, then backed off and looked up at the human with this perfect dog face and these eyes that said, “I can’t do it, please help me oh kind sir, and do it quick.”

I have seen that look on my dog so many times it made me laugh out loud. My dog likes to throw balls in the air and chase them around. She thinks she’s going to entice me to play with her by doing this, and sometimes it works. If I’m too busy to play right then, she’ll manage to roll the ball under the couch where she can’t reach it, and she gives me that look. If I’m not looking at her, she’ll bark a particular bark and sit and look toward the couch until I come in the room and ask what’s the matter. She just looks at me, then looks at the couch with that exact TV dog look until I lay down on my stomach and fish that ball out from under the couch.

That dog uses me for all kinds of stuff. She wants out, I get up and let her out. She wants in, I get up and let her in, then she wants out again – all in the space of three minutes. That dog has me wrapped around her finger and I’m on demand to do her bidding anytime day and night.

What that has to do with Christmas letters is this. Maybe it’s not a 3rd party writing those letters; maybe it’s the family dog. I think I’m going to train my dog to type. She’d probably have some pretty good tales to tell. “Yeah, I got Suzanne on her belly six different times today. She’s such a sucker. You’d think she’d learn and just quit doing it. I laugh so hard I puke, which she promptly cleans up and starts talking to me in that stupid baby talk she thinks I like, then asks me if I have a bellyache and slices me some cheese to settle my stomach. Ahhh, a dog’s life is the only life for me. ”

Why We Love This Dog

My dog is curled up in my lap (yes, she is a lap dog), and she’s hot. Not “attractive” hot, though I think most dogs would say she is quite cute with her black curly hair and black eyes. The eyes are her best feature when you can see them, which is only when she looks at you askance so that the little sliver moons of white show.

No, this dog is really hot. She’s like a heating pad, which works okay in the winter because it gets cold sitting in front of the computer, but in the summer we’re both shifting positions, trying to get some cool air in, but she won’t get out of my lap even if we’re both miserable, and if I put her down because I can’t take it anymore, she looks at me with those sliver moon eyes and whines all pitiful-like until I pick her back up.

Speaking of whining, this dog is always seeing something out the back door and wanting to check it out. I open the sliding door to let her out, and she just stands there with her nose stretched out, smelling the cold air rushing in. I’ll start to close the door, and she leans way forward and takes a step. I stop the door and she sniffs some more, and I lose all patience and try to shut the door quickly, but then she tries to bolt through it before it closes. So I open the door enough for her to get through, and she finally goes out on the patio and barks a few times. If I stand there, she ignores me and just looks around for an eternity. If I walk off, she turns toward the door and wants to be let back in right away. I read somewhere that a doorway is something that a dog is always on the wrong side of.

Dogs are pretty entertaining, though, aren’t they? I mean, this one will play with you by pretending to bite your hand or pull on your sleeve and growl. You push her away and she comes back, pretending to bite again. It’s all in good fun until suddenly, for absolutely no reason, she gets mad. She lunges at you and bites pretty hard, which usually doesn’t hurt because she’s only a 9 pound Yorkie Poo, but sometimes her little pointy tooth will make contact with a bone and it hurts like the dickens. She growls like you’ve become a burglar and she’s morphed into a Doberman, and she’s got a particular growl that if you hear that, and you get your hand or face or any other part close to her, she’d bite hard enough to make a lasting tooth impression in your flesh.

My son loves to get her to the biting stage because he thinks her growling is funny. I say to him, “You’re gonna get bit,” and he grins and looks at me and, every single time, puts his hand a little closer to the dog’s mouth and she shoots out like a lighting bolt and clamps onto his hand, and he yanks it away howling, “SHE BIT ME!” like it just came out of nowhere. He gets all upset because those bites really do hurt, and acts like the dog is disloyal and unfaithful, and shows me the tooth mark before he goes away pouting, clutching his bitten hand and mumbling, “Bad dog.”

I can’t tell you how many times this has been repeated at my house. Over and over and over again. My son will go off to his room or somewhere and then come back out a little later, still pouting, and won’t make eye contact with the dog, who’s just sitting there on my lap minding her own business, the altercation already forgotten and her little stub tail thumping soundlessly against my leg.

The dog is the central figure in this house. Everyone wants to know what the dog is doing at all times. When the kids come home, I ask them how school was, and then I tell them about the adventures of the dog that day. “She treed a squirrel,” or “she rolled in something so foul it made my eyes water,” or “she saw some crows and barked her fool head off for half an hour.” I honestly don’t know what we all talked about before the dog. She’s everyone’s best friend, but she likes my lap the best.

Walking Laurie's Dog

I woke up so cranky this morning I started an argument with the mirror.

At least I could look forward to walking with my friend, Laurie. Except she's got this big black standard Poodle named Pepper.  He's 14 and can't hear, or refuses to.  Laurie pesters him all the time.  "Pepper, Pep, where are you, Pep, come here boy, Pep, Pepper?" Laurie's got chickens, too, but I'll gripe about them some other time.

So Pepper is FOS, (full of ____) all the time.  No matter when we walk, day or night, that dog is this big, lumbering, hunched over, straining eyesore dropping chocolate loafs all over the place like strings of sausages. It's nauseating.  No, really, I've gotten that "bl...lu" reflex a couple of times in my throat.

Laurie never brings enough plastic bags - however many she stuffs in her pockets on any given day is usually about half as many as she needs. Today we were walking through a school playground when the dog started doing his thing as he kindof traveled along.  He covered about ten feet with mini-loafs, making a dotted line behind him.  Laurie picked up a couple and started strolling away from the scene of the crime, (and it is criminal - I'd like to know how what that dog eats).  "Oh, no," I said.  "You have to pick it all up, this is a playground."  "Was there more?" she asked, as if her darling precious, poodle-hairdo scalped sissy dog could have done such a thing.  I marched over and pointed my finger down at the grass, shaking it a little like a judge harassing a guilty criminal.  "There's one," I said, "and here's another, and there's another one over there, and two more at the base of that tree."

"Good Lord," she exclaimed.  "Pep, what's gotten into you, boy?" Good question, I thought.

We resumed our walk, the dog jerking Laurie backwards from time to time as he continued to blanket Southwest Portland in giant tootsie rolls.  Although, like everything, there is a bright side.  If we ever get lost, we can follow the trail of plastic bags every few feet until they lead us safely back home.