Winter Wonderland


I must be feeling better. I got more done in three hours Sunday afternoon then I had gotten done in the last five days.

I did several loads of laundry, finally put away the clean laundry I did last weekend that had been on the bed gathering dust, filled and ementy the dish washer, remembered that today is a recycle day and played hide and seek with various coke cans around the house, got that all of those and the newspapers together and into their recycle boxes and carried those out to the curb. I also remembered that today is trash day and gathered up and dumped all the trash in the house and took that outside – and then got another bag to replace the original bag that tore two seconds after I stuffed it into the can.

After all that and changing the sheets on the bed I still had enough energy to solve The Case of the Missing Dog Toy.

Dogger has three identical bones. She however, can only go steady with one of the bones at a time and if she can’t find the bone she will play with one of the others, but she knows it isn’t the right bone and she whines about it.

I’ve been spending more time back in the wetlands since Dogger joined the Pipe Liberation Front. The Front hates the idea that any water pipe may be denied its natural right to burst and be “free”. Dogger believes that this cause is so important to water pipe rights that she will undertake terrorist acts to protect the pipes God given right to burst in the cold.

So I have to stand outside and guard the blanket I have now wrapped around the exposed pipe. I did have a lovely pipe bra thing so that the pipe could keep itself warm but no the Pipe Liberation Front didn’t like that and some PLF member got to Dogger and taught her how to take the bra thing off and destroy it.

I looked out the window one afternoon and the wetlands were littered with Pipe Bra Thing. She tried to do the same thing with the blanket despite the blanket being liberally spritzed with Dog be Gone and sprinkled with enough red pepper powder to win an east coast chili cook off. She is nothing if not dedicated to the cause.

Now I have to go out there and stand guard, in the cold and wet, for as long as it takes Dogger to do her thing and now since she’s suddenly like all Pipe Liberation Front – and she knows I am going to insist on not allowing her to “liberate” the pipe and destroy the blanket. She isn’t going to make it easy on me and my poor frozen toes, her toes aren’t going to curl up and freeze off right away and she knows it.

As if in sympathy to the PLF, The wetlands have a New And Improved! Now With New Snow Smell! and Dogger has to go around a resniff the whole damn yard before she can pee on it. If I don’t want to hang around the wetlands and feel my toes curl up and freeze off inside my shoes, I can take her to the front yard where it also smells new and different and have my toes curl up and freeze off out there, in public.

There is nothing that says I Love My Dog like allowing yourself to be seen wandering around your front yard with a parka over your bathrobe waiting for your politically radicalized dog to deign to pee.