Posts Tagged ‘dog’

Yeah, it's your tooth brush.

I think anyone that is brave enough to have children deserves a medal. Seriously. It would be difficult enough to have to figure out how not to completely fuck up someone else’s life.

Would you want me responsible for the development of your kids?
Yeah, me neither.

I have dogs instead. They’re my kids. And sure, I still have to put up with a lot of crap, but it doesn’t seem as painful when they can’t actually talk back.

There are times when I look at them and I swear that I can figure out what they would say to me if they could, though. And let me tell you? My dogs have some serious attitude problems.

No, I have no idea where they acquired them.

For example. The other day, I was in the middle of something very important while working on my computer, and I must have stopped paying attention to White Dog for all of five seconds. Because next thing I knew, he was telling me in no uncertain terms that he was going to shit on my foot.

No, really. I’m sure that’s what he was keying up to do. In fact, I do believe that he was in the process of lining his asshole up to maximize the shit shockwave.

Now, I can’t really blame him. Nature does call every now and then, and it’s my duty to make sure that he gets outside. I would just prefer a more subtle approach.

The only good that can result in this aggressive action is that I will have a lovely, furry pair of dog slippers to help keep my feet warm.

That might not count as one of my favourite things “that my kid ever said”, but damn, I’ll bet those would be some fine slippers.

They’d probably be my fave pair.
I think that counts.

The 50-50 Challenge is an idea that Chrissa from A Little Wicked and I came up with. It is based on a list of 50 Lists to Write to Lift Your Spirits, which can be found at Demanding Joy. We were inspired to make it a blog challenge. If you’d like to participate, please do. Be as inspired as we were.

I have two dogs.

Those dogs eat.  Which generally means that those dogs also shit.  As an pet owner – or pet ‘staff’ as my dogs prefer to call it – I get the ever delightful job of having to go out in the yard and clean up dog poop.  It’s a crappy job.  However, it does lend itself to coming up with some really shitty puns.

I don’t generally mind cleaning up after the dogs.  In fact, mostly, it’s a job I kind of like.  It always makes me laugh.  Not because I’m handling excrement, either.  Well, not exactly, anyhow.

There are very few people that know this story.  I’m sharing it now only because I laughed so hard today remembering it that I wanted to share the smile.  And for those of you out there with absolutely no sense of humour, might I suggest that you head elsewhere in your interweb travels because anyone that decides to flame me over this will not be treated with respect.

You’ve been warned.

My Dad was always an early riser.  He got up without an alarm clock his entire life, and he always woke up early on the weekends, too.  It allowed him to get all a lot of stuff done without interruption.  It’s also the reason that I love waking up to the sound of a lawn mower and the smell of fresh cut grass.  That meant the weekend, and Dad was home during the day.

I seem to have inherited my Dad’s need for very little sleep, and one Saturday morning, I woke up before the sound of the mower against my downstairs bedroom window.  I wandered upstairs to get a cup of what my Dad considered coffee – I considered it hot water with a ground or two of beanage.

As I stood at the kitchen window, I saw the strangest sight.  My Dad was coming out of the garage with a hockey stick.  I could not for the life of me figure out why the fuck my Dad would need a hockey stick to do yard work.

I went outside to our patio and watched my father put the hockey stick on the ground, and then over his head.  I was no more educated.  So I went right up to my Dad and stood behind him for a moment.

It was then that I realized that it was not a hockey stick that he wielded with such style.  It was the shaft of a hockey stick, but at the end where the stick part should be, he had attached a small garden shovel.  I watched my wonderful father as he scooped up a pile of dog poop into the shovel part of his tool and thought, “What a smart guy my father is!”

Then, I watched as he raised the stick slowly…
Brought it to about shoulder level…

And proceeded to fling the dog crap over the fence, across the alley, and into our across-the-lane neighbour’s yard.

I believe that might have been my first verbal usage of the term, “What the FUCK?!”

He turned to face me, a slight smile on his face.  And rather than giving me a hard time for my language, he simply told me that he was just doing his weekly cleaning up of the dog poop.

I have rarely laughed as hard as I did that morning.  I laughed so hard that I dropped my coffee, and wound up sitting on the grass with tears streaming down my face.  I couldn’t help it.  Every time the man who was supposed to teach me about life’s lessons picked up another pile of shit and flung it into the neighbour’s yard, I laughed even harder.

You have to understand.  This was not a nice neighbour.  The man was an asshole in every possible way when it came to being neighbourly.  He parked his cars in the alley, blocking my Dad’s garage and rendering it useless for car storage.  When he ran out of room for his garbage, he’d put it in my Dad’s cans.  When it came time to pull his RV in and out of the yard, he would invariably run it into my Dad’s fence.  Every year, twice a year, my Dad would have to replace a few boards in the fence because this guy backed into it on purpose.  The guy was a fucktaco.  Plain and simple.

It wasn’t like my Dad flung shit into anyone else’s yard.
Just this guy’s.

And buddy had a dog, so it wasn’t like there shouldn’t have been any shit in his yard. It’s just that my Dad felt there wasn’t quite enough shit in this guy’s yard.  This guy must have thought that he had the shittiest dog on the planet.  I mean, seriously.  How much can one dog possibly shit?

When I finally started to breathe normally again, my Dad asked me if I wanted a go.  Well DUH.

He showed me how to do it right.  What kind of power to use.  To fling with your shoulder and make sure that the shit didn’t accidentally hit the fence.  As I flung my first shit over the fence I thought about all the times that this jackwad had one of our childhood toys land in his yard and refused to give it back, instead telling us that anything on his property belonged to him.

Well, I guess he was right about that.
In a sense, my Dad made sure of it.

Over the years before I moved out on my own, I would join my Dad in this weekly chore. Did I ever feel bad about it? Not even for one single second. Should my Dad have ever felt bad about it? Oh, hell no. Fathers are supposed to teach life lessons.

And during those mornings that I flung actual shit into the yard of the man that had flung so much symbolic shit at us, I learned one of the most valuable lessons of all.

Treat people well, because you never know when karma is going to come back and bite you in the ass.

Oh.

And never mess with a man who has a spare hockey stick, a garden shovel, some ingenuity and a bit of an attitude.

This evening’s dinner was a simple one, consisting of some good bread, cheese and fruit. Amongst the fruit were several very plump, ripe strawberries. Strawberries are my favourite. I love them. I saved them for last. When I picked up the first one, I noticed a small, furry brown face staring up at me from the floor. Strawberries are Badger’s favourite, too.

When I first moved here, one of the things I noticed were the gardens that surrounded the place. I also took note of a small greenhouse attached to the garage in the backyard. Not that it would do me any good whatsoever. You see, I’m not good with plants. I never have been. Of all of the things that I would have loved to have inherited from my dad, it would have been his green thumb. Unfortunately, that missed me. By about a hundred and a half miles.

The flowers here were not in bloom when I first saw this house, nor was there anything to speak of in the greenhouse. It was winter, you see, and so nothing was blooming at all, and was instead covered over by a thick layer of snow. However, the first spring that I lived here, a small miracle occurred. In the front yard, all along the house, flowers started to bloom completely without my help. I noticed them sprouting and watched in awe as they just grew up all by themselves.

As the months changed, so did the flowers. When I would look out on the gardens as the spring moved into summer, new and beautiful buds would replace the ones that were starting to lose their color. Each one different, and each one remaining until the new ones bloomed to take their places. I had no idea what to make of this, so I consulted my dad. He told me that whomever had owned the place before me must have planted perennials, and timed them so that there were always fresh flowers surrounding my little house, right up until the first frosts came and put them to sleep under a blanket of white.

The next year, so inspired was I by the small miracle of having a garden that seemed to be lovely without my help, I consulted my father once again. I had been sitting on the patio in the backyard, staring at the barren little greenhouse. I had been day-dreaming of my dad’s garden and the gorgeous strawberries that used to grow there under his tender care. How hard could it possibly be, I asked myself. After talking to my dad, and getting the lowdown on what I would have to do, I set about doing it.

The planting was enjoyable enough, but not nearly as satisfying as when I saw the first little berries coming in. I remember calling my dad, excited as if I had just won the lottery. I was growing strawberries. He took great joy in the fact that I was so pleased over it, and I’m sure that it must have seemed to him as if all of the calls about what to do when something or the other happened were finally worth it.

I watched the little berries grow and ripen, and would not allow myself even one taste of one berry until they were perfectly ready to eat. I remembered the fresh sweetness of the first strawberries of the summer when dad would bring them in, and I remembered that nothing ever tasted better. I didn’t want to spoil that by eating them too soon. So I waited patiently.

One day, as I was out checking them, I realized that I couldn’t wait any longer to taste my strawberries. In fact, if I did wait much longer, they would be past the point of ripeness. I was like a child with her first allowance, let me tell you. No candy could possibly have tasted as sweet as those strawberries were going to taste to me.

I went in to the house to get a bowl to collect them in. There weren’t too terribly many, but that didn’t matter. I had grown them, I had looked after them, and I was looking most forward to enjoying the fruits of my labours.

When I arrived back in the greenhouse, I noticed that something was amiss in my strawberry patch. By amiss, I mean that all of the strawberries were, in point of fact, missing. I could tell where they had been, because where each little morsel had once been perched, there now sat a measly little green stem that looked like it had been plucked by the steadiest of fingers.

It was about this time that I noticed the same small furry brown face that sits perched beside me now staring up at me. Licking his lips in a rather satisfied way. With a look on his face that screamed that he had just taken candy from a baby.

To be more precise about it, my dog had just eaten every single strawberry that had once lain so colourfully in my greenhouse.

There has been no other attempts at growing anything in that greenhouse since. To be honest, there is no strawberry that could possibly be as sweet as the memory of Badger’s face as he looked up at me as if to say thank you for the delicious treat.

So sweet is that recollection for me that whenever I eat strawberries now, and find my little protector so close beside me as I do, I share them without reservation.

It’s not the fruit we grow in the dirt that brings the most pleasure, but the fruits that we reap from our lives.

And that little dog deserves to enjoy his as much as I enjoy mine.