2006-07-05

Red, White, and Poo

Red is the color of all the cherries I washed and laid out on a paper towel very early Tuesday morning.
White is the color of my face when I came home from skating around 10 am and saw that the cherries were mostly gone.
Blue is the color of the dog shit that I cleaned up all afternoon.

Yay!
Freedom!

It's not like I wantonly leave food of any kind lying around within reach of the doglet. She's a DOG. They eat tables, for crying out loud.
Cherries aren't bad for them, either. But in moderation, right?

I had three pounds of cherries on my counter when I left and when I returned two hours later, I had seven cherries lying around on the floor.
There might be a couple more that rolled under the fridge but when I move out in ten years, my landlord probably won't mention them to me.

Apparently, Rosie doesn't agree with me about me about cutting down on carbs. Portion control eludes her.

She probably thought nothing of snarfing down three pounds, mostly because they were the last thing I touched before I left her ALL ALONE. Dogs love obsessively, almost in a weird stalker way and I know that they are often compelled to wander through the apartment until locating the thing that smells most recently of you.
If it's edible, it's getting eaten. Well, sometimes it's getting eaten even if it's not edible, in the strict sense of the word.

Anyway, I got home from skating, sweating, hungry, and feeling all Democratic since it was the Fourth of July and I tipped my helmet to a Vet and his daughter, stolling down the street in a two-person display of early-morning, flag-waving patriotism.
It was also a great skate - early in the morning and with brand new, super- fast adjustments to wheels. It was such a good skate that when I tripped on my friend and skidded across the hot cement of the skate park on my right shin for a good 23 yards, it only hurt in the good, satisfying way.
Of course, the good hurt didn't last. I woke up today with this THING on my shin. It's shaped like an Idaho potato. I think it's so angry, it can't even decide what it wants to do: Swell up like a bruise or scab up like a scrape. It's so pissed off, it might do both, just to be mean to my leg.

Anyway, I get home and I walk in and given that I live in a hovel. There's no avoiding, first glance, that the cherries are gone and the dog is looking high, probably from a combination of excess sugar and the sweet, sweet rush of being bad.

My gut reaction was to run away from home.

My second instinct was to go to the store and replace the cherries because they were a crucial weapon in The War on Candy. If my house goes unarmed, my Fat Cell troops will be defenseless and become decimated... and go with the metaphor because otherwise that sentence doesn't work, m'kay.

Those flight reactions faded fast when the light bulb finally clicked on: My 27 pound dog ate three pounds of cherries at some point in the previous two hours. I can't go anywhere.

It's not like I could leave her inside because.... no thanks, I do would actually prefer to NOT come home to a doody filled bedroom.

Leave her outside on her lead? It's totally illegal to leave your dogs outside in Arizona unless you have an air-conditioned dog house built in the same shape as your own home with a sprinkler system outside and a dog-bed inside that is guaranteed to wick away Fido's sweat. It's actually illegal to have them on a lead at all but I only do it when I'm laying out next to her. I figure if we're both frying, I'm not going to end up going to jail for animal cruelty.

So I hauled out my sun chair, put Poopy Puppy on her long lead in the shade, oiled up, and started a new book to help the time pass. It was probably about 45 minutes before I heard the first tell-tale sounds of too much fruit, eaten too fast. The good news is that the bulk of it was all over pretty quickly.

The bad news is that I had to spend the day cleaning up and being Vigilant. I had to clean up the doody. I felt like if I had eaten three pounds of cherries, I would want to take a cool bath, so did that for her but she wasn't as nice as I would be if a pretty girl in a bikini was giving me a bath. Then there was cleaning up me, which took forever - tanning oil, skating sweat, dog fur, mud from dog resistance to dog bath. I think I hid in the shower for a good 37 minutes.

The rest of the afternoon was spent celebrating my freedom by pretending to be the current Administration, wire tapping the dog's ass for cherrorist activity.

Things weren't entirely over until well into the afternoon, by which time, I had to corral the cats into the house for the night because of fireworks. The one time I ignore a PSA that I think is stupid is the one time some wild animal will freak the hell out from the fireworks and I'll never see my fruit-avoiding kitties again.
Droopy Dog managed to summon the energy to be completly freaked out by the fireworks and then later by the thunderstorms that were rolling around town all night. She felt like she needed to be on top of me and I kept having to remind her that she made a better door than a window.
BOOOOOOM
"Get down."
CCCCRRRRRACKKKKKK
"Now."
BOOOMBOOOOOOM
"Move."
"Scale of 1-10, How'd You Sleep?"
"1.5 and only because I moved to the couch at 4 AM where it's cooler and where no pets can join me."

This isn't exactly what I had in mind when I decided I needed to have a little more drama and excitement in my life.

arizonasarah at 9:11 a.m.

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