Man's Best Friend

Wow, it's been a while since I've put any of these up. Well, I can't believe I totally forgot to add my doggy-poopy story, so here goes. :)

Several years ago, we still had all 3 of our dogs; 2 retrievers and a big ol' St. Bernard. Anyone with dogs has a horror story about some doings of said dog, but I'd like to say ours was probably the most heavy duty that I've heard.

It all started at about 3:00am one autumn morning. Naturally, as any disaster story goes, it couldn't have been on a Saturday, but no it was middle of the work week. Me being the much lighter sleeper, I was woken up by the sound of pouring water, and a dog whining. Great! One of them must not have peed when I let them out before bed, so now they're doing it right there in our room! Our whole house is hardwood flooring, save the 3 bedrooms being carpet. What better place to take a wizzer than on the carpet, right?

I was wrong.

A fast moving dog poop smell came across my face like a ton of bricks. Dogs have an unnatural smell about their poop or even farts, in that for some reason you can feel them coming. I swear I can almost tell it's creeping across my face before I hit my nose. When your spouse farts in the bed or whatnot, it always slowly fades in, letting you keep enough of your faculties to deal with what's about to happen. Not so with dogs. It's like "pleasant...pleasant...pleasant...SICKNESS!!!"

So anyways, I get the smell. I reach over to turn on both bed lamps and NOT put my feet on the floor until I've ascertained what's the commotion. I've learned at least that much through life lessons. Our smallest dog, Wednesday, is sleeping on my side of the bed. That's ok. Our middle dog Auggie is standing at the door of the room, as to her any movement on my part means it's dinner time. Ok, she's safe. That only leaves our 130lb St. Bernard, Ellie May.

It's amazing how under certain circumstances like duress your mind can become extremely clear and efficient in an instant. From what I saw, I most likely had the mind power to levitate myself. There were seven dinner plate piles of dog liquidump all over the place! Pile may not be the appropriate word, unless you serve your homemade soup by the pile.

Holy Crap!

Well, after I coaxed her outside (of course leaving a drip trail down the hallway) as nicely as I could muster, I got to work. When we moved into this house, we yard sale'd our "good" carpet cleaner. Hell, we only had like 3 little rooms of carpet. We kept the smaller wussy one though. I'm pretty sure if I would have read the instructions more carefully, it probably wasn't rated for the HAZMAT disaster I had to deal with.

So there I am, working this piece of crap cleaning device, at 3:00 in the morning, in my underwear. Getting dressed was not a priority at this point. To make it just a tad worse, some retard in the past had the bright idea to invent bur bur carpeting. This makes it horrible to clean with a fluid cleaner vacuum like this, as it can't get down to those lower levels as easy as normal carpet. The only thing that would help is if I stood a foot on the top of this contraption, all while pushing it back and forth over the ick.

This is when my wife woke up. She's such a peach.

Standing there, lights on, dog fertilizer everywhere, stinking so bad you could see it, and pushing a substandard appliance around while straddling it like Captain Morgan in my whitie-tighties, she says "did something happen?"

After 20 minutes of making absolutely no difference, I got out my utility knife and cut out a huge section of the carpet and padding, drug it outside to the back yard, hosed off the dog, put her in the garage, climbed in bed, said a quick prayer and went to sleep.

The next day, we found out that Ellie had some kind of stomach bug apparently. My wife was in our youngest daughter's room playing some girl game her, like princess pony cutie-pie or whatever. In walks Ellie with a very worried expression. It's all my wife can do to shout "NOOO!!! GET OUT!!!!" and try to at least shoo her out to the wood hall. Too little, too late. As Ellie turned around, she let out a stream of bun nectar, effectively drive-bying the wall of our little angel's room. Surprisingly not too many things were hit. The rocking horse however was not so lucky, gunned down in it's prime.

When I came home from work to see all this, she had already taken everything out of the room, including the entire floor's carpeting, and the rest of our master bedroom carpeting. Talk about a little trooper! Told you she was a peach. :)

Needless to say, we lived on bare floors that were painted with about 15 gallons of Kilz paint until we were abso-frickin-lutely sure Ellie was over whatever was upsetting her tummy. Took about 2 weeks and too many trips out to the yard to secretly watch her poop to make sure it was normal nuggets. Yes it had to be secret, as she won't go if you're standing there watching. I can understand that though, as I'm pretty sure I couldn't poop on command for an audience.

By the end of the ordeal, we had newly painted floors, newly painted walls, and brand new carpet to the tune of $1200 total. I must be insane though, as of all our dogs Ellie's the one I miss the most. :)