How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You?

One of my regular blog reads, which I have mentioned here previously, is PassiveAggressiveNotes.com. I found one of the items posted yesterday to be particularly funny…

Who hasn’t seen examples of stuff like this?

In the aftermath of the little giggle this picture prompted, I got to thinking about passive-aggressive notes that could be found at my house.

I bet you’re thinking, “Uh oh. Now she’s going to bash her poor ole still-recovering Hubby.” But I’m not. He’s Superhubby, remember? He also happens to be an engineer. I could say he’s anal, but that sounds too negative. The fact is, he just likes orderliness. He likes things to be in their proper place. Which is not a bad thing. Otherwise, our house might be subject of a Hoarders episode on A&E.

You know what they say about opposites attracting? I am not orderly. I’m clean, mind you, I’m just not as driven to distraction by clutter or things being out of place. (If Hubby had a blog, he could post all kinds of crazy stuff about me.)

My Hubby is subtly passive-aggressive, i.e., he doesn’t leave notes, he leaves hints. We’ve been married for almost 17 years now, so I am pretty good at recognizing the hints.

I’ll pretend I’m Hubby and give you a couple of examples. But, BUT, before I do, I will be the first one to admit that he is right. His way is best. Order is better. My brain just doesn’t work like his does.

Here’s an example of the place I get hints most frequently. Especially when it’s Hubby’s week to make dinner.

Notice how cluttered the kitchen island is? That’s the workspace he likes to use when making dinner.

Here’s what the hint would look like…

That little brown cabinet at bottom left houses the trashcan. All of the stuff that was on the counter is now on top of or near said trashcan. Which means, “Keep the crap from cluttering the kitchen counter or I’ll throw it away.”

See? He’s right. The counter is much nicer when it is clutter-free. I just can’t put stuff in its place promptly. I do it in stages. It is not a conscious thing. I am not trying to push him over the edge, I swear.

Here’s an example of the second-most-frequent hint…

This shows the sinks in our bathroom. My sink is on the left. Hubby’s is on the right. That big white thing in the middle is Hubby’s. It’s no accident that his largest item is in the middle. It signifies the middle. Notice my hairbrush well to the right of the middle. My cuticle trimmers and hairspray are also slightly to the right (it gets much worse, but it is still early in the week). While you’re looking, take note of the red comb to the far right. That’s Hubby’s comb.

If I hadn’t just done this for the photo example, Hubby would’ve done it later today or tomorrow morning at the latest. My hairspray is nowhere to be seen, the cuticle trimmers are shoved under my sink bowl, the hairbrush has been moved to the middle, and his red comb has been inserted in my brush as if to say, “Um, Honey? Your stuff is on MY side again!” Red is certainly an appropriate color for the comb when used in this manner. I wonder if that was intentional?

Again, Hubby is right. It looks much neater this way. I’m being honest here. I did not set out to bash Hubby. That’s why I keep saying, “HE IS RIGHT.” I really just wanted to point out that he’s rubbing off on others, including the dog. Which dog? Why Belle, of course. Meg’s a bit wackier. (More like me, some might say.)

Belle and Meg both have Gentle Leader Easy Walk Harnesses. They wear these when we’re driving so we can fasten them in to prevent them from bouncing around the vehicle like crazy dogs, covering all the windows with dog snot and/or bounding out the second the door is opened.

We’re not really crazy about the Gentle Leader harnesses and reverted to using CeCe’s old harness on Belle. But then, last week, it mysteriously broke. So this past weekend, Belle wore the Gentle Leader harness again.

Here’s what it looked like when we got home…

That’s when we realized the old harness had not “broken.” All this time we thought Belle was just being a good little passenger, she’d been quietly working away at gnawing through the harness. That was apparently her way of saying, “I don’t like this stinking harness.” (Meg, on the other hand, would’ve said, “I don’t like this f@*#ing harness.”)

Yes, it took a while to get to the point of this post. But you had to have the whole picture. Besides, through poking fun at Hubby I have created a public admission to being a disorganized mess.

That Hubby of mine is very patient when it comes to my foibles. A lesser man would have just given up and divorced me by now!

UPDATE on yesterday’s post… Klondike, my grand-dog, was the culprit. I suspected as much. He spent the day here with Amy, who was sick. She called today to fess up and apologize. But, like I told her, the point I was trying to make was not that the poop was left in my yard. I mean, I wasn’t thrilled, especially after sticking my finger in it, but that’s not the moral of my post. The moral was supposed to be, don’t let stupid stuff like poop get you all worked up. There are more important things in life, like your sick spouse, on which you should focus.

Hopefully, Today is Better

Yesterday didn’t start off so well.

I think I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Either that or it really isn’t irrational to get extremely pissed off after accidentally sticking your finger in a large, squishy pile of dog poo. It wasn’t the act itself that set me off as much as knowing the poo, one of three piles found in my backyard, didn’t belong to either of my dogs. Getting poo on my hand when cleaning up after my own dogs is bad enough…

I was in the middle of writing a post to express my frustration, ranting about people not cleaning up after their dogs when Hubby showed up. He’d left work early because he was very dizzy (to the point that he could not walk straight), nauseous and vomiting. It was scary.

To make a long story short, after a visit to our favorite doctor, we found out he has vertigo, also known as labyrinthitis. Basically, it’s an inflammation of the inner ear that screws up your balance. Lucky for him, it wasn’t severe.

Worrying about my sick Hubby prior to the diagnosis sort of put things in perspective. My anger over the foreign, squishy poo was the least of my worries. My Superhubby was ill!

I promptly made an appointment with the doctor. While we waited for the designated time to roll around, Hubby laid down on the sofa. He wasn’t even completely settled when Belle joined him.

Isn’t she is just the cutest little dog? Her Daddy wasn’t feeling well and she wanted to make him better. She may be a killer, but she’s also quite the little snuggle bunny.

Belle wasn’t the only concerned one.

Meg wanted to help make Dad feel better, too.

Our kids say we spoil our dogs. We don’t agree. Of course we love our dogs. Who wouldn’t when they do stuff like this? But they’re not spoiled. They’re just well taken care of.

Dealing with poo on a daily basis may be gross, but it’s worth it. (The reason I have to be diligent about cleaning up poo is even grosser; if I don’t, Meg will!)

When’s the last time a kid cuddled up with you like this to make you feel better?

As an aside, in case you’re wondering if Hubby knew I was taking these pics, the answer is yes. Did he know I’d post them on my blog for the whole world to see? Of course! Hubby’s quite the good sport about providing material for my blog. Just another one of the many reasons why I love him.

As another aside, while I’m pretty sure he’ll be sort of touched by this post, he’ll be the first to point out that I started and coincidentally ended it by talking about poop.

Oh well. He’ll still love me back. I think…

Today’s Grossbit

Wanna know what’s worse than a cat yakking up something on the floor of your office?

Fending off two dogs tripping over each other in the mad scramble to get to the stuff and eat it.

On a positive note… I rarely have to clean cat puke off of my floor.

It was raining this morning when I woke. At first, I thought, “Yay, I don’t have to run.” Moments later, that thought became, “Crap. There are only 58 days left ’til the Army Ten Miler and I still can’t run a solid 30 minutes.”

When I signed up for the race, in my overly optimistic delirium, I remember one of the questions being something to the effect of how long I thought it would take me to run ten miles. Having no idea, I said three hours. That wasn’t the right answer. Apparently, two and a half hours is the max. If you don’t maintain a 15-minute-mile pace for the first five miles, you get re-routed at the five-mile mark.

Now that would be embarrassing.

So I need to go run in the rain. Or shortly after the rain. It’s time to get really serious here. Wish me luck!

WAIT… one more thing about cat yak. We’ve always referred to cat puke, whether it was a hairball or just stuff, as “yak” in my family. Back when Eric was a wee lad, I remember a conversation we had about violins. He wanted to know what the strings were made of.

“Yak hair, I think,” was my reply.

“Ew!!!” he moaned, all loud and disgusted. It took me a second to realize he thought I meant they use cat yak to make the strings.

“No, the animal,” I had to explain. “You know, a yak.”

Having this picture then would have made things much easier to explain.

I Smell Like a Wet Dog…

…and it is all Hubby’s fault.

Today was a summer Friday for me. If I work extra hours, I get every other Friday off. Which is awesome. It’s even more awesome when my work load is such that I can actually take the day off.

I told Hubby last night that I couldn’t think of anything fun to do. First, he suggested I go buy a truckload of mulch. I told him that might be way too exciting for me. Then he suggested I take my doggie girls to the dog park. And that’s what I did.

We didn’t go to just any dog park, though. We went to the beach. I took my camera along, but wisely decided to leave it in the truck. So, no pics of the girls frolicking in the waves. I did borrow a pic to share though, which shows the dog beach at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis.

The girls had a blast. They were both quite excited. Meg would go in the water, but not deep enough to swim. Belle, our toddler dog, was happy to go into the water and swim. Mostly because I was in there. She swims like a toddler, though, lifting her front feet out of the water and smacking them back down, flailing happily along. Right next to Mama, of course.

I was soaked. Between that and all the dogs shaking water off of themselves and onto me. Oh yeah, and there’s the one time Belle swam out to me (I was wading at a depth of about mid-thigh) and for whatever reason she decided to try and climb into my arms. She didn’t make it, but the front of me was a mess!

Meg was cracking me up, too. Like I said, she’d go in, but not deep enough to swim. She’d only go out as far as she could while still touching bottom, then growl and bark at me to come back in.

I really wish I had pictures to share. But I am also VERY glad I did not take my camera.

One of these weekends when we’re at the WV place, I’m going to take them down to the river for a swim. Maybe Hubby will come along and we can get pictures of that.

Parenting Failure

Occasionally, I am wracked by guilt for taking pictures when I probably should have been taking some other sort of action. Take last weekend as an example…

We were at the WV place with Joey, our adorable little grandson. I wanted to take Joey to see our neighbor, Jean, Buddy’s Mom. Just to prove that even I have brief periods of sanity, I realized it would be much safer to drive to Jean’s house than risk having Joey fall off the very steep ridge we’d have to traverse if walking.

So I loaded Joey and the girls into the truck, and we went to visit Jean.

While Joey and I were visiting, the dogs were off playing. We heard some barks and went to see what the dogs were up to. That’s when I saw this…

That’s my cute little girlie-girl’s butt sticking up out of the groundhog hole. The same one she’d explored a couple of weeks prior to no avail.

You can see that Buddy decided to join her down below. Keep in mind, I was standing atop an 8-foot creek bank with one very bashful toddler clinging to my hip as I clicked away.

If you look closely, you can see that Meg (rear-end visible at far left) joined the “hunt.”

Meg soon lost interest. So did we. And we walked back to the house to resume our visiting.

All was going well, when the dogs suddenly started barking. A lot. In voices that said, “We found something.”

So we walked back over to investigate.

“Oh, look,” Jean said. “They did find something.”

Yup. They’d actually routed out a groundhog. With that still-bashful toddler glued to my hip, I just HAD to get a picture.

“Buddy has been trying to catch that thing for years,” Jean reported. Leave it to my not-so-girlie-girl!

Having trouble seeing the groundhog?

Is that better? He probably weighed about 10-12 pounds. My Tinkerbelle only weighs 25 pounds.

Just when I thought to myself, “I wonder what they’ll do now,” my cute little Tinkerbelle picked the thing up to violently shake the life out of it. But she didn’t shake hard enough, apparently, because it clamped down on her ear.

I was faced with the option of plopping my cute, little, defenseless Joey down atop an 8-foot creek bank to rescue Belle or just screaming loudly to encourage Belle to extricate herself from what had become a pretty intense situation.

Look at the size of that thing clamped down on my baby girl’s ear!

Know what I did? I screamed. It released her.

I thought all was okay…

Then I noticed Belle was bleeding. I raced back to the truck, with Joey still clinging. I called the dogs and they, being the good little girls they are, came running. I loaded everyone in and drove as quickly as I could back to the house.

Quick aside… I so wish I’d gotten a picture of Jean finishing off the not-quite-dead groundhog with a very large stick, but I was panicking. My baby girl was bleeding.

Wounds on dog ears are like wounds on people heads. They bleed a lot.

I was totally freaking out. All I could think of was getting Belle home so Hubby and I could assess the damage. When I got to the house, I unloaded Joey and rushed inside saying, “Belle got bit by a groundhog!”

Apparently ignoring the panic in my voice, Hubby nonchalantly replied, “Oh. She did?”

Then he saw Belle who by then was covered on the front, head to both feet, in blood.

“Oh my GOD!” Hubby said, quickly changing his tune.

We got Belle cleaned up pretty quickly. The cut on her ear was only about 1/4″ long. It took a while to get the bleeding to stop, until we applied some pepper. It worked like a charm.

Here I am tending to my sweet little baby (aka Killer).

She’s fine, by the way. The vet said her ear is healing nicely. He gave her a rabies booster, just in case, and some antibiotics.

Here’s hoping this weekend is less eventful!

Not a Morning Girl

I’m not feeling quite human this morning and it is all Shannon’s fault. She forced me to go to Helen’s Garden again. And she made me drink lots of wine. She wouldn’t let me go home early either.

So I was a bit slower than usual waking up. Only a bit, though, because my little Belle was beating on the side of the bed as if she were playing a new set of bongos. She is the morning girl in the house.

I’m not a morning girl. Either is Meg. If I were a dog, I’d look about as thrilled as this after having been dragged out of bed, unwillingly, at 7:00 A.M.

At least Belle stops harassing me once I get up. She doesn’t nip at my ears and my butt trying to get me to play like she does with Meg.

See how happy Meg looks?

She’s a grump in the mornings.

She does relent and play with Belle a little bit.

That makes Belle happy.

And it makes me smile.

These pictures are actually from the other day. I’m still not quite awake enough to play photographer yet today.

I hope these images made you smile, too.