Something Is Wrong With Our Dog

We have two or three water bowls for our dogs in our house, and these bowls need to be refreshed several times a day. No, they don’t drink that much water, but Stanley has decided that each bowl is only good for one drink, and that drink can only be taken just after the bowl has been freshly filled.

Wait too long to change the water and Stanley will creep up to the bowl, sniff it suspiciously, and turn his disappointed eyes on us. I can’t blame him, though, because the water usually has strange things floating in it by then. (My theory is that the water gets dirty after Mina Bean takes a drink. Because she’s missing a lot of teeth, taking a drink involves essentially rinsing her mouth and letting some bits of dinner float out into the bowl.)

If Stan’s thirsty, I usually grab the water bowl, go upstairs to rinse it, and refill it from the Brita pitcher in the refrigerator. Stanley follows me upstairs and gazes wide-eyed at me as I go through this process, and he will often do a little dance and lick his lips when I turn toward him to put the bowl of fresh water on the floor.

Tonight Chris and I were in the family room. Chris was preparing to watch the Patriots game, which entailed clearing the Tivo for the night and asking Paco loudly, “Are you ready for the game, buddy? Do you think you’re ready for some FOOTBALL?”

I was sitting beside Chris, checking something on the laptop, when I thought I saw Stanley get up from the bed on the floor and head toward the other side of the room. After a while, though, I realized he was strangely silent.

Sometimes Stan just stands by the door to the garage, if he’s decided he want to go out, but I couldn’t see him there tonight. And sometimes, if we don’t change the water in his bowl fast enough, he walks to the bathroom on this level and into the stand-up shower to lick water from the stall floor if we’ve recently showered. But he had been gone for too long now.

“Chris, have you seen Stanley?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

We kept doing what we were doing. I figured Stanley had gone upstairs. A few more minutes passed, and Stan still didn’t show up.

“You don’t have Stanley on your lap, do you?” I asked Chris eventually.

“No,” he said.

I got up. I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew where he was.

I peered into the bathroom, and there, in the gap created by hanging our bath mat on the shower stall door, was a tiny, Stanley-shaped shadow peering anxiously at me. Apparently Stanley hadn’t quite worked out that if he could fit into the gap going into the shower, he could also fit into the gap to get out of the shower.

This is the second time we’ve caught him “trapped” in the shower, and sadly, I didn’t think to grab a camera to commemorate the occasion. Next time, perhaps.

Posted by: ssjane | October 1, 2007 | 8:46 pm
Posted in: Dogs