A station wagon in front of me today had three bumper stickers on it.
The first two:
Re-elect Gore 2008
and
Draft Al Gore 2008 for a Change in Climate
People, I’m as upset as you are about the last 8 years; possibly even more upset given that we’ve lost like $130,000* in our house value if we sell, and then another $50,000 in the saga known as the Realtor Who Stole Our Money To Buy Victoria’s Secret Lingerie And Yet This Is Not A Crime From The Viewpoint Of Massachusetts Judges.**
But these bumper stickers are SO 2004. At some point, you gotta let Al Gore go. Al Gore is not running for president. Al Gore has a Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s not bringing it to the White House. We have new people running now; people who will be vastly better than the current administration, regardless of their political parties***.
Bumper sticker number three:
Nobody Died When Clinton Lied
All right, I’ll give you that one. Where do I buy one of these stickers?
*Number not inflated for dramatic purposes. Unfortunately.
**Thanks, Massachusetts judges, for teaching us that criminals can commit crimes without penalty, and that we should be committing crimes right now if we want to stay on top of our debts!
***This statement not verified on candidates named Ralph Nader.
10:30 pm: I turn on the Tivo and cue up tonight’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” Just as I hit play, someone calls Chris on Skype.
10:32 pm: I stop to put on headphones. I can still hear Chris talking to his friend about some computer game.
10:33 pm: I hit pause on the Tivo, and realize that blogging a half-hour tv show will take me hours, if I have to hit pause every few minutes to write down something on the computer. I decide to switch to AIM and IM Chris my very deep thoughts so that I can simply copy my chat history. Lest you think I am being an unkind wife, I warn him ahead of time to ignore everything I type during this half-hour.
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Today I have been busy reading Stuff White People Like and have sadly come to the conclusion that I am a White Person*.
*For those of you who don’t know me, this may be a good time to point out my baby picture on the upper right.
CONVERSATION ONE
Coworker sitting a few feet away is talking to someone sitting across the table from her, and also to me. I cannot really hear her since there is someone sitting between us, but I nod. Suddenly she turns and asks me what I think.
Me: Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t really listening. I just had my interested face on.
CONVERSATION TWO
Boss is greeting us as we walk into the meeting. He asks all of us how we slept (in the hotel).
Instead of saying “fine” or even “good,” I say, “Well, I have this thing about bedbugs.”
We have long known that the Bean is set in her ways, and a peaceful coexistence requires that we simply do whatever she wants, when she wants. As far as she is concerned, every “command” we give is merely a chance to exercise our vocal cords. “Sit,” for example, which the other dogs know very well and will often automatically perform if we just look at them, amounts to a slight squat on the Bean’s part with her bum held a decorous half-inch above the ground.
Even our latest dog trainer, who has been helping us with Stanley, figured out pretty quickly who the boss was in our household. On her second visit, the dog trainer was advising us on how to keep Stanley from hiding in the garage when he suspects we are leaving the house.
“Call him to the kitchen after you take him out,” she said, “and give him a treat. Make him sit first.”
She eyed Paco, who was jumping hysterically at her ankles and clearly intent on wrestling her pant leg to the death. “It wouldn’t hurt to have this one sit, also,” she said.
She turned to Mina, who was squeaking happily and doing her best to encourage the trainer to pet her.
“Just give her a treat,” she said, “for, well, showing up.”
We were glad to have the dog trainer’s approval on this, because our pre-trainer technique had already been to tell the boys to sit or do a down, and then look at Mina and say, “You…um, you be cute,” and toss treats to everyone.
As you can tell, Mina has trained us well. The newest trick we have learned for her amusement involves her favorite activity: going outside. Theoretically she goes outside to pee and/or poop, but in actuality she goes outside to look for errant squirrels and to eat rabbit poop. As these are both incredibly exciting activities, she will often alert us to the necessity of a trip outside by barking incessantly until one of us gets up and lets them outside.
The yard where the dogs do their business is accessed via two different doors. During the day when we’re often in the kitchen on the upper level, we let the dogs out through the French doors which lead out to a deck. The dogs can run down the deck stairs and do whatever they like in the yard while we watch them through a kitchen window or from the deck.
At night, though, we’re usually watching TV when the Bean demands to go out, so we use the garage door to get to the yard. The garage door is on the opposite side of the house from the deck, so we just watch the dogs from the garage door until they are ready to come back inside.
For whatever reason of her own, Mina has recently decided that she prefers to enter the house through the French doors on the deck. Upon taking all the dogs out through the garage door, we would inevitably find Mina waiting, immobile, by the French doors when it was time to come back inside.
After numerous and futile attempts to get her to come back inside through the garage door, we soon learned that the only way to get Mina back in the house was to bring the boys in through the garage door, go up the stairs to the kitchen, and open the French doors for her.
On a few occasions when we’ve had to put something away or fetch something on our way from the garage to the kitchen, we have forgotten to open the French doors for Mina. This means that after a while, she will walk right up to the French doors, stare unblinkingly at us through the doors and bark once, peremptorily. One bark is all it usually takes, because she has trained us well.
Tonight after dinner I let the dogs out through the garage door. They wandered back and forth in the yard, bestowing liquid gifts upon certain rocks and bushes, and then the boys were ready to come back inside. I called for Mina, but naturally, she didn’t respond. I peered up at the deck and could just barely make out a tiny dark shape waiting by the French doors.
“Dumb Bean,” I muttered.
I ran inside the house. Because there are coyotes in our neighborhood who would just love a little chihuahua appetizer, I don’t like to leave the dogs outside by themselves for long, if at all. So I raced up the stairs to the kitchen as quickly as I could, accompanied by Stanley and Paco who were barking ferociously and were clearly under the impression that something exciting and perhaps even scary was happening. Was the mailman at the door?
I turned on the deck light and slid open the door. “Mina?” I called. Usually she waits right by the doors, but I couldn’t see her at all. Oh my god, were the coyotes that fast? And why couldn’t they go after the rabbits who kept pooping in our yard and leaving the tidbits for the Bean to snack on?
I walked out onto the deck and examined the back yard. Very faintly, I could see Bean’s tiny body standing in front of the garage door.
I didn’t have outdoor shoes on, and I wasn’t about to brave our poo-filled (rabbit or otherwise) yard in the dark to fetch the Bean.
“She is such a weirdo,” I told the boys, who joyously chased me as I ran back down the stairs.
I opened the garage door.
No Bean. This was ridiculous.
I looked toward the deck again and…yes, that looked like a Bean-shaped splotch standing patiently by the French doors. Did she have a Star Trek transporter, or how was she moving so quickly and silently?
“For god’s sake, STAY THERE!” I ordered her, and slammed the garage door shut again. The dogs and I ran up the stairs and by now I was getting pretty tired. The boys had no idea what all the fuss was about, but apparently barking wildly was suitable for all situations, because they wouldn’t shut up.
I flung open the French doors, and the Bean trotted casually in.
“What took you so long?” she seemed to be saying. “I thought you’d never decide what door you wanted to use.”
Getting robbed is not a choice.
Getting robbed is not a choice.
Getting robbed is not a choice.
We are simply the unluckiest people in the entire world.
This morning Chris took the dogs out as he always does on weekdays. I shut the bedroom door after he left, just like I always do on weekdays, so that I could get another half-hour of sleep before getting up.
As soon as Chris had left for work, Stanley sat outside the bedroom and scraped the door and howled. So far, all was proceeding as usual.
However, I soon heard a noise that sounded like Stanley was peeling strips of paint off the door. This was not normal, so I got out of bed and flung the door open.
Stanley immediately ran into the bedroom while I leaned down and checked the door. The door looked fine.
But now Stanley was in the center of the bedroom, staring at me, and I knew there was no way to get him out of the room so that I could go back to sleep.
I decided that the only way to get him out was for me to leave the room. So I did.
Stanley followed me downstairs, where I said hello to Paco who was curled up in a bed by a heat vent. Then I turned around and ran as fast as I could back up the stairs.
Even at full speed, I made it to my bedroom door only a second before Stanley, and I slammed the door triumphantly in his face. Then I jumped into bed, pulled the covers over me, and… realized I was completely wide awake.
Stanley: 2,346
Jane: 0