Doggie Speed

No dream recollection, because I was dealing with a psychotic Cocker Spaniel all night. She absolutely had to go outside at midnight, an hour after I went to bed, so I figured I'd give up the minute and a half to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep. Except then she woke me up again at three in the morning, insistent that she had to pee right then. And at five, she woke me up thundering away at the bathroom door, her signal that she's out of water. I thought she had just been left alone too long.

But then, this morning, I found the evidence of something far more sinister. Sunday night, I made chocolate chip cookies for Mary and me. We couldn't eat the whole batch, so I bagged them up and put them on the counter. This morning, I found a mangled freezer bag and chocolate stains on the guest bedroom's bedspread. So now I understand perfectly well why she needed to pee four times from ten o'clock until six o'clock, and I understand how she went through two bowls of water. She was flushing the drugs out of her system. The old conspiracy theory is that chocolate will kill a dog, but Sabrina's done things like this a number of times, and it only makes her more impulsive than a Cocker already is. For instance, this morning, she didn't wait until Mary and I had left the house as per usual but went straight from her most recent excretory outing into our bathroom to eat our toilet paper. I put her in her cage for some hard time, but she knew that I'd get in more trouble for inducing dog-noise before seven AM than for letting our little dog become more of a monster than she already is, so she got out early. And I know for a fact that, given enough time, she will do this again. There is no learning of lessons for dogs as old as Sabrina; years of ruling the house in Pennsylvania are impossible to undo here in Georgia.

On the book front, I've given Malory and Niebuhr a break to read David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. It's got to be one of the funniest books I've read in quite some time. Even Mary, who read sections with me while we were waiting to get in to see the doctor, thought it was great stuff. And best of all, I've been reading it just for a day and a half or so, and I'm almost finished. I'm starting to understand how people can go through so many books at the library--some books are actually easier, some go faster, some don't take as much time as others! I really should have known that before now.