11 October 2007

Puppity Doggity's Very Bad Day


Man it's been a tough day. My patience has been tested from the moment I was woken up early by Chubbity Bubbity, through the torment of getting Sonny-Ma-Jiminy ready for Daycare, continuing on past the preparations for the lamb roast and guests for dinner tonight, through to now - when I sit at my computer and start to blog the lot of it. Well, the bits I can remember anyway.

And yet as I reflect on a day full of difficulties thrown at me by my two lovely little ones, the frustrations that really stick out for me are the ones delivered to me by Puppity Doggity. She's insane, and today I'm not sure she's such a good addition to the family. She's a lovely two-and-a-half year old Border Collie, very personable, lovely nature, easy to train except she is completely insane with other dogs. She has this desire to grovel, ingratiate and humiliate herself in front of dogs she considers her superiors. And the flip side is that with dogs she considers her inferiors - she tries to tear them apart.

First thing this morning she breaks away while my husband takes her out to the kerb to put rubbish in the bin and she flies across the road to maul a tiny ball of white fluff on legs. Snapping, snarling, she gets her teeth involved, there's some blood, you get the picture. And within an hour, Fluff-On-Legs' owner (a complete stranger) is on our doorstep with a rather large vet bill which we're expected to pay. Puppity Doggity gets in trouble.

Then I find that she has been desperately trying to dig up the rotting carcass of some poor dumb bluetongue lizard which I found in the yard and buried over a fortnight ago. Dog in more trouble (though this time, she has no idea what she's done wrong).

And later in the day, I find that she has licked a large puddle of grease (plus cooked meat juices and the essence of a thousand Barbecues Past) from the barbecue roasting tray. Okay, so I left it on dog-level, but with Chubbity Bubbity crying all day, I DID have to leave some jobs half-done! I usually don't mind if Puppity Doggity licks the roasting tray clean - it saves me most of the cleaning. The thing that bothered me was that she gacked it up inside on the lino. (The silver lining here is that she didn't gack up on the carpet.) By this stage, I was too exhausted to work out how to punish a dog for doing a typically doggish thing and I just cleand it up, trying not to gack-up my own lunch.

And out of the thousand frustrating things that made up today, it is this dog and her insanity that will be last in my mind as I fall off to sleep.

Some days need to be totally written off.

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