wideeyedfunk

Tag: dog dookie

  • Snow trash is the best.

    Gloriously foul and endlessly fascinating, snow trash happens when the deep snow melts and reveals the urban detritus of weeks. It is a special seasonal process to be enjoyed only a few times a year. Because I happen to be a professional studier of the material remnants of human activity, I can’t look away from a nice nasty city snow bank. I like them to be really full of good stuff and I stop for particularly rich ones to be sure I’m seeing everything. This isn’t the WideEyedSpouse’s favorite activity, but the dogs sure don’t mind.

    Dog dookies are ubiquitous in the melting snow banks. Big, small, dark, light. You can really see the variety of diets fed to the neighborhood canines. Here in Buffalo chicken bones also are typical in the melting snow mounds. Perplexing. Yes, Buffalo Chicken wings, but does everyone eat them all the time? They must fly from car windows like confetti.

    I see newspapers, catalogs, dryer sheets, and Kleenex that appear used but may just be wet from the melt. I haven’t developed a way to determine used versus wet yet but I do tend to think crumpled means used. They come in all colors: white, pink, green, yellow. I have suspicions that the yellows started as white and they are in fact used.

    A shoe appears every now and again and it baffles me every time. Where does that single shoe come from? Who walked home with one shoe? If you noted that your shoe had come loose from your foot, in the winter, would you not backtrack? Go on a little hunt for your missing shoe? What I should do is determine if the single shoe is statistically significantly correlated with the presence of a spray of brightly colored vomit. Which, by the way, can be observed on the white snow with alarming frequency. Here my broader hypothesis is that inebriated people throw up hard enough to toss a shoe, and then they don’t notice their shoe is gone. Although, there are no bars in the immediate vicinity, so they must be home drinkers. Alternatively, the vomit could innocently result from too many chicken wings or a terrible Kleenex supported flu that hits while walking the family dog (which parsimoniously explains the vomit, the Kleenex litter, the uncleaned up dookies, AND maybe even the shoe. Now that’s hypothetical model building friends.). I might be looking for too many causal links. I can’t help myself, that’s what I do.

    Yesterday the dogs and I saw something entirely new. A unique specimen. A kidzbop 3 CD had sliced into a snow bank and it gleamed in the morning sun. A prize. Hamish sniffed it pretty good and Tibbit wee’d near it. From its position in the snow bank, about 1.4 meters in from the street, I could posit that kidzbop 3 had been flung from a moving car. The presence of the kidzbop cd in the snowbank distracted me all day and I developed a series of hypotheses explaining why the cd had been flung:

    H1: “What? No baby I don’t have any kids.” Fling.

    H2. I went home and found kidzbop 3 online. Gave it a listen. Who wouldn’t?. And so, Hypothesis 2: Track 1: remake of Soak up the Sun. Track 2: remake of Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey sung by tunelessly chanting children. Track 3: (does it even matter?)…Fling.

    H3: “Oh look, a cd came in my used car…” Fling.

    H4: “Oh God, the baby just puked in the car! All over everything!” Fling.

    H5: “Mamamamamama play kidzbop. Play kidzbop. Play it. Play it. Plaaaaaayyyyy iiitttt.” Fling.

    I went back later to get kidzbop 3. It was gone. Gone.

  • Hamish the Corgi is Embarrassing.

    Have you ever heard of display urination? No? Neither had I until Hamish the Corgi came into my life.

    Evidently dogs, male dogs most of the time, like to lift their legs nice and high to wee when other dogs are around. Hamish is keenly aware when an unfortunate is locked inside, watching from a parlor window as Hamish prances across this other dog’s front yard. Hamish will take a moment to be sure he is in the ideally, most obnoxiously centered viewing position, then he will lift his tiny, 5 inch leg as high as dogly possible to wee on that other dog’s property. Usually you can hear the barking change from alert to berserker during the display.

    If that were all, I’d probably get over it. However.

    And mind you, I’m going to have to be indelicate here.

    Hamish, my furry pal, my buddy who is napping next to me now, well, he’s a display dooker too. Don’t be coy, you know what dog dookies are. The problem, if we can stretch our minds past the initial, unavoidable catastrophe of me having to carry tiny plastic bags to clean up warm dookies, the problem is that Hamish unequivocally prefers to dookie in front of homeowners, on freshly sodded, well-watered, carefully groomed lawns. Sure, who wouldn’t – the grass is soft and cool and deep. Probably it is very nice.

    But.

    There are many lawns in this condition. Many without an owner in sight. Hamish likes the ones where the owner is sitting on the porch with an evening glass of wine, enjoying the end of the day. Or even better, the ones where the owner is actually STILL out there working on the lawn. It is embarrassing. Heh, heh, Hi, I say, making it Very Clear that I have a dookie bag at the ready. Awful.

    The absolute topper, the dead most humiliating display dooking didn’t involve a primped lawn though. Instead, it included an entire multigenerational family reunion. Oh god. Folks were clustered on their front porch, iced teas, family albums, smiles in much evidence. Ahh, they said almost in unison when Hamish hove into view, what a cutie! People pointed him out to others. Someone ran inside to get Auntie Clara to see the cute Corgi.

    Hamish looked at them with his goofy smile and paused. He does like to be admired. Then, in a careful, smiling pirouette he turned his hind quarters to the 30 or so happy people. And he dookied.

    I think I heard Auntie Clara – whoever she was – gasp. One older grampie was wheezing with laughter. Otherwise. Silence. Long seconds of silence. Hamish didn’t mind. He took his time. I cleaned up and we walked on.

    That dog is completely embarrassing. And there’s nothing I can do to change him.