Puppied Out, part two

(Originally posted August 11, 2008)

We have a puppy. Her name is Clementine and she is a mutt about 6 months old and she was Dan's idea.

I hate this f**kin' dog.

She barks at everything. EVERYTHING. And we live on a busy street so there's a lot to bark at. And it's not a woof-woof earthy real dog bark either. It's that yappity yap high pitched continuous string of yaps kind of bark. Although, not the toy dog yip-yips, at least. Because those are the worst. And I should add, those are the f**kin' poodles across the street that are outside all the time, and they also bark at EVERYTHING. Those dogs, they bust out of their yard all the time and run out on La Crescenta Avenue, and after about two months of living across the street from them, I started rooting for the cars.

But I digress.

Clem, she barks, and she won't stop pooping on the carpet, and she absolutely destroyed the new doormat I got at Target within 2 hours. (That was about $7.50 an hour for that doormat.) She is irresistible to my daughters, who chase her and torment her no matter how many times I tell them to stop, which makes her run and hide behind me, which makes the girls come after her on the floor at my feet, which makes it impossible for me to fix dinner or even move, which often makes me trip over the lot of them and don't get me started about the screaming mom stuff.

She and Nathan play, of course, which is great and funny, except that she's gnawing on him all the time since he's so much bigger than she is. So she swallows a bunch of Nathan hair and has taken to puking up hairballs like a damn cat.

She gets Dan up at 5 a.m. to go outside. He doesn't seem to mind. (I worry about him.) I sleep through it, usually. And Dan has her trained to respond to "good girl, go potty", which he says in a silly baby talk voice, so now I have to do the same thing when I take her outside. So there I am sing-songing "good girl, go potty, good girl, go potty" in the backyard, and John is next door tending to his heirloom green peppers and laughing at me, and I just want to kill both of them. Dan and the f**kin' dog, I mean.

And you know, I love dogs. I LOVE them. It's just this one, this puppy... I'm just too old and have too small a house and these lousy rotten kids and...

...and she's just curled up next to me on the couch, and her little face is nestled into my leg, and she's asleep, and I love her again.

And oh by the way, the cat just puked up a hairball on the carpet. (Seriously, I'm not making that up for the big close.)

So excuse me, I have cat puke to clean up, and then I have to go watch Top Model. Because those bitches are fierce.