Now for Something Completely Different

I’m in the midst of a bad evening. Things haven’t gone as planned, so I’m going to pretend that I’m somewhere else right now. I’m going to pretend that I’m not in a house with a puppy that just jumped up to my kitchen counter and knocked over a ceramic bowl so it shattered on the floor. I’m going to pretend that this same puppy didn’t find my iPhone and continuously slam it on the floor three times before I could get into the other room to retrieve it. I’m also going to pretend that he’s not whimpering loudly right now because I put him in his crate to save my sanity and protect the things in my house.

I know this will pass. My older dog, who seems so calm and obedient in comparison, used to eat my walls.  Seriously. He ate through the dining room wall until he hit the cinder blocks one evening. That’s what happens when I get too involved on the computer and forget that there’s a ravenous puppy on the prowl. He ate other walls, but that particular hole would have been large enough for him to escape to freedom had he not been slowed down by the cinder blocks. Don’t think that he wasn’t trying to eat through that part of the wall, either. When I brought him home, he was eating the brick on my fireplace. I have a photo of it.

So now he’s seven and the new puppy is putting me through his own brand of hell. When I saw him chewing on the fireplace bricks, I had a horrible flashback. So far, he hasn’t tried to eat my walls. My shoes, my pants, and my iPhone have all been chewed up, but not the walls – yet.

So it’s time now for something completely different. I processed this photo as a kind of escape from the tension and pressure of owning a labrador retriever puppy with far too much energy and far too little discipline. People may think he’s cute, but I know better. He’s a monster with fangs and claws. He’s a furry white ball from Hell. Yet tomorrow morning I’ll wake up with him crawling in my bed and licking my face.  Damn dog.