Guess who turns 13 years old today!
Yours truly, that's who!
And because it wouldn't be a Sister photo shoot without it, here are my Grumpy Old Man shots (if you listen very carefully, you might be able to hear me shouting "hey you kids, get off my lawn!")...
...as well as a goofy picture (because I'm a fun loving guy).
Allow me to introduce you to the world’s best pair of shoes.
They belong to Ma and they are truly a wonder. Not only is there a nice metal button to chew on and attempt to gnaw off when the opportunity presents itself, but there is also a Velcro strap and there’s nothing in this world better than the sound of two pieces of Velcro being ripped apart (it sounds so much like the noise my toys make when I start ripping their seams apart).
And how did I discover this masterpiece of modern footwear?
You know how magpies are supposed to be attracted to shiny objects? Well, call me a magpie because I have the exact same fascination. I’m drawn to shiny things. I can’t ignore them. Here are some of my favorite shiny things:
Buttons on Ma’s Pants: There’s a certain pair of jeans that Ma wears that has protruding metal buttons running down the sides of the legs. Without fail, while lounging with her on the couch, I discover these buttons and start nibbling on them. Usually Ma doesn’t notice at first, but eventually she does and has to pry the buttons out of my mouth and cover them with a blanket or a pillow to keep me from gnawing on them further.
Pa’s Bracelet: Pa wears a metal bracelet on his right wrist which just happens to be the side I sit on when he and I are watching TV (okay, he’s watching TV and I’m mooching ear scratches). After a few minutes of scratches, when Pa is good and distracted by the television, I start nibbling on his bracelet. Eventually, he too notices what I’m up to and starts contorting his arm to get the bracelet away from me.
Zippers: Many a time someone in my family has noticed that a coat, seemly abandoned over a chair or on a doorknob, appears to be moving on its own. It’s only after getting up and investigating that the reason for the movement is discovered: I’m either lying underneath or standing alongside the coat, gnawing away happily on the zipper pull.
Watch out for those candy bearing, egg hiding, carrot munching, stupid fluffy tailed bunnies gallivanting willy-nilly like all over town.
Sister is mean. Sure, she was instrumental in me being allowed to lounge on the couch and she’s very generous when it comes to buying me new toys and fixing my old ones, but when it comes to food and sharing, she can be downright cruel.
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| Waiting for Ice Cream |
Sister has been known to try to bypass this rule in the past, usually unsuccessfully. She’s particularly fond of the head fake where she pretends to walk a snack from the kitchen to the living room by way of the dining room while I, predicting her destination, scurry from the kitchen into the living room via the hallway only to find myself totally alone. Eventually I circle back to Sister still in the kitchen and force her to share, but it’s a lot of unnecessary work.
Well last week, Sister did something horrible--something unforgivable. Sister succeeded in cheating me out of a piece of banana.
It started innocently enough. Pa offered to take me outside to do some business and I graciously obliged. There was no reason for me to suspect that something nefarious was about to happen and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bark at invisible entities just beyond my front gate. Getting up, I headed for the door, leaving Sister sitting in her chair in the living room.
As soon as I walked back into the house, I could smell it; someone was eating a banana. Quickly, I scurried into the living room and came to a screeching halt in front of Sister, still sitting in her chair, ready to assume my begging position. But despite the fact that the aroma was strongest by her, Sister wasn’t eating anything. I turned toward Pa’s chair thinking maybe the banana was there. It wasn’t. Frantically, I turned back to Sister and started snuffling along the top of the side table to her right. No banana. Beside myself with panic, I checked my pillow to see if maybe the banana smell was coming from a Kong waiting for me there (sometimes Ma does that, she sets up a Kong for me when my back is turned). But there was nothing. By this time, I was completely and totally frantic--my head whipping back and forth with my nose up in the air trying to find the source of the smell.
There was something else I noticed, though. Sister was laughing hysterically which I’ve learned over the years is not a good thing.
Turns out, as soon as I stepped outside, Sister jumped up, grabbed a banana, and quickly ate it with the intention of consuming it entirely in my absence so that she wouldn’t have to share it with me. To my great satisfaction, Sister was yelled at for being so mean to me and apparently felt so bad in the end that she even broke down and retrieved a second banana which she shared a majority of with me.
Did that banana make up for the trauma I underwent? No, but it was tasty.
Some days it’s just not worth putting on one’s collar and leash.
But first, a fashion update. Because of my sensitive back and neck (I recently had a flare-up which left me limping piteously until a visit to Doc. Petermanm resulted in a week of pain meds), Pa bought me a harness to use rather than a collar on our walks. I rather like my new harness despite the fact that I was wearing it upside down for my first outing (the part that rests on my back was on my chest and vice versa…it was a tad awkward but luckily I didn’t run into any other dogs to make fun of me) and my family frequently suggests that I be carried around like a suitcase using the handle running along the part on my upper back.
But despite being dressed to the nines, my second walk using my new harness was less than ideal.
When we’re out east, Pa and I enjoy taking frequent quick jaunts up and down the street. We immediately hang a right out of the driveway and scoot across the street to do some business. We then walk one house north then switch sides of the street again to leave a message at Flo’s house (Flo is the Golden Retriever who lives two houses down the street). After that, I pull unsuccessfully toward a wooded area that I’m not allowed to explore due to the threat of ticks, then cut across the street again to sniff the plastic yellow figure holding a flag that reads “children at play” (this was my arch nemesis for the longest time, but now we’re cool). Once the yellow figure is deemed not dangerous, we turn around and repeat the aforementioned route in reverse before returning home to take a much-deserved nap. It’s a nice route--short but filled with lots of interesting places to sniff and sometimes I even get Flo in trouble when she starts barking at me from within her house.
But last Saturday, this nice little route became painful. As I sniffed along Flo’s property line, I suddenly jumped back as if I had come across something nasty like a bug or something that smelled so bad even I didn’t want to roll in it. After lurching backward, I started limping forward. This is when Pa got involved. He knelt down next to me and found, in my front right paw, a giant thorn sticking out from between the pads.
Launching into doctor mode, Pa quickly pulled the thorn out of my paw at which point I found that I could comfortably walk on it again. And walk I did--straight home. There was no sniffing around or leaving additional messages. I wanted to go home and I was not wasting any time getting there.
A cookie, some sympathetic attention from Ma and Sister, and one nap later, I felt much better and hardly traumatized. In fact, I was feeling so much better about the whole situation that I was even willing to go with Pa on another walk (though I steered clear of Flo’s house just in case).
