How much do you love Chihuahuas?

Probably not as much as THIS PERSON:

Who needs wallpaper when you've got a collection of magazine photos and some Christmas lights???!

Cats and Dogs are friends

 

Look at how far they've come.  They can almost tolerate sitting next to each other.

RBD, phone calls, and the dog

Chris and I spent the Fourth of July weekend up near Flagstaff, AZ. We decided not to take the pup and arranged for Chloe to stay at a local “pet resort.” We sent over her vaccination info, one of our lovely housemates dropped her off on Friday, and Chris and I made the long haul from San Diego to Phoenix (mini-stop to pack) to Flagstaff. We settled into the rustic cabin and proceeded to have a relaxing holiday weekend .

Saturday night I had a dream that the pet resort had called Chris to inform him that Chloe had been coughing. The pet resort proceeded to tell him that they had taken Chloe to the vet and she was fine, but because they had to drive so far to the vet they weren’t going to retrieve her. We would have to drive back down to Phoenix to pick her up at the vet, or be charged an exorbitant overnight fee for leaving her there.
I woke up shortly thereafter, glad that it was just a dream and we didn’t have to cut the camping trip short to pick up the dog.

Monday morning, we returned home. I picked up a clean and healthy Chloe from the pet resort and returned to the house to unpack the camping gear. About an hour later, I received a phone call. It was a lady from the pet resort.

Pet Lady: Hello, is this Ms. Glam?

Me: Yes, this is she.

Pet Lady: I received a message here, that you were concerned because your dog was coughing?
There was a moment of silence while I processed this information and tried to come to a reasonable explanation for her call. The only thing I could come up with was that somehow, I had thought my dream was real and did a sleepwalking number to the phone and made a phone call while I was asleep.

Me: Uh… really?

Pet Lady: Yes, I got a message from my supervisor, that you called at 2:35 saying that your dog was coughing. Now, I checked with the technicians on staff, and they all confirmed that your dog didn’t appear to be coughing during her stay. I also see that she’s up to date on her Bordatella vaccination, and even then it takes several days for symptoms of kennel cough to show up…

Me: I’m so sorry… I think… I guess I must have called in my sleep? I don’t remember calling, but you see, I had this nightmare where the dog was coughing, and maybe somehow I dialed the pet resort in my sleep? I’ve never done that before but…? This is embarrassing. I’m so sorry for your trouble.

After a few more words, I hung up the phone with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Was I going crazy? Was I suddenly sleepwalking? Did I have some sort of weird psychic moment? What the hell was going on?!
“Who was that?” Chris called from the living room. I went over to repeat the phone call, and after reciting the whole story I looked at him. He looked back at me and gave me a stare that said, I have no explanation either, so don’t look at me for answers.

I started to think this through a little more. First check: phone log. Turns out, neither my phone nor Chris’s phone showed an outgoing call to the pet resort. Not to mention the number was not even stored in either of our phones. Add to that the improbability that I would manage to get out of bed, make a phone call, and have a conversation in the middle of the night in a tiny cabin without waking up my husband – the sleep-dialing scenario was looking less and less likely.

But still, it was the only logical explanation I had. Could they have had the wrong person? I suppose, but they specifically asked for Ms. Glam and mentioned Chloe, without me volunteering the information.
After an hour of antagonizing over my inability to remember having made a phone call to the pet resort, I finally decided to contact the pet resort again. I needed more details. Like, what day was the call made? Saturday? Sunday? And was 2:35 AM or PM? I had immediately assumed AM, thinking it was a middle of the night sleep-dial, but maybe that was not the case. And I certainly would remember calling someone at 2 in the afternoon.

Me: Hello, this is Krista Glam. I spoke with someone earlier, about my dog Chloe?

Different Pet Lady: And what was it regarding?

Me: Well, she said she had gotten a message that my dog was coughing…

Different Pet Lady: Oh, yes. Sorry about that, it was actually meant for another dog. The vet had printed up the message on your dog’s card by mistake.

Me: Really? Because here I was thinking maybe I had called in my sleep
Different Pet Lady: Yeah, she told me about that. She felt really bad for worrying you. But your dog’s fine.

Me: Yes, she’s right here, I can see that my dog’s fine. It was my own self I was worried about!

I hung up the phone and told my husband, “Guess what, I’m not crazy!”

He rolled his eyes and said, “Well, that’s up for debate still, but about the dog-coughing thing, I was never worried. Only you would automatically start confessing to the lady about your weird dream, instead of just assuming it was a wrong number.”

The Cat is a big bully

The Cat (Maia) is the undisputed Queen Animal of the household.  She is the sweetest, most loving, devoted cat you will ever find.  Unless she is in one of her Moods.  Then she becomes a Queen B#@%.  This side of her also comes out when she has to co-exist with other animals.

The vet once told me, "Your cat is highly susceptible to stress.  She should probably be in a single-animal household."  Too bad for her, I thought, she's gonna have to learn to deal.  All things considered, she's learned to deal fairly well.  As long as she can bully the dog around and eat the dog's food, she's perfectly fine with the arrangement.

And it works out all right, because The Dog is a complete and total wuss.  Example?  When we were in Kansas over Christmas, she let my brother's two ferrets kick her out of her kennel.  As in, she would be hanging out in her kennel and the ferrets would wander in and she'd look around like, "WTF?  What are these things?  Why are they in my kennel?  Oh well I guess I'll just get out and let them have it."  And the ferrets would go to sleep in her kennel while Chloe looked at us with sad eyes on the living room floor.

So recently we got The Dog a new bed.  We fluffed it up all nice and laid her favorite blanket on top.  Unfortunately for The Dog, it appears that The Cat (in full Queen B mode) decided that the new bed was hers.  So when The Dog approached the new bed, sniffing around and thinking, "gee this bed sure smells like my favorite blanket" she would wake up The Cat (curled up sleeping on the bed).  Maia would hiss and swat and Chloe would wander off with a kind of stumped look on her face.

She's such a sweet little pudgy bundle of joy, my cat.

Terrorizing the Neighborhood

The front door on our rental house is faulty.  It doesn't latch, so if you forget to dead-bolt it, and it happens to be a windy day... ahem.  The next thing you know the front door is wide open.

And if you happen to be upstairs when said door is opened and you don't realize that you've just posted an open invite to the neighborhood...the animals see this, and they get curious.  They decide maybe they would like to explore the wild.

Chris gets a call from one of the neighbors.  The dog had wandered outside the wide-open front door as our neighbor was walking her dog, also a 2-year-old lab.  Chloe decided they could be great friends.  So she followed our neighbor and her dog home.

The neighbor finds our number on Chloe's tag and calls Chris. "So your dog is in my backyard, is she friendly with other dogs?"

"Um, yes, dogs, people, cats, squirrels... whatever.  She's not picky."

The neighbor lets her dog into the backyard with Chloe.

When Chris gets there to retrieve our mutt, he walks up to the neighbor's backyard gate and there's Chloe, happy as a clam and playing tug-of-war with her new best doggy friend.

The most beautiful thing

When I arrived home today, the most beautiful thing was sitting on my neighbor's lawn.

Perhaps you might ask why I am so excited the house next door is for rent.....  Because this means the old neighbors have moved out.

Did I hate my neighbors?  No, I hardly knew them.

It was their dogs I had a problem with.  Their god-awful-dumb-ass-twenty-four-seven-barking-dogs.

There were two of them, and they were beagles.  They barked in the morning.  They barked in the afternoon.  They barked in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep.  They barked on the weekends when I was trying to relax with a good book.  They barked at breakfast, they barked at lunch, and they barked at dinner.  They barked all Sunday long while the neighbor was busy inside watching football.  They barked so loudly that if I was having a phone conversation, the person on the other end of the line would ask, "do I hear dogs barking?"  I'm telling you, these dogs Just. Wouldn't. Shut Up.

I had seen a moving van out front before the holidays, but I thought it was too much to hope for.  And when, for three whole days after we returned from Christmas vacation there was wonderful silence, I really began to get excited.

And today there was proof.  A rental sign in their front yard.  Hallelujah!

Kennel-Me-Not

Today was pick-the-dog-up-from-the-kennel day.

As I walked in, two of the staffers were just about to leave for the day, and they were at the front chatting with the girl behind the desk about work stuff. All three all smiled and greeted me when I came in. I told them I was there to pick up Chloe, and one of the girls went back to get her while I paid.

You can always tell when they’re walking out with your dog, because all the other dogs in the kennel start barking. So I can hear them coming … and then…

I see a brown streak go by, running down the hallway behind the front desk. Quickly followed by the diminutive girl sent to fetch my dog.

“Chloe, come back here!”

Chloe has managed to wriggle out of her collar and immediately proceeds to run like crazy for whatever destination her little doggy brain has fixated on.

One of the other girls standing by the front desk steps into the hallway with the intentions of blocking Chloe’s path and forcing her capture. Like a slippery fish, Chloe eludes her.

At this point, I’ve paid, and the girl behind the desk has now joined the other two in their effort to capture my dog. The hallway dead-ends at a closed door, and the three of them come at her but she bolts, managing to elude all of them, and sneaks by headed for the other end of the hallway. They follow. She hits another roadblock, turns around, and runs past them, back down the hallway in the direction she came from.

I feel a bit like I’m watching a tennis match. Or a Wiley E Coyote cartoon, with my dog starring as the roadrunner.

They have her outnumbered 3 to 1, and my dog is winning.

“Chloe,” I shout sternly, thinking that her owner’s voice might actually make her obedient, “come here.”

She completely ignores me, and continues running in a crazy zig-zag across the kennel with the three girls chasing after her, one of them holding up her collar like she’s a cowboy about to lasso a calf.

Finally, two of them manage to hold down my dog while the third fastens her collar. They hand her off to me, but the collar’s still too loose and within minutes she’s free again, this time running in circles around the lobby.

We readjust her collar and one of the girls gets it back on while I hold down Chloe. This time she’s not getting free.

“Thanks …” I shout as I bolt out the door, wanting to get the dog outside and in the truck before she causes any more havoc.

Seated in the backseat, Chloe pants heavily. I look at her, “well, you need to listen to those nice ladies at the kennel.”

She just continues to pant, looking at me with those innocent chocolate brown eyes, “Who, me?”

Chloe gives *us* a present for *her* birthday

My favorite local radio hosts, John Jay and Rich, do this segment on Mondays entitled, “After this weekend, I will never do ______ again.”

So let’s just say that after this weekend, I will never get on the airplane without hand sanitizer again.

Wednesday was the dog’s birthday. She turned 2, and in celebration of this event the husband bought her a giant steak, which he grilled and cut up into little pieces. We tried to get her to pose for a photo, but she wouldn’t tear her face away from the food dish long enough to snap the shutter.





Seriously, she ate that whole steak so fast I’m surprised it wasn’t still mooing on the way down.

Since we were taking the day off on Friday, that meant our Memorial Day weekend officially started on Thursday evening. We packed up the dog, the cat, and a couple of overnight bags and loaded them into the plane for a flight back to Phoenix.

It was the cat’s first flight, but the dog was pretty much an old pro. Having flown with us half a dozen times or so, she had the routine down. This is how it usually goes:

Make sure dog pottys before we leave for airport. Arrive at airport and load dog into back seat of plane. During taxi and pre-flight, dog sits in seat, leans forward, pants, and drools on our shoulders. After takeoff, dog lays down on seat and promptly goes to sleep. Dog does not wake up until after landing at our destination.


[This is usually what she does the whole flight]

Thursday’s flight was different. About 45 minutes into a 2 hour flight, the dog started whining. We could not figure out why the dog was whining so much.

The whining stopped. Chris and I both smelled it at the same time. We looked at each other, “Oh, no, Chloe!”

The dog had let lose some violent diarrhea all over the back seat of the plane.

Did I mention we still had over an hour left on our flight?

The entire half of the seat behind Chris was covered. The poor dog was sitting on the other half of the back seat, one of her paws in the air, with an expression on her face that said, “I am so sorry but I tried to tell you guys and -eww- I do not want to put my paw in that.”

Chris turned to me, “Hon, can you get the paper towels and at least make sure the seat is covered so she doesn’t step in it and get it all over her?”

“Sure,” I replied, “where are the paper towels?”

“They’re behind your seat.”

So I reach back behind my seat. However, instead of finding the paper towels, my hand touches something wet and gooey. I am instantly suspicious that this is not dog drool that I have set my hand into.

Sure enough, the dog had also gotten the floor behind my seat.

Did I mention we still have over an hour left on the flight? And I had poo all over my hands. And we did not have any hand sanitizer.

The saving grace was that she had managed to miss the paper towels, so I wiped my hands the best I could and tried not to touch anything for the rest of the trip. About a half an hour after The Event, my husband looked at me and said, “I really can’t smell it that much any more.”
I just looked at him. And held up my hands. “Speak for yourself.”

Eventually, we landed, I was able to wash my hands, and we hired someone to shampoo the seats and floor. But valuable lessons were learned this past weekend. I learned that hand sanitizer can be extremely handy to have on the airplane, and Chris learned not to feed the dog a giant steak dinner the night before a plane trip. And Chloe learned... well, nothing. She's a dog. Although if she were capable of complex thinking, it would probably be something along the lines of, "not all presents are as fun on the way out as they were going in."

Happy Birthday, Chloe. Next time, leave the gift-giving to us, huh?

Thanks for the gift...

To Whom It May Concern:

We would like to thank you for your excellent choice in wedding gifts. The glasses will come in very handy for beverage consumption. Our Labrador retriever, Chloe, has already field-tested them, and they hold up well in rugged outdoor conditions. Not that we ever expect to throw them down on the grass and roll them around the yard, or chew on them, but if we ever did, we know that these glasses would remain both unbroken and unscratched after a long day of such activities.

You see, when the mail person delivers our packages, it happens like this: She walks up to the front gate of our yard. She stops just outside the gate and then, with the aplomb of an Olympic shotput thrower, chucks the package over the fence and into our yard. Said package usually lands between 5 and 15 feet from the gate, depending on its weight, size, and general awkwardness for throwing. This is how the package ended up in our yard, where the dog mistook it for a chew toy (despite the hundreds of actual pet-store-sanctioned chew toys provided to her for avoiding just this situation).

So not only did the glasses survive the Labrador test, they also survived the angry-mail-person test! Unfortunately, the cardboard box in which they were packaged did not hold up so well. This is okay in the sense that we had no intentions of using the box once the glasses were removed (incidentally, the glasses can be removed from the box quite violently and still remain intact!) But the downside to the box’s demise is that the packing slip also suffered the same fate. And the packing slip contained the name of the sender(s) of the gift.

Since the packing slip was not immune to being shredded into little bits by an over-excitable and determined Labrador, we were greeted by a lawn full of confetti upon our return home from work. And it was windy, so not all of the little bits were retrievable, were we to even try and piece them together. The important thing here is that we did receive your gift, and it is much appreciated. However, we do not know where to send our thanks. Please do not think of us as ungrateful, beverage-drinking ruffians who can’t take the time to send a simple thank-you.

All humor aside, if you are reading this letter and are the aforementioned gift-giver, please see the thank-you card attached below. We apologize for its impersonal nature. Hopefully, you also have a dog, and can sympathize.

Much Love,

The newlyweds

P.S. The dog ate the thank-you cards too when they were delivered. Seriously. This whole thank-you thing was just not destined to happen.