My Dog is Full of Crap

A month ago, my entire world was consumed by dog pee when our new Lab puppy had a urinary tract infection. It was really great. She was expelling nine to ten times her body weight in urine every hour, fortunately only inside the house.

We got that cleared up with twelve rolls of paper towels and two cans of carpet cleaner for the house, and for the dog, an evil-smelling remedy of apple cider vinegar and Greek yogurt. Personally, I would have rather eaten the carpet cleaner.

Amazingly, even after ten days of ingesting that demonic concoction with her food, her poop remained normal.

All that has changed now.

Now, my world revolves around her poop. Now, a month after the pee issues cleared up, she is experiencing some issues in the bowel region. To put it in layman’s terms, we’ve got poopy puddles and potty problems, people.

By the grace of God, however, she has not pooped in the house.

{sound of me knocking on every wooden surface in the house}

I will spare you the less than appetizing details. Suffice it to say, her poop has been anything but normal lately. If you decide to visit our backyard in the next few days, I would strongly suggest bringing some hip waders and a military-style gas mask.

She’s also having trouble “going” all at once, and has been gracious enough to wake me up multiple times the last two nights to allow me to experience her GI tract problems with her. She’s so thoughtful for a canine.

I just hope this passes quickly, because I am out of ideas. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she could have eaten that would be causing such bowel-related stress. She has been religious about sticking to the standard Labrador retriever diet. This past week she has only eaten:

Thirty sticks

Six pounds of leaves

One plastic outer coating off a cheap baseball, and half the stitches

Just under three acres of grass

One wayward hotdog, whole

Thirty gallons of pool water

Seventeen pounds of bark chips

A handful of lamb lung toasters –I am not making that up – Treats that consist of little pieces of dried lamb lung with waffle marks on them!

Three-quarters of a foam squishy ball

One pair of swim goggles

Fifty or so Rice Krispies

More or less half a roll of duct tape

Somewhere between six inches and a foot of polyethylene pool noodle

Thirty-six square inches of dog bed plush top fuzz

One paper towel

One Lego man’s head, with space helmet

Half a tennis ball

One gravity-stricken slice of a quesadilla, with sour cream, whole

Two feet of nylon rope

And approximately six hundred little shriveled red plum things off the ground from our neighbor’s tree.

Oh, and about five pounds of actual dog food. But she doesn’t really seem to eat that, so much as suck it in, the way a jet engine sucks in air.

I mean, who knows what could be causing this, what with such a strict diet? Your guess is as good as mine.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

A Tenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Kudos to you, Lifetouch. I had no idea how diversified your great company was until we got our new puppy.

It’s been a while since I’ve written to you, so first off, I want you to know I’m still looking forward to spring pictures. It’s the first day of school here today, and I’m already giddy with anticipation about what we might get from you after winter break. If I send Son Number One in a pirate costume with a Sharpie marker “arggh” speech bubble drawn on his cheek, will you still take his picture? Will you still send me reams and reams of pirate pictures I didn’t order, along with handy plastic rulers and keychain fobs of the young buccaneer?

If I send Son Number Two in a stained wife-beater T-shirt, gold chains, a temporary tattoo of red lips on his neck, and no picture order form in sight, will you still sit him down on that silly fake rock you have that looks like a giant cow turd and snap a picture of the little gang banger in a magical field of daisies?

Time will tell. I hope so!

Also, I just wanted to remind you that we’re breaking up with you for the fall pictures. It’s just been too many years of Chronic Forced Smile Disorder, wild uncombed hair, food on the faces, etc. I don’t feel like you and I need to rehash all the reasons. You know how you are.

The real reason I’m writing you today is to congratulate you. After all these years of bad school pictures and questionable business practices (where you send me huge packets of pictures I never ordered or even authorized and then pretend like my only two options are to pay for them or send them back to you), I had never realized you were good at anything.

I foolishly just assumed that your only business was taking pictures of students with noticeable milk mustaches and one side of their shirt collars sticking up. I never imagined you took good pictures of anyone, or anything. Then, we got a puppy.

Now granted, we’re on day ten of having her in the house, and I’m going on an average of three and a half minutes of sleep per night, but I think my judgement was sound in this case. We took our new puppy dog to the vet on Monday, and there, in the front office, your other line of work was showcased.

You take portraits of pets! Who knew? Well, I guess maybe you guys knew, since you do it. Although, based on some of the decisions I’ve seen you human school portrait folks make, maybe you might not be aware. Go ahead and ask around. If the pet portrait thing is another division, can you please let them know they’re doing a good job?

There were big canvas portraits of dogs and cats, all over the walls in the waiting area. Bigger than life-size, the ten or twelve black and white photographs showcased the animals perfectly.

I’m not sure if they were the fall or spring pictures from obedience school, but they were really great. None of their smiles looked forced. None of their collars had any parts sticking up. Their hair wasn’t messed up, there was no food stuck to any of their faces, and none of them were covered in chalk or paint.

Plus, they were all just head shots of the dogs and cats, so your pet people even figured out how to avoid the embarrassing cow turd chair problem.  

Just an all-around outstanding job by the pet school portrait division. Again, please tell them good job, and while you’re over there, you human school portrait guys might want to ask them for some pointers. Just a thought.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

What Were We Thinking?

We had an amazing two-week vacation on the east coast with my family, but I arrived home to a mountain of paperwork and a to-do list a mile long. The top of the list is my new book. I finished writing book three of The Sycamore Detective Agency series last month, and my editors are starting to return manuscripts, so I am anxious to get on the revisions and get the book that much closer to being ready.

So, what’s the absolute stupidest thing you can do if you have a bunch of work to get done? Get a puppy, of course.

The boys wrote up a puppy contract just before Christmas last year, and have been harassing us to sign it ever since. It states that we, as the parents, will need to do nothing and pay for nothing in regard to the puppy. In exchange for agreeing to board the dog, they would handle all the care, feeding, and paying.

We were naturally skeptical, based on previous smaller-scale pet experiences. We have watched them literally forget that we even owned goldfish three days after bringing them home from the fair. Also, as far as the financial side goes, between the three of them they have seven bucks, so footing the bill for a dog seemed like it might stretch them a little thin.

After some major private parental deliberations, we decided we would let them slide on a few of the finer points of the financial contract, and bit the bullet. It was time to get a dog. We broke the news to them while we were on vacation, which resulted in some extra security and cleaning fees, since we had to scape them off the ceiling of our Airbnb.

We arrived home from our trip late Saturday night, so naturally, Sunday morning we got up and drove to get a puppy.

Super dumb idea.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been involved in taking care of an eight-week-old dog, but they are just ridiculous. They’re like having a crawling infant, except you can’t put diapers on them. Human babies rarely shred their diapers with needle-sharp fangs.

We’ve only had her for three days and she’s peed and pooped on our carpet - and this is just a rough guess, since I’m sleep-deprived – about three thousand times. You do not want to visit right now, and if you do, do NOT sit on the carpet.

Actually, on second thought, please visit. You can puppy sit for a night or two! It’s a blast. (Plus, I’ll get some sleep.)

The night we brought her home, my wife told me that I got the first shift since she needed to get up early for work. Fine, I said. No problem. I foolishly thought she meant I would get to sleep in my own bed and just get up when the dog needed to go out. Turns out that wasn’t what she meant at all.

I was getting in bed and she looked at me like I was an idiot. (I get that a lot.)

“What are you doing?”

“Umm… is this a trick question?”

“You said you’d take the first night.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Then why are you getting in this bed? You and the dog are downstairs in the guest room.”

“Huh?”

“Goodnight.”

So, I slept downstairs in the guest room with the puppy. That was fun. Between her being in a new house without her mommy, and me being three feet from her, and both of us crying, the dog and I got a combined total seven minutes of sleep.

The next day, while yawning continuously, I got exactly nothing done. I was able to say things like “Potty,” “No,” “Good dog,” and “Dammit, my ankles are not chew toys!” about a million times, though, so I felt good about my day.

After another night of being awake in the guest room, day two provided zero opportunities for getting any work done either, but I did spend about half the day in the backyard asking the puppy to go potty in a designated spot. It was majorly fulfilling. I got to praise her a couple times when it actually happened correctly, but I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up all the spots on the carpet where it happened incorrectly. That was great, too.

Night three in the guest room provided a little more sleep for both of us, as she seems to be getting more comfortable in her new surroundings. Maybe I’ll get to sleep in my own bed tonight? Wouldn’t that be cool.

As for today, the only thing I’ve managed to do between puppy training is write this, and I have to stop now, because it’s time to go potty again.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll publish that third book when the dog is two or three years old.

Puppies are fun. You should totally get one.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!