Aselin

I'm a simple person who is easily entertained...and if you are a faithful reader you know I don't get out much. I have, however, developed a fun little routine that Dog and I play every few weeks when he is out of food.

Dog knows a lot of words: bye bye - he heads for the car. Walk - he grabs his leash. Dinner - he points his paw at his bowl. Puppy - he runs to the window and starts crying (I do too, but that's another post). But by far, my favorite is when I say "Petsmart?" - every hair on his body perks up, he tilts his head and wags half of his body furiously. He knows Petsmart. Rather than sitting in a locked car while his family goes off on an adventure without him - he gets to go INSIDE! He LOVES Petsmart.

Petsmart is where we combine his entire vocabulary into one glorious trip. We go Bye Bye, then we Walk on our leash to the store where we might see a Puppy and buy some Dinner. His joy is full.

So off we go tooling down the street, toward our local Petsmart to purchase some Dinner. He is very polite as we enter the store and promptly starts crying as he sees a cute little gray miniature poodle who won't give him the time of day. I tell him to man up, it won't be the last time he gets dissed by a chick. We parade around the store, saying hello to the fish, adoptable cats and chew toys. He sniffs, and pants and wiggles with canine delight.

Pushing my cart filled with a large bag of Dinner, he stays on the lookout for any opportunity to socialize that he can. Whenever we are in public, people notice him. He is a large, black dog, but he has soft curly hair and looks a bit like a teddy bear. I'm chatting with some women who are interested in his CV when one of the women starts pointing at him. I look down just in time to realize he is dry heaving and was about to change modes to wet heave. He hurls a bright yellow puddle of bile all over the floor in front of the nice ladies. They scatter like 10 cent feed crickets.

Great.

Now, for those of you who are not pet owners, Petsmart has little stations set up throughout the store for "accidents". Normal dogs just pee, but of course mine has to barf. I drag Sir Barfsalot over to the "Accident Station" and gather an armful of weak recycled paper towels, antiseptic spray and plastic bags. Unfortunately they do not provide latex gloves for such occasions, but I suppose that's the punishment I get for owning a dog that leaks.

Approaching the giant puddle of barf, Dog suddenly needs to hurl again. I try and throw towels in his path, but only end up making things worse as some of the barf is repelled by the little pile of crummy towels and splatters all over. Now I turn back to the "Accident Station" to replenish my supplies. As I'm about to tackle the job, a man rounds the corner headed directly for our first puddle of barf. I yell out to warn him, but either he is related to me or very rude since he totally ignores me and rolls all four of his cart wheels through the barf puddle and then slops his loafers through the parts that he missed. Not only is this totally gross, but now he has expanded the contamination zone as his tracks continue a good twenty feet past the original barf pool.

Now I am faced with a defining moment: of course, the original barf puddles are my responsibility, but is the secondary contamination and spreading of said barf also my responsibility? Down on my hands and knees, wrapped to the elbows in plastic bags I'm sopping up barf for what seems like miles. How did I get to be this glamourous???

Of course, Dog is no help, he just sits quietly next to my purse pretending he doesn't know me. Just like my kids.