Well, it actually was a pretty smooth week for having my husband being gone all week, returning tonight. Only a few mishaps, one broken carpet shampooer (yes, I’m still hyperventilating over that), one trip to the emergency room, one fall, and a few extra unneeded holes in the wall, a slight, just a slight misjudgment about how much a Sharpie really can do and a received ransom text demanding cake balls or the chicken dies. But compared to other times he has left, this was a cakewalk! The week flew by. I hardly had a chance to miss him but looking forward to his return.
In the past, we both feared the times he would be gone for any length of time because something ALWAYS happened when he was gone. Something bad. I recall one year, at our old house on the river, standing at my kitchen counter preparing onions to make salsa. A quick storm blew up and out and in ten minutes the dock was ripped right out of the river, and rain was POURING down my chimney into the fire place and into the living room. It was late, like 10:00 at night and I called my Mother in law asking WHAT DO I DO??? She said…go to bed…just go to bed and pretend it’s not happening. So, I did.
There was the time on a Sunday, my new puppy Chessie tried to eat a fishing lure, (might have been the fishing lure my MIL tried to fix my toilet with….yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute). I walked past her and she got caught on my pant legs. Unknowingly, I pulled my leg and said stop biting my leg! A few minutes later I realized what happened! She had a fishing lure embedded in her tongue. Yes, I felt horrible then immediately for wrenching my leg away from her. So, an emergency call to the vet was made and we drove there. She was put under to have the lure cut out of her tongue and then re-awakened with some miracle shot that woke her up so we could head home. Poor little Chessie, but who know they had a shot that can wake up a dog after being put under? Not me! But, a couple hours later and one very large vet bill and we were headed for home with a groggy puppy.
Now to the toilet….there was the weekend the toilet wouldn’t flush. (It was a common occurrence sometimes in that house) but this time it would not flush, was not plugged, it was crazy. My in laws were at the house and I mentioned that Dave would have to fix the toilet when he came home. But to the “rescue” came my mother in law, the queen of all rigging. She fixed the toilet with a FISHING LURE. I was new to the whole hillbilly country life and was about as speechless as I could get but managed to say…”I don’t think that is going to work”. She replied, “Oh sure it will, it will last for months now”. Uhm…no, no no, you do not put a toilet together with a fishing lure and expect it to do anything. I clearly was not comfortable with this. So, when Dave came home I said, “We need a new toilet”. He checked it…said “It seems to be working fine now”. I said, a little louder than I should have “YOU DO NOT FIX A TOILET WITH A RAPALA!!!”. He ignored me. So two days later, young David and I return home from a long day at work and guess what….my living room was flooded, and moving quickly into the kitchen. David took one look at the floor and then at me and said very cautiously, “I’m going to just go to my room now and watch a movie”. You guessed it…the fishing lure was not the quick fix we, or rather, they thought it was going to be. I would have a new toilet THAT NIGHT, because Dave received a phone call from me and was basically told not to return without one.
Yes, things always have a way of going bad whenever I was there alone, un-educated on the country life and having no idea how to fix anything.
I seem to be having a little better luck these days but I certainly am always on my guard. I remember one day coming home from work and Chessie, now feeling great after her little fishing lure mishap, getting into the food pantry that must have been left open like a half inch….HOLY MAN what a dog can do in a 12 hour time period with a stocked pantry. From one end of the house to the other it was nothing but a sticky pasty mess of Bisquick mixed with punctured juice pouches, potatoes everywhere, boxes shredded of pancake flour, sugar, noodles, soup cans found in the bedrooms, onions under the furniture. EVERY inch of my house was either powdered, filled with peanuts, raw popcorn or coated with sticky juice from Capri Sun juice pouches. Again, David walked in with me, took one look around and said “I’m going to go play outside for a bit” and disappeared.
It’s quite amazing I still am willing to have dogs in the house at all, but Chessie did grow to be the absolute best Black Lab in the world, She is now 11 years old and as faithful as a dog can be. We love her completely and she is treated pretty darn good for being a dog in her old age.
She lived through a lot of things, from a flood, to eating random deer hides found after deer hunting, being raped by the Yellow Lab next door, to even one bout with skin cancer four years ago.
Yep, I just heard your question. She was raped by the dog next door? Yes, yes she was. There was a time when there were “phantom sightings” of a mountain lion in the area. Multiple reports and my husband was called more than once in the middle of the night by the Green Lake police department to come with his hound dogs who had hunting cougars in the past to try and find this cat after a sighting was reported. He would race out of bed, grab his clothes and head out about as excited as a boy on Christmas morning with a train circling the beautiful Christmas tree. One day the call came in about dinner time and I had, had enough. There WAS NO MOUNTAIN LION…..these people are smoking crack for crying out loud, it’s dinner time sit down. But nope, he was going to go and rushed out and drove the truck down to where the dogs were tied and was going to go and save the day again….I stood up by the house watching this scene unfold . Dave really loves to hunt, I see him at no other time as excited and happy as when he is about to go on a chase so I was watching him zoom the truck down the dogs and jump out to grab Buck, the champion of all Plott Hounds. Well, he made one slight mistake, a mistake I have made more than once in my lifetime…he did not put the truck into park and I just stood at the house saying “your truck is driving away, your truck is driving away”. OK, I didn’t say it as loud as I probably SHOULD have but I said it. He grabbed his dog and turned around and stopped dead in his tracks. WHERE WAS THE TRUCK??? Well, it was nose down in the ditch on the other side of the driveway. I couldn’t help but to laugh, but did my best to stifle it….and that truck was deep. We needed a tractor to come and pull it out. Thank goodness for that beautiful John Deer named Bodacious!
Anyway, back to MY dog (I'm a tad ADD....SQUIRREL)….so these reports are going around about this mountain lion and I get up one morning bright and early at 4:30 to get ready for work. I jump in the shower and get out and wrap my hair in a towel and put on my bathrobe and head out to the front porch to let the dog out. The only thing I see is a yellow animal and the only thing I hear is a deep low growl. I SLAMMED that door shut and screamed MOUNTAIN LION IN THE PORCH!!!! No one even budged or twitched in their sleep. I peek out the door again and realize, it’s not a mountain lion, it is a yellow lab with my in heat black lab. OH BOY WAS I MAD…I had talked to the neighbors more than once about keeping their male dog tied up because I had a couple dogs in heat, my lab and a one of the hounds…but he apparently was hard of hearing and did not hear me those times I was in his yard talking right to his face. I got in my van, (yes, in my bathrobe and towel) and drove to the end of the long driveway and pounded on his door….no one answered. Well, really, if you looked out the window and saw a stark raving crazy woman in a robe and towel at 4:30 in the morning would YOU answer the door? My poor girl….the dog busted through the porch window (and the door and another window at two other different times). He was an INTRUDER….until it dawned on me…what if Chessie was one of those crazy teenage girls who snuck their boyfriends into the house at night or when the parents were gone? What if she was just the town hussy? Well, regardless, she should have used protection then because 90 days later there were 8 adorable puppies being born in the back room of my house. By then we all had warmed to the idea, since both dogs were pure bred AKC labs. She was such a good mom, but I told her it would not be happening again. After those puppies grew and were sent off to their new homes, after an extensive interviewing process to make sure they would not end up at a puppy farm or an abusive home she was taken on a field trip to the vet to be fixed. I think she was just as relieved as we were to know there would be no more unwanted pregnancies. But I still wonder how many nights after that she was sneaking her friends in while we were gone whooping it up and then getting them out before we returned. In fact, HOW MANY DOGS were there when the pantry was ransacked…..hmmmm, I think I had a dog party going on in my house during work. It is all making complete sense now…she is SO GROUNDED!!
So when compared to that....this week was quite quiet while my husband was away, but there are still hours to go so I best not say that too quickly. Here's to a safe, peaceful, uneventful Sunday with nothing but relaxation and a football game!
Have a great week all!
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