What a morning start on New Year’s Eve. I let both dogs out while I was building a
fire in the basement trying to get the
day going. It’s 1 degree above zero and feels like T-shirt
weather to both me, Cookie and Delilah compared to yesterday. While
I had the fire going and it looked like it would continue, I went out to look
for both dogs. Warm outside or not, I still did not want them to wander off
because we have a wolf pack in the area.
Upon calling, Delilah came
snorting full speed out of nowhere, happy to see me like I’d been gone for a
month. Cookie was nowhere to be found. I called
for that stubborn, fluffy Pekingese and she’s nowhere. This
is unusual because she’s usually the rock that guards the palace gates, sitting
in front of the store doors keeping a lookout for anything unusual. Upon
sighting something unusual, she would then do absolutely nothing like a large,
fat, house cat. Maybe she’d bark and if
it was a car coming down the ice hill which is our driveway, she’d charge directly
at it expecting the panicked driver to garner complete control at all times
despite the road conditions. I still have not determined if that dog is
fearless or just plain dumb.
I thought of where she might be and headed up to the back of my house. Our back deck is the default position for
when she decides it is time everyone needs to run around looking for Cookie in
a panic. Walked up the hill and turned
right I did and there she sat on the deck looking like she was asking “What?”. I told her to come down and when she stood
up from her sitting position, I saw it:
the Christmas tree from Hell. Big,
fluffy furry mass with dog poop ornaments of all sizes flailing about with
every indignant, Pekingese, flip of her tail.
“Ugh – what am I gonna do?”, I thought to myself. Of course, Annette was safely in our van
heading for Hibbing, MN to be a substitute beauty school teacher for the day
and I had a really, REALLY messy dog full of fur and poopsicles who was not
listening to anything I was saying.
I proceeded to chase Cookie around the parking lot with a dust pan, trying to
sever the connection of fur and flailing turds by driving the edge of the dust
pan into the snow below. With each
fur-ripping yank, Cookie was having little to none of it. Delilah was bouncing around us thinking we’re
all having a great time in the northern Minnesota wilderness. I was speaking my second language in which I’m
very fluent: swearing.
Well, I was overall unsuccessful at best, but I did manage to remove some of the
offending squishy mess from that errant show dog. I
finally resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to take her up into
the house and give her a bath. Using
Delilah as gullible bait, I called her in and she bounded up the basement steps
and Cookie, a creature of rigid habit, followed Delilah up into the living
room.
Not being able to control each part of the operation at hand, I got a smaller
tub in the bathtub, filled it with warm water and doggy shampoo, donned some
rubber gloves that went up to my neck, and proceeded to go find that dirty
dog. In those five minutes of prep-time,
Cookie managed to travel to the living room and the bedroom leaving particles
of poop and fur here and there. Like little adobe bricks, they fortunately
held their shape and didn’t get a chance to soak into the carpeting. But, now I’m trying to catch and pick up a
dog who wants to be neither caught nor picked up. Run all over the house we did as I tried to
corner that stinky furball. Delilah
watched in utter confused fascination not knowing the final fate to befall
Cookie. I finally cornered the 22 lb.
Pekingese and while she snarled like a Tasmanian Devil, I bravely dove in, picked
her up, kept her away from my face while hauling her to the other side of the
building. Fortunately, she being a normal
girl, the act of taking baths is a true luxury and once she hit the warm, soapy
water in the tub, she did her
short-nosed snuffle which I interpret to be the equivalent of “Ahhhhhh….Calgon,
take me away!” With that, the intense
scrubbing of private doggy parts and fur
with blue rubber gloves on, began.
It was squishy, warm and wet and felt pretty much just like gutting a deer, but I got that fir very
clean. I rinsed, re- applied copious
amounts of shampoo to try to smooth out the matting, rinsed again thoroughly
and toweled her dry.
Her tail turned into a Rastafarian dread-lock.
It became a fur rope. I found a
dog comb and tried to take the knots out but I was met with more Tasmanian
indignation. Not quite knowing what to
do, I dug in a drawer and found the dullest, most worthless pair of scissors in
the house – why we own them, I cannot say.
I then proceeded to cut off about 6 inches of her furry tail. I was careful to not hit any important parts,
but that, which was a large, stylish,
flippy part of her tail, is now gone.
Then, I decided to solve yet another problem and basically took the
world’s dullest scissors to Cookie’s nether regions which were spotlessly clean,
and I did the equivalent of a bikini trim – or at least, that is my guess,
having never actually performed a bikini trim on neither human nor beast to
this very day.
When I was done, I must say that my grooming and trim of
Cookie looks like the equivalent of a “bowl cut” in yesteryear’s group-home
environment. It certainly was not the 5-Point Sassoon pixie
cut that Annette masters so brilliantly on many of her clients by their
request, but in my defense, it got the
job done. I may have even re-defined dog-styling. Her
tail is definitely shorter and there is now a poop-chute.
Jackie just got in for the morning and upon inspection of Cookie, broke out laughing at Cookie’s tail and
suggested that I not take up dog
grooming as a secondary profession. I
explained that it is obviously not Sassoon, but more of a “functional cut”.
I can’t wait until my hair-stylist wife sees it.
