Mar
4
There are many indignities to aging but I’m glad I’m not yet suffering with the malady Dog has acquired in her middle years: the Poop Blot. I’m not sure when I first noticed the Blot but it happens when she sits in a certain position and scratches herself, her foot doing that Thumper thing on the floor and her butthole, presumably, resting comfortably directly on the carpet while getting its surface pounded into the fibers. Then she gets up to wander off and lo! A brownish blot remains.
I did take her to the vet to get the situation checked out because I am not a monster whose actions are limited to poking fun of the afflicted on the Internet (to be clear, I am absolutely that monster, but I contain multitudes) and they ruled out an assortment of potential butt-leaking diseases while mentioning that sometimes, dogs of a certain, ah, girth, are occasionally known to experience poop blots because of — and I can’t remember the exact scientific name here, but it was something like Lardassius Canis Lupus, also known as Fatty Fatty Boomba-Labby.
It’s true that Dog has taken on a shape that Riley describes as “like … if a Tootsie Roll was also a dog?” thanks in no small part to her annual gorging on fallen apples in the backyard plus her overall food drive which once prompted a dog-boarding employee to say she was the most food-oriented Lab he’d ever seen, which is impressive because most Labs will eat anything and everything including socks and LEGOs and crayons (check check and orange-flecked CHECK) but even among her garbage-disposal kind she is something of an outlier in that she acts as though she has been starving for literal years and routinely eats her own fresh lawn deposits.
We don’t give her scraps because 1) it makes the already-annoying begging even worse and 2) while I admittedly follow more than one chonky-animal Instagram account and am constantly shoving my phone in peoples’ faces to show them yet another overweight raccoon haw haw HAAAAAAW lookit that fat trash panda I don’t actually want to contribute to my pet’s health woes, but between scavenging fallen kid-crumbs and tucking into both her and the cats’ doots on the reg she seems to be snacking quite frequently and although the latter habit is fairly disgusting I can’t really fault her, these are trying times we’re all living in, I myself prefer a fistful or five of Triscuits when it comes to distracting myself from the hellscape of current events but perhaps in her limited way she is not only self-medicating but saving the planet while doing so. Dog is upcycling.
Anyway, while the poop-eating is unfortunate, it can at least be mostly ignored (until she comes inside and immediately wants to lick your face, that is) but the Poop Blot is a near-daily occurrence that has me constantly stalking around with the Folex and scanning the carpet Terminator-style until I locate yet another sphincter-shaped stain and honestly, this why I am both plastered to ongoing coronavirus news with grim fascination, partially convinced we’re all about to live out The Stand, and largely unconcerned about germs in general because that would require a standard of feces-bacteria-free living that is at least several cleanliness levels above the one this beloved and repulsive Tootsie roll has brought to my existence.
Feb
4
When we moved into our house here in Eugene we had to spend a bunch of money on some immediate updates — my memory is so bad I’m fuzzy on the details, but I’m pretty sure the kitchen was carpeted, among other criminal decorating decisions including a strip of hideous decorative flowered wallpaper that bordered the living room walls and a paint job in the main bathroom the previous owner described proudly as “hand sponged” which produced the general effect of a Sherwin-Williams-soaked dog having rubbed itself on various surfaces — and thus had little left over for appliances, so we cheaped out across the board. Our microwave is so old it just has a egg-timer style dial so you can’t program it by seconds, which has resulted in many soft pretzel thawing disasters, and our dishwasher has been long plagued by a weird glitch where it does something mysterious and unhelpful with that expensive fast-dry fluid while reliably producing soaking wet clean dishware every single time, but whatever: our stuff mostly works, even if it’s not particularly fancy.
We did recently have to get a new washer and dryer, replacing the truly ancient used set we had originally bought off Craiglist. The old set had bare-bones functionality: you turned a dial and water would start pouring out, you pushed a button and the dryer would loudly rumble to life. When a cycle was complete both machines released a grating buzzing sound that was apparently intended to notify the entire neighborhood that the laundry was done, although I must say that never stopped me from forgetting to grab things before they succumbed to fatal amounts of wrinkling.
In comparison, the new set feels like an advanced robot duo, full of complex programming possibilities and an oddly charming selection of upbeat electronic noises. Starting a load now involves pressing several buttons before leaving the machine to furrow its digital brow (“SENSING,” reads the display) before getting down to business (“LID LOCKED,” the display informs me, warningly). Boop boop BOOP, the dryer says cheerfully once the power button is pressed, then trills a delightful little tune when it’s finished. Which I of course routinely ignore, because all the technological advancements in the world haven’t solved the ass-painery of folding laundry, especially children’s laundry which is always always ALWAYS inside-out.
As with generations before me, I find myself both embracing and rejecting the new way of doing things. It is undeniably cool that my washing machine feels like something out of the Jetsons, but I’m sure some eventual electronic malfunction will have me raging about how they just don’t make things the way they used to.
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