Needs more toys
Saturday morning at Casa de Kirby. At the obscenely early hour of 6:30, the greyhound hops up from his pile of bedding on my husband’s side of the bed and starts making slobbery snorting noises. A few minutes later, my husband crawls out of bed and feeds the early morning chow hound.
I stay in bed until around seven, when it becomes impossible to ignore the sound of the shrieking Wonder Horse. (If I could understand horse, I’m sure his ranting would be R-rated.) Get up; put on whatever’s on the floor and head out to the barn to feed the horse and clean up his paddock. The day has begun.
While I’m doing the morning garden chores, my husband walks the greyhound. They’ve returned by the time I come back in the house.
“What’s that?” I say, bending down over a red streak on the mostly gray carpet. (It’s supposed to be pale gray, but more than a decade of habitation has made it more of a gray dappled with mystery stains.) The red blotches lead like bread crumbs to the greyhound, who is stretched out by the front door, panting like an asthmatic, in full “They took me on a death march and tried to kill me” mode. (Oh, honestly, he’s fine. After the walk, he gets wet down with water and is given ice cubes–he loves crunching ice.)
I start inspecting doggie feet and find that he’s somehow ripped out a toenail on his left rear paw. And so begins the doctoring of the hound, who looks mournful, but really, loves any attention. Husband and I try to figure out what happened. The only easy explanation is that he somehow caught the toenail in the metal mesh that makes up the floor on the little bridges that cross the irrigation ditch.
Hound’s wound gets cleaned; carpet is de-blooded; all seems well, so husband and I head out to do the morning shopping.
We return to a slaughterhouse.
The greyhound, in a minor fit of pique over being left alone (we do this every, fracking Saturday, oy) has trotted around the couch several times, made a circuit of the kitchen, and then marched across my brand new laminate flooring in the dining room. Prior to his little jaunt, he licked his bloody toe until it was running red again.
Somebody fetch Dexter, because boy, do we have some blood splatter for him to analyze.
I’m most aggrieved by the mess on the laminate floor. In primitive cultures, blood was super glue. Now I’ve got red sticky stuff drying on my beautiful new floor. We get out the paper towels, spray-on carpet cleaner, and the steam cleaner. Scrub, scrub, scrub.
Tiny problem. Partially dried blood, when made wet makes the house smell like a slaughterhouse. I wonder, for the millionth time, why I have pets. The greyhound looks bored and starts to lick his foot.
Husband and I yell, “DON’T LICK YOUR FOOT!”
Some time later, most of the red is banished and I’m burning incense to cut the smell of carnage. Now the house smells of blood and incense. Yeah, I’m Martha Fucking Stewart.
Three days later the greyhound has a tummy upset and poops and vomits all over the carpets. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
At this point, I’m thinking of pulling up all the carpet and painting the underlying concrete a vivid motley of blood red, shit brown and vomit green. Oh, and adding a drain in the middle of the living room for easy cleanup.
