my sister's visit

my sister, anita christy came to visit this weekend. yeah!! i haven’t seen her in over 4 years. she is the mom of 2 gorgeous human kiddos, (abby is 6 & a j is 7, they both stayed up north with their dad) she also lives with a pit-mix GOOBIE, kittens, a horse, 16 chickens, a donkey & probably some other critters i don’t know about. she was very confidant coming here that she would be able to handle living with 5 dogs for 10 days. no problem.

i’m always nervous when we have guests. our dogs are usually very well behaved, but the initial 15 minutes can be very intense with the jumping, barking, racing laps around the house. plus, if you’re not used to it, 5 of anything can be overwhelming....5 kids, 5 pairs of shoes, 5 martinis, 5 choices of dessert, or 5 golden rings - 5 is a lot.

anita did very well...initially. the puppies loved her (our youngest canine fur-child is 2 years old & 70 pounds, but they’re all still puppies to me.) we walked them, played with them, made up voices for them, couch-potatoed heavily with them & photographed them. anita even slept with sparrow the first night.

aunt tee-tee with eiyso. chris has luke and ditto.

i believe it was the second day of aunt tee-tee’s visit when things began to go slightly down the proverbial hill. (all my fur kids call anita “aunt tee-tee” because they can’t say aunt anita)

anita brought with her a fancy pair of flip flops (actually, everything anita has is fancy. even her horse is named fancy. that’s so weird. i never even thought about that until right this minute.) anyway... she was sacheting around our house in her designer high heeled leather fancy flip flops extolling their comfort & i was oooooing and ahhhing. & then we got distracted. started cooking, laughing, remembering when she hit me in the head with the rock & i almost went down. i barely clung to consciousness, only so i could tell mom on her. apparently with all the reminiscent tale-telling excitement of our childhood, she threw off her very comfortable flippies. mojo found them.

by the time i noticed, one shoe was isolated in the dogs’ play room, separated from all other shoes. sitting alone. no living creature in sight. the leather flip had little tiny teeth marks & the the toe tip of the rubber flop was all swiss cheesy.

at first anita whimpered, maybe even cried a little bit. then she got mad. then she got all “my glass is 1/2 - full” & resolved to still wear them.

her thoughts on the matter included:
no one will notice they’ve been chewed when i have them on.
they may eventually break, but at least they should last long enough for me to find another pair.
they rub on the top of my foot, but only a little bit.

while walking the mall the next day, they did in fact give her a little blister & a mild limp to go along with it. that injury didn’t hurt nearly as much as her bloody knee. she broke the vase at the giftshop, but i picked it up to inspect the damage and a huge chunk of ceramic flew out right & away, slicing her knee open, giving her a huge gash that ran red for hours.

i think it was a couple of nights later that anita felt better, had a new pair of flip flops & her knee finally stopped bleeding, so we organized a little party.

we had some guests over for a very competitive game of wii bowling followed by a hard hitting set of rock band. our neighbors walked over to festivate with us; they’re a lot of fun & come over as often as they can. they kicked their shoes off at the front door, cracked open a bottle of yummy red and relaxed into dinner.

just as everyone was changing out of their bowling shirts & into their rock star clothes, i spied it with my little eye.

notice that the drummer has no shoes on his feet.

another lonely shoe in the dogs’ room. it was large & leather. insert 1/2 eaten & separated from the body of the shoe. the lace was missing as well as the leather that the laces ran through. there were, however, several metal rivets, slightly bent & strewn over the floor. mojo does have her standards.

my shopping list.

the STICK

Playing with my puppies outside, I was too busy to pick up the fresh pile of poop. I rammed a foot-long stick in the ground like a flag pole to remind me where to go when I had the scooper in hand.

I had not even turned to leave the flagged pile when MoJo ran up (MoJo rarely runs, unless it’s for food- she is most certainly her mommy’s girl) tipped her smiling little face, snagged the stick out of the ground and took off, just out of my reach.

She growled, hopped, and grinned and teased, begging me to chase her for the prized poop stick….so I did. Who can resist a good game of chase-the-dog-around-the-yard?

[Side note: this is a VERY bad idea – always teach your dog to chase YOU. It’s very difficult to catch most dogs, especially if you’re as slow as I am and some day you’ll need your pooch to come to you and they will only want to play the “chase me” game. It’s aggravating, could be dangerous and, trust me on this one, can make you very late for work.]

The real humiliation is not that my slightly chubby, 5 year old lazy Samoyed beat me in every round of “chase me,” but that I still haven’t picked up the poo. I’m destined to find the pile with my shoe, in the dark early one morning while I’m trying to get MoJo to load in the car quickly because I’m running late for work and she is going to double dog dare me to run around trees chasing after her. I’ll play.