Alpha Dog

Spoiler Alert!  If you are an animal lover, you may not want to read on.

I'm over my pets.  I am done.  I have never been what you would call an animal lover, more like an animal 'liker'.  Now, I am at a point where I can barely tolerate the beasts.  I know, for some of you who adore all living creatures and bring home every stray, this is hard to read.  There are others of you, however, that are wondering why I ever allowed four-legged creatures into my house in the first place.

The cat came first.  Skipper arrived as a kitten - so cute and black and cuddly.  She grew up.

Now she is confined to my bedroom when she is in the house, well, our room, since I do have a roommate of 29 years.  Why our room, you ask?  I'll get to that later, since it relates to the dog.

Back to the cat.  She curls up in the middle of my our bed and every time I walk in the room talks to me, (yes, that's right, talks) begging for attention, wanting to be scratched, petted or cuddled.  I'm not a petting, cuddling kind of person.  She is getting on my nerves.  To make matters worse, my husband has become a cat person.  Really.

 I came down the hallway the other night and heard him whispering to someone in our bedroom.  "Does that feel good?"  I stopped dead in my tracks.  Who on earth was in there with him?  I turned the corner and there she was, the little tramp, purring so loudly the neighbors could hear, while he scratched her behind the ears.  He never scratches me behind the ears.

He was always so proud of the fact that he was a "dog guy", but now I fear that he will become that crazy cat man you always see on the 6:00 news, with twenty cats and a city ordinance against him.  It's a slippery slope.

Skipper's not satisfied staying in at night either.  She settles in for a while and then, when she's sure that I'm fast asleep, she sits right on top of me meowing until I let her out.  She doesn't bother with her best friend Steve.  He sleeps like a log and only wakes up if the house is on fire.  If I leave her out, she sits right outside our door begging to come in.  She is one fickle cat.

Now, let's deal with the dog.  Even worse than the cat, she is my nemesis.  We got her from a local animal shelter and I felt like we were really doing a good thing, rescuing her.  What was I thinking?  Dogs come with dog hair.  Who knew.

Dog hair ends up everywhere, even places the dog doesn't go.  It is the bane of my existence.  Far worse than dog hair, however, is dog poop and dog pee.  That is the delicate Christian blog way of wording it.  I have other words for it that I won't share with you today but if you happen to be at my house when Casey "has an accident", you may hear those words.  They are angry words that I use when I have had enough of cleaning up after this mangy mutt.

Now, I told you that the cat curls up on my bed, well, the dog sits right in my spot on the sofa.  She sits there and looks up at my as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it?" 

I look right back at her with my best alpha dog face and, needless to say, she moves, leaving her little doggie hairs behind.  We have dog hair removers placed strategically throughout the house.

There's the dog hair, the dog poop, the dog attempts at domination, the dog odor, and of course the constant, relentless, unending chasing of the cat by the dog.  This is why the cat resides in my bedroom.  The dog will not leave her alone.  She lives and breathes to chase that cat.

All of these things are reasons enough to be done with the dog, but the final straw came last week.  I was in the backyard, picking up little doggie treasures from the lawn.  I could see something buried in the dirt.  It was black and I peered closer.  I finally pulled at it and could not believe my eyes.  That crazy dog had buried my bra!  This is the honest to goodness truth.  I decided then and there that my little beagle is a pervert and a thief.  She has to go.

I have calmed down since then and reminded myself that when we brought these little creatures home, we committed to them for life.  My daughters leave hair all over the bathroom floor and I haven't gotten rid of them (yet).  The men in the house are always stealing the remote and I haven't told them to hit the road.  We put up with each other, in spite of the things that drive us crazy.

They're just lucky that they have me.  I'm the only sane one in the house.